DZine’d
Issue 01, Volume 01
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Contents
4 Exhibition Map
AIGA Emerge Exhibition 2010
6 First Impressions
AIGA Emerge 2010 Opening Reception
32 AIGA Emerge 2010 Exhibition Poster
Suite 257
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Suite 257
Suite 257
14 Behind the Design
Interview with Chandler Chow and Sylvia Ly
The Threepenny Opera Bertolt
Brecht & Kurt Weill
An
Opera for Beggars
The Threepenny Opera
The Threepenny Opera
The Threepenny Opera
34 My Expressionistic Poster Bertolt
Brecht & Kurt Weill
An
Opera for Beggars
Bertolt
Brecht & Kurt Weill
An
Opera for Beggars
Bertolt
Brecht & Kurt Weill
An
Opera for Beggars
The Threepenny Opera Bertolt
Brecht & Kurt Weill
An
Opera for Beggars
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Exhibition Map AIGA Emerge Exhibition 2010
The Threepenny Opera Bertolt
Brecht & Kurt Weill
An
Opera for Beggars
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CSUDH Design Students Chandler Chow / Sylvia Ly
Suite 257 The Threepenny Opera Bertolt
Brecht & Kurt Weill
An
Opera for Beggars
My Expressionistic Poster
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First Impressions AIGA Emerge 2010 Opening Reception
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Nervous, excited, anxious, you name it, I was
feeling it as I walked up to the opening reception of the AIGA Emerge Student Exhibition 2010 at the Pacific Design Center, located in West Los Angeles, California on Melrose Avenue. The Pacific Design Center where the exhibition was held was impressive and intimidating all at the same time. The architecture and surroundings convey design of all types when you see it. The interior is equally as impressive and has a very sophisticated feeling to it. Dressed up, but not wearing a full suite, I felt underdressed and over-dressed at times. Some people were wearing suits and others were wearing surf shirts and flip flops. Quite a diverse crowd of people, but I was told that the design community was an eclectic type of folk. This was my first experience at an AIGA event since becoming a member and I wasn’t sure what to expect. Left: Front entrance of the Pacific Design Center. Above: top: Front courtyard of the PDC. middle: Interior of the PDC main floor. bottom: Escalators up to the Emerge Exhibit.
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Being a person who rarely goes to L.A., just getting to the exhibition was very nerve racking for me. The unknown and the unfamiliar the reasons being. Being a creature of habit, this was definitely out of my comfort zone. As I walked toward the suite where the exhibition was being held, (suite B257 on the second floor), I saw a small group of people gathered together and talking to each other. As I entered I said hello and walked into the exhibition’s main room where my poster was on display. I checked out the surroundings and continuing into the gallery’s back rooms of the exhibit to see if any of my classmates were here, but no one was., I had arrived early, about 4:30 p.m. The opening did not officially start until 5:00 p.m., so the night was young. In the back of my mind I kept thinking, how am I going to find the design students who did the pieces that I liked. In a way, knowing this kind of put a damper on my evening because I could not just enjoy myself and take in the experience, but instead I knew that I had to take photos of the opening reception for the ezine (DZine’d) and find the design students who’s work I liked that I wanted to talk to (interview).
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Right: PDC exterior under an aluminum lamp sculpture. Left: top: 2nd floor escalator landing. middle: AIGA Emerge 2010 suite B257. bottom: People enjoying the evening.
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I was thinking to myself, was one of the people that were standing at the front of the suite a designer of one of the pieces that I liked? Knowing that I wanted to interview the designers of a couple pieces that I really liked for this ezine (DZine’d), I walked back up front and asked if anyone among them knew the designer of the fairly large typographic piece that took up an entire wall on the right hand side of the gallery when you first walk in on the right, that read WARpeace. A woman from the group immediately spoke out and said yes, they are students of mine and said that it was a collaborative piece by two of her student at USC, but they were not here yet.
Left: Gallery beginning to fill up. Below: People checking out the student design work.
As 5:00 came, the gallery was really started to fill up and was getting hot. There was food and beverages at no cost which was really nice considering it costs $12.50 for parking. Some people from school started showing up. We talked, mingled and ate, discussing the designs and the exhibition. Time was flying by.
