I just realized...

My Senior Show was a culmination of propaganda posters from games, comics, anime, etc that had a huge influence on me. I did Zombies, Pokemon, The Joker, One Piece... How on Earth did I skip doing a Mega Man poster...

I feel so stupid.

Playing around

I've been playing around with some sketch books because I have a ton and the ones I like the most are pretty cheap. So I've gotten to where I cut things out of books and magazines and whatnot and glue them or tape them into one of my books. It's helps me to organize things that may influence me as far as lay outs, grids, color schemes, typography all those good things. It's not much of an entry, but if you're an artist following me, or just casually browsing don't be afraid to dismantle the world around you to find the things that'll help progress as an artist.

Die Line

This is a really awesome site.

Here's a few things I like.

Old Dogs and New Tricks

I wait tables. I hate it. It pays my bills. It's not that I don't like people, or meeting new people, I just hate that people treat you like a servant rather than another person.
I had a table tonight where the younger guy was asking the older guy if he wanted Teriyaki. And the guy didn't look like he got out much. He wasn't rude, in fact the younger guy was a little more unpleasant. But as soon as he asked that I wondered what sort knowledge the older guy had about Teriyaki. Did it hate because of Pearl Harbor? Did he even know what it tastes like? Was he an adventurous guy or had he only eaten the same stuff over the years.

This may be kind of long so strap in. A few days ago I was thinking about life before the baby boomers when people lived in the cookie cutter lifestyle and FDR was borderline Jesus. What flavors did they have back then? You could get mild or plain... Honestly I'm not sure how this works. My Grandfather turns 100 this year, and he's pretty set in his ways. He called Led Zeppelin "N----- music" one time because it's not 1914 "N'Olens" Jazz.

My grandfather isn't a racist, by any means. Honestly, I feel like I'd have a hard time convincing you of that based on the last statement, but when you spend 60 years of your life watching people be oppressed; by the time you're that old you're probably fairly set in your ways.

So I get back to my point. What are the odds that you really go out and try new things once you're set. I've watched even myself grow more stubborn as I've gotten older. You know what you like and you don't really have the audacity to spend money of something you aren't sure of. It may be 100 bucks or it may be a dollar, but you're still going to get mint gum rather than dragonfruit gum because you know you like it.

Just a thought.

The Ethos of Logos

A long standing history of sports begets followers. People follow leagues, teams, players, even just awesome highlights. But I recently started to wonder what causes great highlights. What makes teams have great followings?

The first thing I'd say brings in followers is location. People are exposed to an area or a region and grow to love its local sports teams.
The next thing I'd say brings in followers is winning. Teams and players with a history of winning bring in a good fanbase. People want to be associated with winning. You can't really hate on someone for being good at something, especially when they are humble in victory like Andre Agassi late in his career.
The next, and main thing I'd like to talk about, is the thing thatbrings in all the random casual fans with no regional or lineage of following. Many people will follow a team because their dad did. But what happens to the kids in Alabama who's dad only watched baseball? Who does he pull for when he's talking football at parties?
Logos and color schemes gets my subjective and subliminal vote.
The Lakers and the Vikings both have the same color scheme, and in the ways that it's used the Vikings look better, but the Lakers sell more units because of championships. Let's find two less than par teams with moderate championship-vying histories. The Houston Rockets current logo may be the best logo in the NBA.


The 'R' with the hoop around it doesn't really convey 'rocket' all that well, but the simplicity and cleanliness of the whole thing is nice when most other teams have very busy logos. Also, though the type isn't realy something that's pleasent, and it sort of overhauls the whole idea, it fits it because the type is also very clean and simple.



The NFL has much less bulky logos, but still has a few problems.
The Bucs redesign is in need of a redesign. I'm not going to hit on all things but I really find it interesting to see what people follow, wholeheartedly, and the aesthetic appeal of sports franchises. This isn't an icon its the face that thousands, even millions of followers stand behind. It's the face of an organization and the face we adorn season to season. It's not crazy. It's sports.

Ladies and Gentlemen

I'm back, hopefully for a good long while. My summer was a little different that my normal time for hiatus, but I'm back now.

