February 2010 Archives
I think that parody is a good way to make people look at things in a new way. Just like in the Iraq poster. The artist presented the information about what happened in the Abu Grhraib prison in a different way than people have seen it before. The fact that he presented it in a way that related to our mass culture made the image take on a whole new meaning, and have a bigger impact than the original photo did. Plus I thought that the pictures after the story were very interesting also. The way a poster can be broken down into all the elements that inspired it is really cool.
Below is a link to some Swiss designs that I found. One thing that I notice right away about Swiss design is how simple it is. That I think is one thing that we don't do much of here in the US. The Swiss are masters of simple design. They know how to include the minimal amount of imagery and their type faces are always very simple and this works for them very well.
I could not understand this article very well. I found a lot of the wording confusing and I feel like the author repeated many of his statements too many times which added to my confusion. What I got from was that Iran has two different types of graphic design and the one that is practiced more often than not is not very good because it's not accessible to the majority of the public. I could be totally wrong about this, though. I'm not sure. I did like some of the posters that I saw, though, like the ones for typography towards the bottom, so maybe the author is being a little too hard on his own country?
This is the famous picture taken by a National Geographic photographer of a woman from the middle east. When I was thinking of my poster using the eyes, I kind of had this in mind because it's such a powerful image.
This is an image that doesn't have to do with my original ideas, but I'm trying to think of ways to take this project in a new direction so I'm trying to come up with a way to work some humor into it and I think adding artwork like this would be a great way to do it.
The problem of being limited in our creativity as designers by clients is something that has come up in some of my other classes. I think that this "deal" that the chapter in this book talks about is a good way to solve that problem. It makes sense to me that big name companies have to abide by certain rules when it comes to it's advertising so that it can sell the most product to the most people, but what I like about less or even non-profit charity work is that, because the organization commissioning the design can't afford to pay the designer much, they let the designer have more creative freedom than he or she normally would have with a bigger company. I feel like this is a very good trade off because not only is a designer helping a company which can't afford a lot of advertising, but they are also free to produce great works of design without very many boundaries. In the reading, I was particularly impressed with the store of the designer at the end. It inspired me because he basically sacrificed money that he could have made with big name clients and instead, followed his vision and create great works of design that he was happy with.