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About 7:00 p.m. the acknowledgement and awards presentation began. Everyone congregated into the suites largest room. AIGA kicked it off, speaking first and presenting a scholarship. Professors from each of the Los Angeles Design schools presented a scholarship winner to a student from their respective school. It was really crowded and I couldn’t see or hear much. From our school, CSUDH, the scholarship winner was Alex Salvattiera, one of my classmates from whom I met for the first time in a Sources of Graphic Design class we took at CSUDH in the Fall ‘09 semester. (Interview with Alex included in this volume.) So, as the opening reception was about to end and I was on my way out of the gallery, I noticed a guy was standing by the typographic design I really liked. It turns out that he was one of the two designers that created the piece. We briefly talked, we exchanged numbers and that was that. Somehow, everything worked out. The whole evening was a valuable experience and something I will always remember as being a part of, thanks to all of my design professors at CSUDH. Right: People mingling. Left: top: Scholarships awarded. Middle & Bottom: End of the night outside suite B257.
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Behind the Design
Interview with Chandler Chow and Sylvia Ly
First, let me congratulate you on your piece at the exhibition, it is really nice! It is beautiful to look at and engages the viewer to look closer at it, which reveals all the words and statements that are related to war and peace. Your piece invokes an emotional response when you look at it. Everyone knows what war is and everyone wants peace, so people can relate to it immediately.
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DZine’d What school are you studying at? Chandler / Sylvia USC Roski School of Fine Arts DZine’d What are your Major/Minors? Chandler / Sylvia Bachelor of Art – Emphasis in Graphic Design DZine’d What year are you in? Chandler / Sylvia Senior – Graduate in May!!
DZine’d Do you feel that your school is preparing you adequately for a professional career when you graduate? Chandler Definitely. The professors in the design program at USC all have professional industry experience and have done a great job preparing me for the challenges that lie ahead working in the design world after school. Sylvia Yes, the professors at Roski have a genuine passion for both design and teaching, and as Chandler said, also have established design practices and many years of industry experience. They have taken many steps to prepare us for working professionally outside of school, but what I appreciate even more is the insight and wisdom they have shared with us on living life in general.
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DZine’d Do you ever think about how your schools stacks up with other design schools?
DZine’d What are your plans for the future after graduation?
Chandler Not really. I don’t think a good design school necessarily makes a good designer. I’m very confident in my education from a design standpoint and also feel like I’ve received a very well rounded University education as well.
Chandler Immediately after – Traveling for a month through South East Asia and China. When I touch back down on U.S. soil – Figure out how to make some $$$!
Sylvia I have, primarily because our design program is much smaller than the programs at major art schools. Perhaps our program is lacking in some areas, but despite its shortcomings, I believe that Roski’s design program also offers its students what other art schools may not. For instance, because Roski is one of many schools of disciplines at USC, we have the opportunity to collaborate and work with students in other fields of study, including the Business and Engineering schools, on larger interdisciplinary projects.
Sylvia Nothing more exciting than full-time work to appease the parents!
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DZine’d Is there any particular field of design that interests you the most or would like to do if you could? Chandler Both entertainment design and apparel design. I’ve worked in both facets of the industry and have had very positive experiences. Would like to work towards art direction in either of those specific fields of design. Sylvia I am most interested in editorial and book design. But really, I am interested in anything that deals with typography and a lot of text. I love organizing information. DZine’d Do you have any favorite professional designers out there today that you admire? Chandler Stefan Sagmeister. David Carson. Erik Spiekermann. Roman Jaster Sylvia In no particular order: Anthony Zinni, Lorraine Wild, Anne Burdick, the designers behind GOOD magazine, among others.
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DZine’d Was your piece created as a class project, or was it designed specifically to be in the AIGA Emerge 2010 exhibition? Chandler The initial idea stemmed from George Orwell’s famous novel 1984. One of the 3 main tenets of his totalitarian world was “WAR IS PEACE” playing on the notion that keeping peace on the home front requires being at war somewhere else. We really thought about this statement – how it is still very true today, and the implications that come with it. Does war actually bring peace? Can peace be achieved without war? Questions such as these interested us so we attempted to dive deeper and explore the concept further. Sylvia And in our exploration of “war” and“peace,” we chose not to seek to (re)define these terms, but to look at what has already been said concerning them, what people already believe these two notions to be. As we continued looking into the subject, we saw how broad notions of war and peace were and how loaded the terms were — they can mean such different things to different people. So what interested us was figuring out what others have believed and said about war and peace throughout history and during contemporary times and compiling all of that together. There are many contradictions and the subject is very complex – we wanted to capture that complexity. 19
DZine’d Who decided who got the word war and who got the word peace? Chandler Sylvia and I are very good friends and have worked in Design classes together since 2008. We often ask each other for advice on projects and have worked collaboratively before. We share a passion for design and have very similar tastes, but at the same time we also have pretty different personalities and outlooks on certain issues. When the concept evolved for our project it was a no brainer that I took WAR and she took PEACE. Sylvia It was really funny in the beginning because we both knew we wanted to do a large scale typography project, and when we were exploring what messages we would like to communicate and what words we would like to use, Chandler was proposing bleak ideas that dealt with death and mortality, while I proposed more positive ideas that dealt with beauty. At one point he responded to my ideas saying, “Well, our project can’t just be something that says ‘Love is lovely.’” But when 1984 came up, a book we had both mentioned we liked, “War is Peace” just worked perfectly – here was a binary we could both work within.
