New typeface

I have been searching on my RSS feeds lately and of course, one of my favorites, ilovetypography.com had features of new typefaces. This one designed by Siegfried Rückel caught my attention because of the treatment of the ’s’ and ‘t’. I thought of using it as my mark for a new branding project I am working on. If decide not to use the typeface, I will at least take inspiration from this design. It has the things I would want: clean, fun, san serif with a hint of ornament.

The article is titled Free Fonts from FontFont:

No Lemons

“I was going to save these until the next the week in type, but why keep people waiting. In the world of free fonts there are numerous lemons; however, these from the FontFont library are of exceptional quality. I’m pretty sure these will only be available for a limited time, so grab them while you can.”

Packed to bursting with OpenType features is FF Nuvo OT. The medium weight is free. Designed by Siegfried Rückel.

P.S. It is not free anymore!

Walker Evans and James Agee

In preparation for my senior exhibition, I was researching and reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. These two men worked together, one a photographer and the other, a writer. Together they explored Hale County Alabama and created a work about the people, places, and culture of a rural community. Evans images are beautiful. Of course all shot in black and white, it was eery to look at some of the works because my work is so similar. They traveled the South back in 1936. My images have been captured in the last decade. However, there are so many similarities in my rural southern experience and those of Agee and Walker. The crucial difference? I am a native. These men were venturing in a territory they knew little about. I will add this work to the list of inspiration. And perhaps, in whatever way, it can also inspire you.

Portfolio Website

For this project, our web design class was given the challenge of producing a portfolio website. In designing the site, I considered the audience who I determined to be future employers and extended to anyone interested in seeing my work. I used the identity mark that I developed in Professional Practices class last semester. This time around I gave the mark new color, look and feel. The printed materials accompany my website design. For the web design, I knew I would have a large number of images. Much of my design includes images and I wanted something with a lot of color and excitement. I chose a youthful image of myself as a stationary background. The contents are contained in a white space with big block thumbnails and a highly visible navigation that keeps you moving without much scrolling. On this project I leaned on liquid layout for easy viewing no matter how small the screen. Also, my background is a large background which offers more image for viewers with large screens. I feel that with this project, I also paid close attention to making neat, clean code with many pages and only one style sheet.

Words of Wisdom from Coptix

On Tuesday, October 14, Josiah Roe and Melinda Taylor from Coptix, a leading integrated design firm here in Chattanooga, lead our Web Media class. Josiah is full of energy and enthusiasm on anything relating to design. He spoke of his background, his position at Coptix, how he feels about design, and how he acts as a mediator between designer and client at the firm. He went through some of the client base they had and jobs that had been done recently. What was interesting about it was to get insight into how the job actually turned out, and then what the client ended up changing that resulted in a different design than the team had envisioned. This is something that happens all to often to all of us. We are given the go ahead to have complete freedom, but the client ends up wanting something that is not, in our opinion, as spectacular. One major thing I learned is you can still recover some dignity in the piece even if you have to bend a little to the customer.

Melinda actually gave us insight into a specific job and showed us the organization aspects of wire frames and grey boxes in Photoshop. This is always interesting to see how people manage their files. I always learn something that I can integrate into my own file management to make my life easier and more productive. She also spoke about how the team at Coptix has divisions. There is the design team who makes the wire frames and Photoshop mock-ups, and the web designers who create the code for the design, and the two teams work closely and well with each other to get the best overall solution. Most of the work Coptix specializes in is web and print based. Both are very different but design is shifting in such a way that both can be integrated into business to encompass the whole package. I was very impressed  with their quality of work.

On Thursday, October 16, Tyrick Christian, Bekka Reese, and Daniel Ryan visited from Coptix. First, Bekka showed us the portion of the project she worked on. She developed the wire frames to organize where info would go on the page. Designing good wire frames helps the next guy out if you all work together to complete the job. Tyrick immediately began a step by step instruction of how he organizes and preps for designing a web page. He was put into the project during the phase of Photoshop mock-up and began adding color and images to the design based on Becca’s wire frames. He showed us how to do a Photoshop mock-up and keep files neat and tidy. Finally, Daniel, the coding guru, began showing us how to begin writing code and CSS to execute the design that the design team came up with. This requires that everyone tries to stay on the same page. I really learned a lot from these two sessions and I enjoy professionals coming in and giving us advice, wisdom, and tricks of the trade. It will help me tremendously in the next assignments.

