Belly Bites

I made a dog treat box for school and it's adorable. Look at it's lickity little tongue and woobly little legs.

The paper it's sitting on is a class critique. I've been working on this project for a week or so, and this is the second iteration of this box. As you can infer from the sheer quantity of notes on the template, there will certainly be a third.

So crack open its skull and feed your pets with the innards of this adorable little doggy box! It's technically not cannibalism!

An Absurd Memory

New assignment! This is one of the first projects we as students have done for an outside client. The goal was to capture the essence of seven short plays by renowned playwright Samuel Beckett for an upcoming performance at Johnson County Community College. The plays include:

Act Without Words II: In which two people of disparate personalities are stored in sacks.

Ohio Impromptu: In which an old man reads from a cryptic tome to an old mute man.

What Where: In which there are only five left of a group of four men.

Play: In which three burial urns take turns spinning yarns.

Come and Go: In which three women sit on a bench.

Breath: In which there is breath.

Footfalls: In which a sick child either exists or does not.

Death and confusion play major roles in each performance, which is why my main graphic consists of a sightless skull. The icons overlaid on top represent imagery from the individual acts. They are loosely joined by broken, ashy lines, implying the thematic ties that necessarily join each, but only in a superficial - or broken - nature.

Bring your kids!

Type Tattoo Week! Day 7: Apply (to) Yourself

Type Tattoo Week! Day 6: Look & See

Much rougher, much less type, but I've discovered recently that I'm pretty fond of creepy tattoos.

The idea with these is that one would be applied one to each palm.

Type Tattoo Week! Day 5: Shall Pass

Did I mention that the project is to design a henna tattoo? Because that detail is important to note for this pun.

Type Tattoo Week! Day 4: Above

More tattoo motifs! The typographic focus in this one is mainly the letter spacing and thin slab serif style.

The words mean nothing but are vague enough concepts to mean quite a few things. So that's nice.

Text Tattoo Week! Day 3: Ampersand

When designing the most generic typographic tattoo, it helps to use some of the most generic tattoo motifs. Hence this half-filled ampersand.

Type Tattoo Week! Day 2: Still

I chose this word for the second tattoo mainly because of the anatomy of the type. The lower finials of each of these letters forms a neat little hook motif that I think works well with the idea of stillness - keeping things in place and all.

Type Tattoo Week! Day 1: LOL

I'm back in school! And the first assignment for my new Advanced Typography class has been to design typographical tattoos. So I'm going to post a week's worth of those to get us back in the swing of things.

This might look familiar. It's sort of an extension/reimagining of the ROWA concept from an earlier typography project. I chose the LOL mark because I've always been fond of it's semi-symmetry and the cute little happy face incorporated into the center. However, in the process of drawing it larger I've somehow made it much, much creepier. So that's a life choice I have to live with now.

The Roaring Five-Years-From-Now

This was past of an art history project, the assignment was to create an educational product that could be sold in a museum gift shop to teach people about a particular movement. Hence this art deco desk calendar. It's chock full of all kinds of lovely prints and fantastic information about the era, the art, and the legacy of art deco.

Poster in this image is © Art.com and Steve Forney. Used non-commercially in an academic setting.

Road Trip!

Here are a few travel magazine covers and titles I designed!

It's the Bombe

 Cryptography! Or as my great-grandpa used to call it, fubswrjudskb!

This has been an ongoing project for my layout design class, and it's finally getting to a point where I'm ready to call it presentable. The project is to construct a tritone newsletter for a non-profit organization. While my classmates are off raising awareness for worth-while organizations like the WWF or GlobalH2O, I decided that I like word puzzles and made a newsletter for non-profit hobby organization the American Cryptogram Association.

The neat thing about making a newsletter for a group dedicated to hiding messages in things is that you get to hide a bunch of messages in things. Take this logo, for example.

This logo is a rotational cipher for the word BOMBE, which is a reference to the machines used to crack the Nazi ENIGMA codes during World War II. If you take 360 degrees and divide it by 26 (letters of the alphabet), you can assign a different letter to each distinct point on a circle. I indicated this by the point on the circle that doesn't have a triangle on it. The outer ring is B, the next ring is O, and so on. The result is a neat little explosion with a neat little hidden message.