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DZine’d Did you both research war and peace or did each of you concentrate on an individual word? Chandler Very much so. We helped each other with research and ideas for the text that was used in the piece. We pulled quotes from presidential speeches, influential quotes, songs, books, religious text, and other sources. We also used military acronyms and other words that provoked thought and evoked emotion. Sylvia We both collaborated and shared research with each other, but when it came down to really populating some of the areas of the design with more text, we did do independent research.
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DZine’d How did you decide on the color scheme of black and white? Was it like night/day, black/white, war/peace?
DZine’d Can you describe the process you went through to produce this piece (concept through execution)?
Chandler Initially the piece was going to involve color – a camouflage palette for the WAR side and shades of Purple on the PEACE side. I give credit to Sylvia for toying around with the design and flipping the colors on her computer to a black background with white lettering. We both knew right away that was the best solution, the words just seemed to pop. From a design and conceptual perspective it also made sense as black is often used in the military and is associated with death. I love the color black so I was all for it. We also pushed our instructors to allow us to paint an entire wall black.
Chandler A lot of back and forth sharing ideas and concepts between Sylvia and myself before, during, and after our design classes. We talked a lot before designing anything. Once we solidified our concept and chose to separate the design between the two of us we worked on the actual design process for about a week. Fitting the smaller lettering tightly together to form the bigger words was extremely tedious and took a few weeks to mesh the two sides together once we finished our individual portions. We worked with an outside vendor to produce the piece once the design was finished. We then had to take a few days to paint the space, making sure we had an even coat of paint on the wall. Once that was finished we locked the piece in place on the wall.
Sylvia The black and white definitely was not the first idea – it was the last option we had decided to try out, and when we saw it, we loved it. It made more sense on every level to have it this way instead.
Sylvia And in our exploration of “war” and “peace,” we chose not to seek to (re)define these terms, but to look at what has already been said concerning them, what people already believe these two notions to be. As we continued looking into the subject, we saw how broad notions of war and peace were and how loaded the terms were — they can mean such different things to different people. 23
So what interested us was figuring out what others have believed and said about war and peace throughout history and during contemporary times and compiling all of that together. There are many contradictions and the subject is very complex – we wanted to capture that complexity. We first solidified our idea and made sure we both understood what we wanted to communicate. We then spent weeks discussing what form it would take, asking a ton of questions: How do we want the viewer to interact with it? Would it be a 3-dimensional piece or a flat piece? What materials would we use to construct the words? How big? WHY? What is actually feasible to create, considering our time and skill sets? Having “war” and “peace” constructed out of words was definitely not the first idea we came up with. But when we decided on this (after many conversations), the next step was to actually to start seeing if we could make it happen. And Chandler explained the rest of the process from there. In short, we spent a lot of time fitting all the words and letters together, so that all the little spaces were nicely addressed.
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DZine’d It looks like it was really challenging to design this, were some aspects of this project more challenging than others and what were they? Chandler We really wanted our design to be tight – so we worked the hard on our typography making sure it as seamless as possible. That was the most challenging part. Sylvia I have to say that the part that was most challenging was when we had both finished constructing our individual words and we had to combine them to make them one coherent piece – where “WAR” flows and meshes into “peace” to visually communicate “War is Peace.”