Self Branding

The final project for Leslie Jensen-Inman’s Processes and Materials Class was to brand ourselves. This was probably the most challenging assignment. It is easy, when designing, to think of a million concepts for clients, but thinking up a concept to sell yourself? I immediately began thinking of my name and how I sign my artwork. S Tate. Over time people started seeing STATE. So I began to think about it and how I could incorporate that into selling my brand. STATE became my logo. My taglines are a stream of conscious thought-state of design, state of art, state of wonder, state of creativity…the possibilities seem endless. I researched typography of all styles but particularly of Swiss design. For design of my business card and note card, I used images of myself as a young child, playing at the amusement park, pouting, laughing…all the things children do. I wanted a personal touch to the materials and this seemed right. The color of the images make the cards visually appealing. I used my printmaking skills to carve a wood block with my logo and pressed all of my materials with the block. The way the ink lifts off the paper is something that you really can’t accomplish any other way. It took some time but was worth the effort to add that fine art feel. With the other materials I used a natural premium paper and have extremely tight typography which dominates most of my self branding. It is driven by type. While intimidating at first, I really have had a fun time exploring how I want to present myself in the graphic design world. It was challenging but I’ve received instant gratification.

AIGA Project

The Process and Materials Class had the opportunity to work with AIGA on a project to promote registration and voting among professional graphic designers. The idea was to get the current AIGA members, and other members in the design community, to get out and register to vote and to actually VOTE! This was more challenging than some of the other projects because we are designers designing for designers. We provided a look and feel, and also posters and buttons, so that on the day of voting, AIGA members could wear the button to proclaim their voting. We worked mainly with AIGA president Lisa Blevins and Event Planner Grant Little. They were tough to please, but that provided a unique learning experience that we all will be able to apply to projects in the future. 

Chattanooga State Printing Visit

As part of the Take Root Project, we were able to visit Chattanooga State who graciously printed our materials for the project. The gentlemen working in the print room offered us a full tour and a step by step instruction of how to mix color, run it on the press, how to use the folding and binding machine after materials were done and we also learned how things differ slighty when using a facility that has certain types of equipment. It was also a rewarding experience to design something from the very beginning and be there to see it fresh off the press. It was a small operation with big personality. The guys were very knowledgable and helpful.

Take Root

The City of Chattanooga Tree Commission and Leadership Chattanooga joined together earlier this year to begin a tree-planting project in an effort to affect the climate change within the city. By planting trees in the urban areas, it decreases the carbon footprint we make on the environment. Leadership Chattanooga and Leslie Jensen-Inman, professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, joined by the Professional Practices Graphic Design Class joined forces to create a name, logo, and look for this initiative. Our class named the initiative Take Root-Plant. Grow. Sustain. We began with logo design and followed all the way through by forming groups with the class to tackle the project. The three groups, Team Brochure, Team Identity, and Team Event were in charge of designing all print materials including two brochures, letterhead, envelopes, note cards, banners, and T-shirts. This project was long and tedious, but very rewarding. Not only are we getting “real world” experience in designing materials for such a large, new initiative, but we also, in a small way, are affecting the environment by putting our effort and whole heart into this project. It is a good feeling when your work goes beyond merely designing and really begins to affect your community and the city you live in. Hopefully with our dedicated efforts to this cause, this project will grow and be successful, and sustainable for all of us.

Visiting Artists

One of the nicest things about being in school is access. Access to see new and upcoming artists work and not only that, talking with them in the classroom; what a treat! Three visiting artists Mark Andreas, Ryan Wolfe, and [dNASAb] are some of the most creative and freshly innovative artists I’ve seen. I didn’t always love everything about their work but I loved everything. Andreas’ showing Transcendence is truly that. A little plastic box containing a single blade of grass, lots of plastic boxes, and their little blades of grass all across the gallery wall, and suddenly the grass begins to blow. It was like standing in a field as a child watching the wind come across it causing everything to tilt just a little. It was beautiful. Wolfe’s work is outdoor sculpture made of huge pieces of steel, every piece interacting and affecting another until something significant changes. One sculpture throws seed, the other burns fuel until it burns out and a cape falls to the ground. His pieces are different and interactive in the most simply complex way. And finally, [dNASAb] or Disney, who takes ipods and cell phones, takes them apart, reconstructs them with new media art and sound implemented with shiny little plastic objects. They each came to class to talk about their work and the most inspiration I received from each of them was to think outside the box. Opening your mind, observing your surroundings, and responding to all of it through creative thought.

Word Pair Project

The class was given the assignment to photograph based on a word pair. The word pair that was chosen for me was weak and strong. I immediately went to imagery that I had created that I knew drove home this idea. One image is a sharp image of nails, specifically used in a nail gun, gliding across the frame. The next image for weak, was that of the nails but completely out of focus, leaving a trail of the impression of what could be anything, but is mostly color gliding across the page. Sometimes weakness is not seeing clearly. We were then asked to take the images and explore the uses of grayscale, duo-tone, duo-tones with extreme curves, and halftones. This was very exciting because the door was wide open for imagery and it was also a growing experience in software application.