This is the cover! The main focus here is the tritone coloring - only the colors used in the entire document are the red, orange, and blue shades along the left edge. The dark brown is a combination of all of these colors, and the raindrop imagery is just lighter and lighter shades of blue. In theory, this entire newsletter could be printed with just three inks.

And here's the interior spread! It's very busy, very rigid, and very wordy, just like cryptography. Because this composition is for a hobby organization, I wanted to include articles and information that would be interesting to casual cryptographers. This is a bit of a departure from the philosophy of the ACA, but its accessibility is perfect for bringing in new members and keeping current members informed and entertained.

Bind Those Books!

Ah, finals week. When a young student's fancy turns to caffeine and final projects flutter through the air.

This is one of those projects, if you were wondering! It's a poster about the history of book binding. I made it a large book cover. Because I'm clever like that.

Lace Chromata

I've done it. I've colored the pattern. And it's pretty spectacular.

To make this image, I used color sequences from Munsell's color space. This system accounts for changes to three main variables: hue (the color), value (the brightness of the color), and saturation (the amount of gray in the color).

I really want you to get the full impact of how beautiful this thing is to me, so let me walk you through the five main components:

This is a circular progression through Munsell color space, beginning at the bottom left and extending up to the top right. Note how all the colors represented are the same value and saturation, but all the hues are changing in the order that they would in a typical color wheel.

This is a diagonal progression through a single hue of Munsell color space, beginning at the top and extending downwards. A diagonal progression keeps the same value and hue throughout, but gradually adds more and more gray to the base hue.

 

These two progressions actually use a horizontal motion, but with different hues in each. A horizontal progression means that the color keeps the same hue and saturation, but gradually changes value. In the top example, the base hue is red on the right. Each step moving to the left is another step down in value. In the bottom example, the base hue is on the left and moving right with subsequent steps up in value.

 

Finally, from top left to bottom right, we have the diagonal cross-section sequence. This one gets a little more complex, because we have two variables shifting: hue and value, with the base hue (orange) moving both across the color space to it's compliment (blue-purple) and down in value. The result is a calming transition that avoids creating any of the chromatic gray shades that usually pop up when going from a hue to its compliment.

So knowing all that, join me once more in gawking at how these simple lines drawn through the visual spectrum can be woven together into a magnificently complex tapestry of color.

Meow Available!

Kitty Cat Murder Inc.

Based off this earlier concept.

This is what my technical processes class looks like most days. Print a thing, color correct, print it again, adjust alignment, print it again, resample the text, print it again, and so on.

Finished product will be up tomorrow! Exciting stuff.

Somebody to Count On

So I'm kinda on a roll with these.

Deepest Sympathies

Sometimes, when I go to class, I don't take very good notes.

Sometimes I forget to take down the due date of a project.

Sometimes I panic and assume that the project is due the next day.

Sometimes I stay up all night trying to complete the project.

Sometimes, when I stay up all night to complete a project, I make decisions that I would never make whilst fully-rested and lucid.

Sometimes, this happens:

It's a greeting card, and it's not due until next week.

So I have time to redo it.

If I want to redo it.

...

I think I might just keep it.

Responsible Design

Luba Lukova is a wonderful graphic designer who makes wonderful posters and prints along the theme of social justice, and as part of a class assignment I've made this fake exhibition poster for her.

The illustration and type was all drawn by hand and arranged/recolored in Photoshop.

The illustration depicts a hand gripping a large pencil.

The type uses letter forms spaced closely together to form groupings known as words.

I'm learning so much here.

Driving the Duotone Diner

Remember that Food Truck Festival poster I made a while back? One of the concepts is back as a sexy two-tone postcard for my Technical Processes class! The entire image is made from nothing more than Pantone Bright Red, Pantone 357 Green, and some various mixes of the two. These colors were picked because they're very common food colors that mix to a nice, healthy brown.

I've always really liked limited palettes, if for no other reason than because there are only so many ways you can solve it. With total creative freedom, there's always the chance that whatever you do, no matter how brilliant, isn't utilizing the full available potential. This is just simpler. And it's lovely.