I'm getting back into my creativity and writing and starting to design again, but at the same time everything is starting back up. EPL season started this past weekend and I'm elated for the renewal. In addition, the NFL is in the middle of preseason and I'm getting incredibly excited for that as well. Maybe the influx of creativity is due to the influx of interests, but either way I'd say its great.

This is an old poster I did for a class, I submitted it for an addy. And I'll leave you with this.

Remix!

It's been a long while since I posted. I'm sad to admit that. I'm going to be more on my game, I promise. Some stuff should follow this, coming this week about the EPL season and some other events upcoming.

In the mean time, enjoy...

The Granddaddy of Them All

I just finished doing a podcast with a very good friend of mine, Tim Herb of the blog Black and Blue. His is an all sports blog and he usually features a Goal of the Day. He has very good stuff, I recommend checking it out.

The podcast has us talking about the up coming World Cup. I am a huge soccer fan and incredibly excited for this. The feature photo is of Wesley Sneijder from Holland who is one of my favorite players. We featured a full group break down as well as a few predictions.

I've talked about the marketing for this event and marketing plays a huge notability with the players and teams as well. Some teams don't have guys that play in really prominent leagues, but are still great players. Playing in those huge leagues with high marketability makes guys more favorite and teams to be favorites for such a huge event. Gerrard, Villa, and Messi are three guys in an Adidas soccer campaign because they are so good. Them being good in more competitive leagues makes them stand out more which makes them more well known. These are the players we look to shine on huge stages, whether it be Champions League or an international level like the World Cup.

This makes some of the competition for lesser known players more interesting. We've seen almost everyone on the England National Team play before because they play in high profile leagues for high profile teams. But Serbia and Slovakia play mostly in their home countries for smaller market areas. Both of these teams are viewed as dark horses for the World Cup, though Serbia is most people's pick as THE Dark Horse for the tournament.

I'm really excited to see how some groups will fair and how some players will perform at insane levels to prove their worth at such a high level. Some players even become known because of this stage. Franck Ribery was known in France, but after his duo performance in the last World Cup along side Zinedine Zidane, he moved from a lower market to a high market playing for Bayern Munich. This stage sets some players up for success and let's some players fall to their knees. Landon Donovan is one of the most prominent USA players who has failed to show up on large scales and been a huge disappointment. His play leading up to this World Cup has been captain worthy and US fans are eager to see his performance.

I hope this sports post doesn't put anyone off, but I'm glad to be diverse in my topics. I hope everyone is as excited as I am for the World Cup, and I hope you show your pride when you're team takes the pitch.

Also, enjoy the podcast!

Photography as an art.

I know it's been a while since I've posted, and I apologize. I've been focusing my time into finding a job, blah, blah, blah.

I felt like I lost a lot of drive to be creative since I graduated and I went to get some ideas from the magazine rack at Barnes and Nobles. I don't really consider photography to be an art, becuase you don't create anything you just capture something. I understand the "art" comes in appetures, doing touch ups, exposing negatives, photoshop and all that good stuff. But photo still half-assing a creation or screwing up something so it looks cool. I'm not saying avoid photography it's garbage, but as far are as an "art" I was skeptical.

Digging through magazines like CMYK I started getting frustrated with the lack of design oriented stuff and looking through some of the less "high end" photography. By high end I just mean the magazines geared toward "the buyers and sellers of today's art world". I'm in no position to be buying art right now. I started browsing through B&W Photography, a magazine that's for black and white only photography. I was moved. I pulled over a little bench and sat looking through it for a solid hour. The first real note of photography that to this day I regret not owning was at the LSU Museam of Art (MOA). It was an underwater shot of a naked woman swimming. It took me 30 minutes to figure out it was a woman. It was under choppy water so the light refracted in crazy ways all over the woman's body. It was phenomenal.

Looking through this magazine, I wasn't as enthralled in it as I was that photo at the LSU MOA but I started to realize that the content had a lot to do with it. Photography is creating emotion, a sense of longing, a desire to be there. I took a photography course in college, my teacher sucked, the class sucked, it was a joke. I attribute some of my distaste of photography to that class.

