Water Bottle Chandelier

Although not made of paper, this chandelier is cute and fun. Instead, the crafter here uses water bottles. Looks like a good way to up-cycle your used water bottles, and gives me a little inspiration for my spiky paper lamp. http://zomoc.com/diy-water-bottle-chandelier.html

Paper Dress

On Pinterest, of course, I found a fashion designer, Diana Gamboa, that made an entire line out of paper. It's pretty inspiring to see what one can do with the material, and helps me feel a little more confident in paper manipulation, as I was getting worried this week about the lamp. Heres the link


http://www.mikapoka.com/2011/02/please-do-not-iron.html

Layout

I was reading an interview from Urban Outfitters on Alexa Chung, and I really liked the page layout. You hit the arrows side to side, but scroll up and down to read. I thought it was really seamless, simple and elegant. 

Lighting

I saw this light online, I think it could be a great thing to try with paper. It creates really interesting lines in the rest of the space. I also like the mirroring on the bulb. 

Art From the Ages

My art history textbook is discussing early medieval art this week. The Chi Rho Iota page from the gospel Book of Kells (early 9th century) features some pretty intense interlace and decoration. This layout would be an astounding amount of work with a computer, I can't imagine doing it by hand. Learning about the way monks would assemble these gospel books, not to mention the hundreds of lambs that had to be slaughtered to make the vellum, gives me a new appreciation for printing and binding today. 

Paper Techniques

This week I've been working on different paper manipulating techniques. 25 on regular printer paper and then 25 on Bristol board. So far some of my favorites are inspired from an email I got from Madwell, where the paper is ripped back revealing other paper.

Glasses in Class

Someone was having fun posting an infographic about students and their glasses habits on the BDS chalkboard. I liked the elementary school training guides on the title, and filled in glasses to show percentage. Definitely making notes. 

Reflection on Photography Essay

The photographs that I took for this project were simply to document. I took photos during our process, construction of the letters and then on site to show the progress that our group had made, display how we got from the beginning to end.

But in the Steve Edwards reading, I thought it was really interesting when the author discussed how an artist who could copy down the details of world around them perfectly with a pencil, today highly valued, was once considered a “rude mechanic” and “mindless”. The academics saw it as a mere physical labor type job, and valued positions where one had to think and create originally, so art moved along with that thinking and became more abstract and idealized. I also learned photography’s role in colonializing, how it helped the Europeans separate themselves from their colonial counterparts. The reading overlapped with our photojournalism unit in my Journalism 101 class, as we also discussed the role of a social activist in photography and the photo “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” by Roger Fenton. I thought the distinction between documentary photography and artistic photography was interesting, because for my entire life people have been postulating that all photography is art. I’m not sure if it is really so black and white on either side. I think photographs taken simply for documenting can be incredibly beautiful, and that photos taken for beauty can equally come off as bland as a document. As long as they are not staged, as the reading discusses. I think they can interchange. And in way, all photography documents this time and place, the subject of the photo will always show people in the future what that time looked like.

            I thought this reading was relevant and important for us to look at because of all of the detail it gives about photography and its evolution in the world. Today, we have cameras on every device. It seems that everyone is a photographer and with apps like Instagram, people don’t even need to know how to edit photos with Photoshop. Photography seems quite easy to us, but we don’t often think about the meaning of what we are doing. From the reading we learn that there is a lot of power in images, especially ones for documenting. Now, as design students, we can be conscious of our decisions when taking photographs for art or documenting. 

From the “Photo Ops” reading, I got a refresher on what they taught me in high school photography class. It was nice to see some great examples of symmetry, asymmetry, repetition, framing, and movement. And the other pages about continuous mode, exploration and close-ups give ideas for inspiration for the next time I take photos. I thought this reading was good because it reminded me of the basics of photography and gave me a few ideas on what to try out the next time I’m taking photos.

Books and Magazines

Today our professor brought in books and magazines for design. It inspired me to start looking for magazines to subscribe to (accounting to budget). I thought they were all really beautiful and want to find some for myself now.

Cardboard Art

We're about to start working on the cardboard letters, and I thought this was interesting to see the layers in cardboard and ways you can manipulate it

Another Example

I found another good example of expressing the meaning of a word through composition. This time "fresh" is shown as an orange slice. Though in color, this could be a great example for someone using "squeeze"for their personal word.

Reflection on Parts of a Letter

I thought this reading was really cool and useful. It taught us the vocabulary and technical terms for the “parts of a letter”. This will be really good when we try to identify type faces, want to talk about a type face, or even one day create our own. From now on we don’t have to say “that pointy part on the top”, we can just say the barb of the “C”. Other than knowing the technicalities, this reading also taught us how you can use counter space to make interesting logos, or play up on it like in our project. It also makes you remember how much thought and energy goes into typography. Looking at all of the tiny bits of letterform really help you think about it more deeply as a designer, and I look forward to working more with text. 

Making an Image out of Words

I actually came across this on Reddit last night. This is a little bit of a variation of exactly what I'm trying to do with my word. Now, this has some stretched words which I can't do, and it is also in color, but it gets the basic idea.

Bill Cunningham

Funny how things work- I saw this article about New York Fashion Week on Pinterest the day after we talked about Bill Cunningham in class. It has some of his "best" photos. I look forward to learning more about him. http://www.pinterest.com/pin/163888873913539206/

“What Language Looks Like”

The goal of this project is to learn how placement, context and manipulation effect the meaning of a word. We selected our own word and emphasized its meaning on two-dimensional black and white, then were given a word with our group to create out of cardboard and place in a context to express meaning. With photography, we created personal booklets that also expressed the meaning of the word and displayed the installation of the big word we created. 

Ji Lee

I remembered seeing the work of Ji Lee, a designer that played with expressing words and ideas together, after talking about this type activity. I looked up his work again for inspiration, and I think its totally awesome and exactly what I am going for in this assignment. Here is a couple photos of his stellar work.

Pathfinder

The Pathfinder exercises helped me get ideas for how to manipulate my word, "change". Though I did have some trouble at the beginning, now I know new ways to manipulate text, which is exciting for me. I'm always looking for new styles and new ways to create, so this exercise was fun.

What Language Looks Like: Change

For the beginning of the "What Language Looks Like" project we have to choose a word and its find its definition. I've chosen "change", and it is defined as, "make or become different" or "
take or use another instead of."

Wallstreet Journal Magazine

I found some layouts on spreads and advertisements in the Wallstreet Journal Magazine last weekend. I really liked the use of white space to balance. After looking at more design work I just admire this style more and more, I love the minimalist, simple feel. 

IDEO

These news segments over IDEO were really interesting. The company is a product design firm in Paolo Alto, California, that was a pretty revolutionary office style back in what looked like the ‘90s. There was no big boss during meetings, but a collaborative environment. They had a couple of mantras written on the wall: “defer judgment”, “build on the ideas of others”, “one topic at a time”, “stay focused”, and “fail often in order to succeed sooner”. Overall the office seemed to focus on making people feel comfortable enough to share ideas and collaborate, and it worked because they came up with some really innovative stuff, I believe it was the boss (only in the technical term) who said, “Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius”. They also encouraged playfulness, and I can see how that would help stimulate a creative environment rather than a typical office. It seems like a great place to work, one that was fun but also one where everyone is extremely dedicated and works hard to contribute. It was pretty inspirational for office life could be like- fun and successful.