Month: September 2017

Noma Bar is probably my biggest role model when it comes to design. His use of minimalism and negative space creates designs that I think are far more visually pleasing than most more intricate designs. For example, in his pulp fiction poster, he uses what is essentially two shapes to create an image of two iconic characters connected. Bar’s use of shape, line, color, and space is what makes him unique and gives me a sense of inspiration.

For my final set of photos, my focus was the different shapes you could create with the use of the sky as negative space. I took my photos between 7-9 PM as it gave me a good varied amount of photos with different colored skies. As a whole I enjoyed this project as it got me to look at South Congress with a new perspective.

 

My time taking photos for this project was a solid experience and hopefully a good building block towards progress. While I may have over edited some of my pictures and struggled to find what I wanted to shoot, I made several new friends along the way and got my first real experience walking down SoCo. On the editing end of this, I realized that I’m a little out of practice editing photographs, so I may have overdone it a bit. I think this project is a good first step to high-quality photography.

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Reflection on Tan

After watching the video explaining Tan’s creative process and how the world basically conforms to what she says, I couldn’t feel any more different. As she talks about her process, she talks about how it relates to childhood trauma and her deep depression she keeps pushed away. For me, I find these things to be distractions. Throughout high school I dealt with feelings I hadn’t felt before, depression, loneliness, and for the first time I started really thinking about my parent’s divorce and how it’s affected me. These were feelings that managed to put a stop to any creative work I had. They made my work feel insignificant and like it wasn’t worth going through the process anymore. The things she said contributed to her work are the same things I felt held me from doing the best I could at any given time.

Aside from her motivations, I felt the things that she said about outside life relating to her work had no relation to mine. She talked about how she’d right things down, and they’d somehow come true in her life later, whether it be her grandmother’s suicide that she predicted or the old Chinese man stacking stones and saying the main point of her book. It’s as if the world aligns to what she says in her books. Sometimes when I work on a project, it feels as if my environment works against me, whether it be a missing computer file or something happening to my equipment.

All in all, I found the video interesting and I enjoyed getting a look into a professional’s take on creativity, even if it was a little concerning for how little it related to me.

 

Reflection on Hara

After reading the Hara’s history of design, I found two ideas more thought-provoking than the rest, the concept that all things are descendants of the stick or vessel and the idea that we push technology to advance too rapidly. What was so intriguing to me about the idea of the vessel and the stick is that the more I think about it, the truer it is. Everything I can think of can be considered one of those things. Any vehicle is a vessel for people/cargo that can brings things from point A to point B. Any tool is a stick that somehow has a purpose. But what really struck me was when I thought about how that relates to design. Graphic design is a vessel for themes, concepts, and ideas and should be seen as such.

On the idea that we have been advancing technology too quickly, a lot of people have been beginning to feel that way. Everything in the last 30 years has seemed to progress quicker than ever before in human history. In this time, we saw computers become everyday household items, then become a staple of American society, then start getting smaller and faster, then eventually becoming so small that most people carry one in their pockets at all times. We have seen countless technologies grow so quick we don’t even know what their use is yet. This topic also makes me think of the ongoing debate of artificial intelligence, with so many companies rushing to be the first to truly develop it, but not asking whether they should. I feel like this is a portion of the article that is worth reading for anybody.