I'm not even saying "good photography is art". Artist photography is something hard to pursue and only 1 out of your entire portfolio may be "art" and it comes down to capturing an image rather than creating it. It also has to do with the basic fundamentals of photography and the lighting, angle, emphasis, etc. But it is, in my opinion, that hard to find good artist photography.

Style

I'm pretty nerdy when it comes to my interests, and when I find a new one I get deeply enthralled in it.
I recently started reading a Manga series called Psyren and I started on issue 114 out of some random notion because I was waiting on other Manga series to come out. Well an image caught my interest. At first I sat looking at for a few minutes wondering if he (Kyle) was floating after being hit, or if someones ability was to alter space. Then I thought maybe he's on the offensive. In actuality he is on the offensive and his speed is demonstrated well in the image. Not quite as well as the artist/writer, Toshiaki Iwashiro, demonstrates here.
With all that said, I started to think about how different artists is manga show the same things. In addition, how all of that differs from American comics.
I'm a little stingy when it comes to my interests. I like comics, but mostly action comics. I like manga way more than comics, but only those with a good plot and interesting worlds/abilities/fights/etc.
One of my favorites, and one of the best examples I was going to use Soul Eater recently got suspended, unlucky. But almost the same attack here is show so differently that the one here. It doesn't seem like much, but the artist of Psyren shows the impact of the slam with a number of small lines rather than an almost an explosion bubble like Hiromu Arakawa shows in Full Metal Alchemist. Even the punches thrown... Greed in Full Metal Alchemist, his attack is just there, right beside Wrath's head. Where as Shao's movements in Psyren are almost blurry, but still have a great deal of direction and a lot more movement.
Manga is written by one person as a long standing series, most often in black and white, which creates more difficulty that American comics because color adds a lot. Comics, by American standards exist as a series, the most popular ones have several writers and several artists, as well inkers, and people to do the color. So the art style of American comics literally could vary from week to week or month to month depending on the frequency of which it's released. This for example, is Super Man. Look at how the impact of the car is shown with junk a bent hood and some debris along with a bring color scheme of yellow to draw your attention to the release of energy exerted by force. It's done a lot in comics. In this a large difference of sequence is used to show the Joker being hit. Batman winds up, then the Joker is through the room. You're mind fills in the rest.
Honestly, observing the styles of different artists is really interesting. It's really noticeable very quickly in comics because of how people demonstrate the way they perceive the physics of actions. Then, how do you translate that into an image? It's something that goes very unnoticed, but next time you crack open the Sunday comics in your newspaper, don't just look at how different each of the characters are drawn, look at the shading, is colored in? Is it darker from color? Is a black spot? Is it several lines? Is it cross-hatched lines? Is the action fluid and believable or is it jumbled and choppy.
It's a whole new world to observe just on a single newspaper page! Have at it!

Dual-Wielding Advertisements

I was eating dinner tonight and looked over at a Coca-Cola box that's geared up in collaboration with the 2010 FIFA World Cup and I thought to myself how impressive Coke's advertising group must be.
To shed a little light on this, they probably had absolutely nothing to do with the design firm that organized that World Cup's advertising but instead had to master that style and make it fit Coke's style. This is an absolutely ridiculous thing to do. It's entirely fusing two organized establishments and combining them into an ad that makes both establishments represented without over powering either establishment to make them equal.
Looking at the two ads its obvious where they differ and where they are the same. This isn't the first ad I've seen like this, but most ads for larges scale events like that just have "Proud Sponsor of the ------------" underneath the logo. For example McDonalds doesn't actually advertise their own scheme, they've just attached they're logo to another ad. Not real creative on either part.
Honestly, I'm glad organizations wants to sponsor the same thing, but a little creativity on the part of the establishment attaching it's name to an event would be nice. So Kudos to you Coca-Cola for dividing up the spoils to represent yourself as well as the event you are tagging your products reputation along with.