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DZine’d Do you feel collaborating is important when designing or do you prefer to work on projects alone? DZine’d Is creating an emotion connection or reaction to a design piece something you think about when your designing? Chandler Yes. It was especially important for us in this piece. We wanted to not only create something visually interesting but something that sent a powerful message to viewers as well. Our intent was not to influence them as to what our beliefs are on the subject, but rather to evoke emotions inside of them and hopefully a passion to care in WHATEVER it is they actually believe. Aside from this piece I do think it’s important to create an emotional connection with viewers. Design conveys emotion. The choices you make as a graphic designer are not arbitrary so its imperative to be aware of the message you are trying to send and think of the best ways to do this when approaching a project. Sylvia Yes. I believe in asking questions. Hopefully, with this piece, there was a giant question mark looming when the audience viewed and interacted with design – a question mark that perhaps led to a desire to understand what the piece was about, and beyond that, a desire to explore for themselves what war and peace meant to them. 26
Chandler Yes. Collaboration is always helpful, getting feedback and seeing your project from someone else’s perspective is never a bad thing. You don’t always have to heed their advice or criticism! What’s important is to be comfortable collaborating. In a school setting I feel it is beneficial for students to collaborate so they learn how to interact with other designers in the creative process. It isn’t always necessary however, I enjoy putting on my headphones, tuning others out, and designing on my own as well. Sylvia Life is no fun without collaboration! If given the choice, I would much rather work with someone else than alone (even if working with the other person turns out to be really painful – suffering only makes us stronger. I enjoy seeing how others address and solve issues differently from how I do. There is so much to learn from others!
DZine’d Were both of you satisfied with the final product, or were there some things that you wished you could have done differently if any?
DZine’d Do you think your design was successful?
Chandler I was very satisfied and confident in our work with this project. There is ALWAYS room for improvement for myself as a designer, but at the same time I take pride in things I’ve done and feel like this project was very successful.
Sylvia Can I really answer this question? I think this is for the audience to answer.
Chandler Definitely.
Sylvia Hahha, this question is funny. Anyone who knows me knows I am never satisfied. But I have decided that I can’t always live in dissatisfaction, so I’ve made several negotiations with myself – and what I mean by this is I talk myself into being satisfied with what I make. So to answer your question: Yes, I am satisfied. I believe Chandler and I both gave it our best. I believe we have a solid message we both believe in and executed with as much precision as we could both muster. And I believe that we provided some pretty decent solutions to the problems we encountered while working on this project. If I could do anything differently… well, I could go into great detail here about some of the finer details of the visual execution… but I won’t.
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DZine’d How do you think your piece stacked up against the other designs?
DZine’d How long have you been affiliated with AIGA?
Chandler There was some extremely quality design work in the EMERGE show. I feel very strongly that our piece was right up there with the best.
Chandler Since 2005.
Sylvia I believe I am very fortunate to be able to participate in this group show, having our piece displayed alongside so many great designs. DZine’d In what ways do you think you’ve benefited by being a member of AIGA? Chandler It has helped me to stay connected to the design community and also get a sense of the work that others are involved in. I’ve definitely learned a lot about professions within graphic arts and the history of graphic design as well. Sylvia AIGA provides some pretty great resources to student designers, and I must say that it’s really nice having a tight-knit group of design enthusiasts congregate together at school to discuss things no one else understands.
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Sylvia Freshman year of college… so I would say 2006. DZine’d Would you recommend AIGA to others? Chandler Yes. It is crucial to learn as soon as possible how the survive in the professional world of design. Sylvia Yep.
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DZine’d What did you think of the opening reception (impressions)? Chandler Was a fun night! Great turnout, lots of cool people roaming around. Sylvia I couldn’t make it. DZine’d Had you ever been to the Pacific Design Center before and what are your impressions of it (PDC)? Chandler I had actually never stepped foot in PDC since I’ve lived in Los Angeles. The building is impressive and also a great place for artists and designers to showcase their work. Sylvia I had never been to PDC previously. I found the building pretty impressive – and I wanted to show my mom when I first saw it. My mom doesn’t understand what I do, and I figured that if she could see that my work was being displayed in such a nice building, she would be more comfortable with my chosen career.
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DZine’d Anything else you would like to say or add that I have not asked you, or that I may be missing or overlooking, or that I should have asked you in relationship to your design piece? Chandler Think this sums it up. Appreciate the time and opportunity to give a few thoughts. THANKS. Sylvia You were quite comprehensive. Thank you for supporting our work! It is a great encouragement to me.
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AIGA Emerge 2010 Exhibition Poster
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My Expressionistic Poster My poster on exhibit at the AIGA Emerge 2010 Exhibition was created as a class project in a Sources of Graphic Design course I took in the Fall of 2009 at CSUDH. Design periods from Victorian to Digital were studied. This poster was #2 in a series of 4 posters created and chosen by my design professors to be entered into the exhibition. Being selected to exhibit in the Emerge Exhibition was an honor, a confidence builder and a valuable experience that I will always remember.
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The Threepenny Opera Bertolt
Brecht & Kurt Weill
An
Opera for Beggars
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DZine’d
Designed, photographed and written by: Christopher Pierson