Beginning Graphic Design Portfolio

Anthony Marx Begining Graphic Design Fall 2013 Portfolio of Work Professor Stacy Asher

Project_01

Form as a Typology/ What is Graphic Design

I set about this assignment with a very specific category of designed object in mind. This was the utilitarian object.

These objects have a function (or many).

People interact with these artifacts in some way or another. This search stems from my interest in product design, the reason I am taking this class. This search was then narrowed to a specific nook of the Hay Market. By collecting the images into the matrices and typologies I was able to gain a new perspective of these artifacts and their purpose in the landscape of graphic design. These artifacts serve as access points and connectors.

These are the artifacts that physically link this part of the Hay Market to the rest of the Hay Market and then to Lincoln and then ultimately to the world.

Referring to access point these were the artifacts like manhole covers and fire hydrants. They allow access to utility networks quite literally flowing beneath our feet. The connectors contain the parking meters and bike racks, but also less obviously the trash and recycle bins, mailboxes, and even the atm. The infrastructure

that is necessary for transportation makes sure customers can conveniently reach the Hay Market Area by a variety of modes of transportation; namely cars, bikes, or even horse.

The trash bins and even cigarette butt receptacles connect these patrons to the greater waste management system. The mailbox clearly is the individual level of the mail system, and the ATM even “connects and gives access to� people’s bank accounts to withdrawal cash. For the second typology of historical design almost all of my artifacts could be used, the necessary function of them really has not changed that much over the year. The age can be seen in the rust and the patina on the objects, or that the manhole is dated 1977. Object seem mainly to just get a design facelift that enables us to know what era these object could have come from.

Look Here.

Graphic Design

Exercise_01 Billboard as a Messaging Center This exercise was our earliest exploration into graphic design as a disciple. With it we first tasted the possible breadth of graphic design in our own backyards.

Utility

Project_02

Form as Language/ Designing Visual Communications

I had trouble engaging in the process of this project. I am one of those who really needs to know what the end product and deliverable is. Knowing this I get a very specific idea of what I want my initial end to be. I know this will change and develop as I work, but without this goal in mind it the process can feel pointless. Exploratory process is certainly important, but only with a direction or goal does it have real value. When I realized that the final piece was essential a poster using text and image to define our verbose vocab word I had a bit of an “ah-ha� moment.

This left me scrambling to really start from scratch in production of a piece to accomplish this goal.

Poster design is really my very favorite aspect of Graphic Design. A dream job of mine would be to get into the niche design work of music: album art, poster, and merchandise design. Frankly, I wish I had the opportunity to rework the process from the beginning. I would have done line shape studies and image collection like

a mad man. This is not to say that I am dissatisfied with the product I arrived at. I have a tendency to torture myself with custom designed fonts. I collected the porcupine quill tracings that I used in the font from a rather gory image of quill stuck in the face of a dog. The Poster certainly doesn’t feel finished.

I wish I had had time to hand draw a porcupine. This would match the text better. The final feels more like an iteration after finally figuring a direction for the product.

Irascible

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This project felt fast. I like the process of approaching this project from both ends.

We had the initial logo, and started by doing a redesign of this logo. From there we created a step-by-step animated sequence of to reach our final product by using the conceptual prompts of: disturbance, disintegration, diffusion, re-collection, re-organization. To arrive at my new logo I started by listing all the components of the original logo that defined it, and ultimately made it successful.

It is an arrow that is excised from a circle.

This arrow is curved in order to conform to the circle. The arrow forms a ninety-degree angle at the tip that is square to the picture plan, giving it a grounded feeling and orientation in space. The tip of part of the arrow is precisely in the center of the circle.

I wanted to have all of these in my new design, while simultaneously adding deeper levels of legibility, enhanced engagement of the negative space, and a greater feeling of movement. The logo I arrived at I feel satisfied these. As for the sequence I started by defining all the terms and imagined the logo as a physical entity with these forces acting upon it, then created the sequence. The logo is disturbed by a component falling free as if by gravity. Then all the curvilinear lines straiten as if heat is being applied or they are unfurling. From there the horizontal component starts to break apart and rise into the air as if evaporating. Then suddenly the “boiling point� is reached and the horizontal elements rapidly trust themselves through the arrow creating gestalted, engaged negative spaces. From there the circular momentum is re-established resulting in a finished logo with not one, but multiple arrows arranged in this circle that engage both the positive and negative space.

Project_03

Form as Identity/ Logo Transformation

Google Sketchup 3-D Manipulation

Exercise_03 Color + System = Visual Language This was our only brief foray into color. We took one frame from our logo transformations and quickly experimented with six different color combinations.

Monochromatic Complementary Analogous Triad Contrasting Moods Wildcard

1927 – 1991

Jacqueline Casey

Exercise_04

The foremost US practitioner of the International Style Jacqueline Casey trained at Massachusetts College of Art before working as a fashion illustrator and advertising, editorial and interior designer. In 1955 she joined the Office of Publications (Design Services Office) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) working with Muriel Cooper who was then Design Director. Casey’s work acknowledges the influence of the Grid established by the post-war graphic design masters in Switzerland.

As Director of Design Services many of her posters have been created to publicize exhibitions organized by the MIT Committee on the Visual Arts. She often uses strong elemental imagery, manipulated by letterforms.

“My job is a constant learning experience. While MIT has its roots in tradition, the university represents all that is experimental, exciting and future-orientated. For me designing is highly personal and private. Before I start designing, I research the subject so that my work will be representative of it. I always try to use colours and materials that relate to the subject and the typeface must fit the whole design. Quite simply, my objective is to design a product with an accurate visual and verbal message that can be understood by the audience.”

So much of meaning comes from convention that signs with little convention need to be very iconic in order to comunicate to a wide audience.

Graphic Design History/ Information Architecture/ Visualizing Information

This was another blitzkrieg exercise where we utilized not only our grid skills, but the cumulative skillset we acquired over the breadth of the class. In the span of two hours we researched a historical designer and quickly laid out an info-graphic of the important content of this individual.

Project_04

Form as System/ Working with a Typographic Grid/ Page Layout

To start I found Ellen Lupton’s website incredibly helpful in getting an idea of what this project was all about. The grid. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing with those thumbnail sketches until I read her work. One of my initial concerns from the beginning was the square layout. Page layout is almost never done on the square, which considering this project was the one that was supposed to engage page layout I found that disconcerting. I was put more at ease though on your explanation on creating a greater continuity with the last logo project that were all done on the square as well.

From the thumbnail sketches I was able to determine that the three by tree grid was what I wanted to work with.

That in the square format the ubiquitous rule of thirds would be particularly important and this grid system basically had that built in. The rough-cut and pasted layouts were a good way of getting into it. With a final product being a digital collage of sorts it was good to start with physical methods of collage.

Backtracking I found the text collecting easier then I thought it would be, that even my limited personal collection of books, magazines, and newsprint offered far more text samples then I could ever use. The digital manipulations at first seemed a blessing in how quickly you could cut, paste, scale, and assemble text samples. Thought as it usually goes with me, it’s the fine tuning and fiddling that takes an insane amount of time and patience to get it “just right.” I was happy with my final designs, but the revisit was yielded even better designs, after looking at my classmates results and realizing I needed to de-clutter and engage the whitespace more.