The Relatives of Art

I'd like to kick things off by shouting out a Kuler website for the new color layout.
I just finished doing a web page and I started thinking about how integrated the whole art system is. Web design is one of the most modern forms of "art". You visit a page that looks like crap and think "there's no way the information here can be beneficial." Some with driving down the road and seeing business with those big black boards with fluorescent letters on them, or spray painted boards, you think "that place has to suck." Maybe that's just me.
With that said, it all goes back to graphic design before you venture into web design. Posters, signs, packaging that all looks good makes one more inclined to favor a product over another. Pepsi's current packing is very plain, much like Stella Artois' packaging it's a logo and plain box, but it looks goooood (Pepsi's logo I'm not a fan of). The same thing with web sites. Some web sites look like they worked very hard, some where built in flash or java. But the good sites still apply to basics of typography and use grid systems to organize web pages with harmony, balance, and repetition.
We know to click 'home' to go back because we call it the 'home page'.
Even before that, before design we had paintings, sculptures, fine arts. Hand crafted, beautifully conducted, ART! Something I preach to be of a dying breed and truly a decaying seed (as you can see with those big block boards with fluorescent letters, and the fact no one cares if you can paint well.) Getting off track a little, the reason people don't care if you are good at backgammon or chess is because people don't play it and don't have frame of reference for how difficult it actually is to be good at it. It is hard. It's more time consuming than other crafts, less room to fail that some other crafts (Like the Super Mario Galaxy poster that had stars for the letters to spell U R Mr. Gay. The poster is a little outdated because they re did it after probably a couple hundred million went out world wide... fail.)
Before Pepsi had a fat side, before Mario was Mr. Gay, before java script, there was the Bauhaus, there was expressionism, impressionism, The Renaissance. There was fine art. The same ideas apply. Kandinsky did it, so did Muller-Brockmann. You won't notice it without knowing the principles and elements of design, but there's balance, harmony, space, line, and so much more. It's applied differently in both of these which differentiates styles and eras. Josef Muller-Brockmann is one who made design art, which as my proffessor says "design isn't art... good design is art."

Good literature is art. Good cooking is art. Good painting is art. Good sports play is art. The principles and elements art there for all of these, harmony, repetition, space, line, form, etc. Apply it differently. Apply it two-dimensionally, or three-dimensionally but it makes art in it's own right.

Or at least I like to think so.

Pokemon

I absolutely love Pokemon. It's the 2nd highest selling game franchise of all time behind Mario (both Nintendo ironically enough.) That's not why I love it. If it were simply based on numbers I'd hate it. I hate Duke and UNC for the consistent dominance in NCAA basketball. I hate the Yankees and Red Sox for the same reason. I hate Manchester City for buying all of its players and managers to try to win a championship. I hate Manchester United (as an Arsenal fan I have to) because of their consistent reign at the top of the tables.
I love when things aren't handed out. When things are earned. When companies/businesses are run well from the ground up. Arsenal has a great soccer school program to build up it's players and runs a lot through it's own system rather than systematically buying players to fit empty spots. This isn't to say that they don't occasionally buy players to fit the puzzle, but I digress.
Pokemon started in the mid-90's in '96-'97 if I'm not mistaken. My first time, I was in 5th grade watching my best friend of the time level up his Jolteon. He got yelled at by the teacher and had his big gray block gameboy taken until that afternoon. That bitch.
Since then, I got my own, mastered the ways, and have loved every single minute of it. I didn't get into the cards too much, but the games for various handhelds have been in tune with the beat of my heart since that day in 5th grade. Nintendo has made a game series that takes place in different regions, exploring the lifeforms of different ecosystems (though it doesn't dive too much into keystone animals and things like that but for a gamed aimed at children it gets really complex). My lady friend picked at me when I first got Soul Silver and played the shit out of it after my show got put up last week. I tried to hold off until the end of the semester... I'm addicted... I offered her to borrow an old Pokemon game (Pearl) and a DS that was I borrowing from a friend to see if she would like it. She gets really really enthralled in movies and TV to the point where she devotes her full attention to these things. But never did I think she would get into Pokemon. "Zubat is a cock sucker." She blurted out today when we were sitting by the pool. I laughed.
She'd given me so much crap about playing a game that died out for most kids our age when we were like 14-16. Now she's asking me about types of moves that are effective against certain Pokemon. There's the obvious... Fire beats grass, electric beats water. But then there are random things that you don't really think about. Poison doesn't effect steel. It gets really complex. The point is that it's a kids game yes, very much so. It doesn't dive into the full realm of biology, nor the malice of what it could be. There's no death in it, and you can't really rupture nor preserve the balance of an environment. Most people wouldn't have the knowledge nor patience for this, certainly not little kids. But, personally I'd give it a whirl.
Either way, it's not just some remedial kids game with flashing lights, stupid cute little animals, and really morally positive themes. There's underlying stuff, like when a grass type Pokemon uses a grass type move the move does more damage than if a normal Pokemon used a grass move. There's stats to increase speed, attack, etc. There's a huge difference between special attacks and attacks as well as special defense and defense. All these come into play along with accuracy and damage of the move itself. There's a whole lot of strategy. Some Pokemon are naturally and substantially better than others, but can still be beat with ease by some really bottom of the barrel guys.
I'm by no means telling you to run out and buy Pokemon and play it until your fingers bleed. I am saying not to be harsh on the guys who are a little different because we play Pokemon.
When you know all the starters for your favorite sports team... You're the same as us. When you're 50 years old and you've read all the Harry Potter books... You're the same as us. When you know who's who in pop culture and what's up with the Kardashians/Jersey Show/Hills/Glee/American Idol... You're the same as us. When you shop exclusively at a specific store/boutique... You're the same as us. You might think you're better than the guy who's playing Pokemon in the cubicle next to yours while he's looking up stats to breed Pokemon (like the species is based on the female and the move set is based on the male) you'd better remember that you're just as big of a loser for looking up Northern Iowa's stats the day after they beat Kansas. You don't want to think of it as the same thing, but it is. We all have our vices, and we all enjoy the hell out of 'em.

Keep Rockin' Baby!

Business is a Boomin'

I just finished one of the biggest if not THE biggest art event of career thus far. I did a bunch of Constructivist style propaganda posters for really really bull shit things like Team Rocket from Pokemon and the World Government from One Piece. It was a collaborative show with other fellow graduates from this semester. I realized going through the show tonight that the process of art is so different.
One of my fellow graduates commented on my initial idea for my show which was to do a big show on light and color theory. It was going so far as to dive deep into the world of physics and use formulas and theories within my show. She told me how she went through almost 4 full projects in 3 or 4 days but didn't like them. She said she didn't enjoy them because she didn't feel like she put herself into the pieces she'd made. By this point I was really burnt out on research for my physics stuff and I just did not enjoy what I was doing. This, mind you, was an exhibit that I could literally put anything into. I could've made twelve liquor bottles and had them on display, and it would've been fine by my university. I realized that I wasn't putting myself into these designs.
I was dicking around and made some really goofy Star Wars posters one afternoon when my lady friend was at work and no one was around to hang with. So then that spawned me into wanting to do a bunch of other goofy posters that weren't straight forward. This was great during the show itself to see people walk in and actually take a second to look at it rather than just glance in passing. I realized that my process was different than theirs. My colleague works great with grid layouts and typography and she showed that in her work, but left it just at an art side. The other design major featured in our show did some really nice ad posters for guitar strings and some calendars she'd made for one of our classes. She showed more of her own personal style to it, but she didn't throw in her own interests per say.
That was when I realized that I made my show all about me. It was my grids, my type, my interests. I took religion and flipped it on its head with a Caesar promoting propaganda poster that's probably very offensive to some people. I made a Joker poster, a One Piece poster, Team Rocket, Zombies, Star Wars, the Caesar poster and one dedicated to my ridiculously pretty lady friend. I used decent typography, more or less soviet colors, threw in a JFK assassination reference on the zombie poster and just had fun with it. I slept 15 hours last week total but I didn't mind because I had fun with it all.
I realized that my grid layout, my type, color, shapes all fit an era, my interests, and still let me dick around as much as I could. My process was just different than theirs. I could go into how I drew up sketches in a notebook then made mock ups on tracing paper, but I guess the real difference was that even my silly nature was conveyed in my work.

I'm just not cut out to design brochures for BB&T.

Welcome to the World of Design

I'm a young designer, and I don't really want to get too in depth into my personal life but I've spent the last few weeks really critiquing the art world.
My first two posts were sports related and I don't really want to isolate a particular field, I want to have free roam to speak (hopefully non-offensively) about whatever I choose to harbor thoughts.
With that said, I want to dive into something I thoroughly enjoy doing... Graphic Design or Visual Communication. Art is dead. I've spent the last 5 years studying art, though I'm far, innumerable light years, from mastering the craft I've come to realize the fine arts (drawing, painting, sculpting, etc.) are a joke. And graphic design isn't even art half the time.
I walk down isles at the grocery store and I constantly analyze packaging, logos, grid layouts, how well fonts match images. It's a constant thing. My lady friend often sighs when I point out how awful a layout or typeface looks. Learning design is one thing, learning good design is a whole new thing. People make brochures, pamphlets, posters for whatever reason with no idea of what looks good artistically. She and her roommates ask me to critique their attire when they are going out because there are certain things that people like that we can't explain. The Minnesota Vikings color scheme as well as the Denver Broncos color scheme both look outstanding. The colors used are compliments of one another. It's the same reason 'Got Milk?' ads look so great. It uses a lot of contrast. That contrast looks good together. We don't know why, and yes it is purely subjective. This is why we all have a different favorite color. Even if you color is green, what tint (add white), tone (add gray), or shade (add black) is your green. Is it forest green or lime green or baby puke green?
Now dive into another form of media. I love comics. I love the way different artists take over a series and draw the Joker differently in Batman issue 40 than issue 1 and much different in issue 680. I love the way coloring has changed from pure inking to an in depth field of computer generated color schemes. Some pencilers and inkers use real shading, others use cross hatching to shade in areas. Don't believe me? Go find an old issue of Spider-man and look closely at how shitty the illustrations are. No one expected that sort of media to stand the test of time. It was drawn on newsprint for gosh sakes.
Art has expanded from 1400's with true masters of their crafts through many many eras of change, some to evoke emotion, others to use the most minuscule amount of anything imaginable. But nothing holds or attention anymore. We are face paced global market. If I go to Japan, I want to know what a Coke is without having to burst a blood vessel to figure out the squiggle on the red can looks like it's a Coke. That's where good art and design have taken precedence.
Do you know what the logo for Burger King is?? I drive past one everyday and I have no idea. I know what the logo for Duff beer is on 'The Simpsons'. I'm pretty sure Burger King changed their logo a little while back but I only remember the two buns squishing the words "burger" and "king" into one another. People want simple stuff. I don't have to have to read 4000 pages to understand where I'm getting my next Whopper.
Likewise, when was the last time you looked at the lay out of a news paper or a magazine. Ever notice that all the good articles are spread out between pages of crap? It's to make you the consumer sift through it all so that you'll stop on the ad for cologne or perfume. Even within the page, things are broken up into headings, sub headings, and text. This layout is so good, Microsoft Word has all its resume templates in the same fashion; it's all relative. It makes things simple, easy for the consumer, but it also looks GOOOOOOD.
In addition, have you ever purchased an item simply because the packaging looked good? Don't lie, somewhere there's some shitty movie or God-awful video game in your collection that had an awesome cover to it. Or that bottle of wine or beer, or that box of candy that no one has ever touched because it looked so awesome that you wanted to preserve it.
Art is dead, make no mistake. Design is a misunderstood art form. This is why when your company advertises with those big black blocks with fluorescent letters no one EVER stops in to give you business. It looks bad, it's poorly thought out, yea it's cheaper and that's what driving people to stop at the guy's place 2 building's down who's product is half what yours is, but his marketing is twice as good. I'm by no means saying to redesign the world, the economy is far too bad for that, but I am saying to keep your eyes open. We can change the way design is done and weed out the crappy ones.
Design is delicate, it's fun. It makes your world livable. You don't have to open 80 cans in your fridge to find a Coke because someone took the time to design a can and have an image printed on it. Now you aren't drinking beer with breakfast or popping Tab at a party because some lovely people decided to distinguish these items. So next time you open your eyes in the grocery store take an extra second to notice the little things that make your world, and mine, function-able.