POLY ZIP
YSDN SADDLE ISSUE 02 / DEC ‘14
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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The Poly what? Letter from Hyojung Julia Seo
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The PolyZip About the feature by Nathan Grimberg
4-5
Geometrically good gag Hunter Caron
6-7
Startup influences Ramis Hassan
8-9
You’re gonna carry that weight Angelina Tjhung
10-11
Connection Tim Ho
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The last step... Jessica Brennan
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To the jury Jacob Colosi
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Dear YSDNWYA, Professor Robert Gill, Hannah Lee The next saddle Hyojung Julia Seo
LET TER
The Poly what? A letter from your fellow YSDNer So you are walking around on campus and from a far distance you see someone dashing off with the PolyZip folder in hand. In an instant you know that person is in YSDN. You are standing in a bus filled with the rush hour crowd and you notice a big-ass PolyZip folder taking up a seat and a half. You know better than to ask the owner to put that down on the winter-salted bus floor because what the PolyZip contains is a printed transfiguration of that person’s FINAL_12.pdf, which we all know is worth 12 times more than gold and silver put together. That damn PolyZip is an undermined plastic shield that humbly serves to hold our precious work that we made after many gulps of hot and cold liquid-caffeine and all-nighter parties spent with the Adobe family. Let us take a step back though and think about the PolyZip through a series of questions. Am I proud of what I am handing in here? Do I feel satisfied with this final piece? Does it look too trendy? Will it impress my prof? Is it good enough to put in my portfolio? Am I meeting up to the expectations of my peers?Will it make people in my class go WOooOAH :O ? What goes in the PolyZip is not just a physical deliverable, but work that has been physically and conceptually wrought by what we choose to influence us. As we reflect upon our previous favourite projects, it’s important to keep in mind that the joyous memory and emotional attachment we have with our work comes from beyond just the graphic component of graphic design. The PolyZip ought to be made of diamonds to righteously reflect the work it contains. From your fellow YSDNer, Hyojung Julia Seo
ABOUT THIS FEATURE
The PolyZip
Together in a cheap plastic folder Nathan Grimberg I have to confess, when Julia told me this issue would be about the PolyZip I did not really know what she meant. But after we talked about it, it reminded me of how I think about the PolyZip… You know those mornings when you have almost everything printed, you are rushed and tired, but you have to mission down to York lanes to pick one of these things up or else your professor will not accept your project. In a way our projects never felt “complete” to me until they were tucked away in a folder along with my process work and my “write up”. If we are being honest, I’m not the most diligent student, and when I look at what influences me the most at the end of a project, it is probably time. But there are other influences that go into my PolyZip too. When you look at a project in the PolyZip, you get the feeling that it’s the culmination of lots of work regardless of what class it is for. Beyond hard work there is other stuff there too. There is advice from my friends and my professors, snippets from the places I have been to, the books I have read, and all the things I watch. It is pretty neat when all of that comes together in a cheap plastic folder.
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HUNTER CARON
Geometrically good gag Can I even? If you are like me, you had nightmares for a solid 3 weeks during the first visual language project that involved everyone you loved being eaten by large geometrical shapes whilst a maniacle witch cackled in the background. Luckily for me that only consisted of about two people. Looking back it was nothing much, but for the first project in YSDN it was somewhat intimidating. Personally I think of this project as the barrier of entry into the cult of YSDN, and I was just hoping I passed. The moral of this incredibly short story is to joke around a bit. I had the pleasure of talking to Ellen Lupton the other day and after I complimented her humour she said to me, “Don’t take yourself too seriously,” which drove deep into my dark, sarcasm filled heart. I don’t believe I’m in a place to give advice, so I’m just relaying the advice from someone you can (maybe) trust. This piece is simply speaking not the best designed thing in the world, but it's the idea behind it that made it special to me. It may not be an original idea by any stretch of the imagination. It was my way of letting the prof know, “Hey, I’m here to make crappy jokes and design cool stuff and I hope you are ready for it”. Many of you won’t agree with this way of doing things, but honestly half the fun of creative fields is that we all do things differently. I was going to choose a piece of work from pre-YSDN but I’m sure the others saddlers will quench that thirst. My goal here is to lighten it up the mood a bit as we get into the meat of things for this year.
FIRST YEAR
Let it not be forgotten that diamonds are just two triangles. This piece shows depth.
After is was retured it was clear that Heidi had enjoyed it.
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RAMIS HASSAN
Startup influences Working outside the Labs As designers our influences and inspirations come from all around us. The way we analyze the project and the final solutions that we implement are always influenced by the feedback we get from the people around us. When you work in TEL, you are surrounded by fellow designers and regardless of the year we all
We were given a twelve week period before the big day in San Francisco, where we had to develop our app further and turn it into a product that had the potential for being monetized. While we I worked on the app the biggest difference I noticed was that there was constant feedback coming from my team. Most of the
have the natural sense for visual communication, alignment and the basic principles of design. So when I started working with my startup team, where I was the sole designer, I noticed that the way I designed and the feedback I got were different than what I was used to. Before I go any I further, allow me to provide some context. Recently I worked with a startup team called ‘Hungry Belly’. I met them at Angel Hack 2014 this past summer and together we won the Hackathon, and were sent to San Francisco to present our app to investors.
projects that we work on in YSDN are for the most part self driven and the major influences are the weekly critiques that we get from our professors and ourselves. However when you work in a startup, there is constant change and your influences are not just you and your team members but also the users who are included in the different stages of testing. By adding that element of live feed back from the users, who may not be trained in design or development, the design and functionality of the app changes significantly as oppose to if the users were not involved. Because now you are getting validation about what works and what doesn’t; and if it doesn’t then it gets cut.
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THIRD YEAR
Working Hard at Angel Hack 2014.
Yay, we won! Team Picture!
Pitiching at Demoday in San Francisco to potential investors.
ANGELINA TJHUNG
You’re gonna carry that weight Cool Girl With Relevant Interests.jpg Home is far away. I sleep under an electric box. Cold air leaks past the insulation. I can hear somebody upstairs stomping around and complaning about how somebody ate all her bagels. Honestly, that’s rough buddy. How did I get here? This is a really complicated question for anyone to answer, but I think that a big part of it is growing up in a suburban area as the daughter of two immigrants. My parents came here in 1987. And together, they started to create a family. It went like this: home from school at 4. Piano practice until 5. Say hi to dad as he comes home. Dinner. Homework. And then finally I can dick around on the internet. (Runescape or Neopets, probably.) It was only recently that I started to include more parts of myself in the work that I do. For example, you may have noticed that this spread so far is incredibly self-indulgent. I’m convinced that if you are interested in doing the work that you do, only good stuff will come of it. And the easiest way to feel more interested in your work is by implementing bits of your own life and interests into everything you do. We’re at a point in our lives that we’re able to be incredibly selfindulgent with our design. Might as well use that to our advantage to create work that we’re proud of.
“Chopping down some trees so I can finally buy an internet girlfriend.” Source: Jagex lol
THIRD YEAR
The Great Red is a recent Time-Based Communication project that was a joint effort by Aaron Thadathil and I. The project was to base a narrative around an object. We chose Zab’s lamp seen from her office outside because we thought it would provide some attractive cinematographic features. Aaron suggested that we experiment with subtitles, so we asked Tiffany Tsai for some translation help in mandarin.
The fact that the clip was set in a different language suddenly made it more personal for me. I regret that I’m unable to speak to my mother in the language that she’s most comfortable with. The lamp now represents a promise that is never fulfilled. In the clip, the girl details how she accidentally ruins the only photographs that was saved of her grandmother’s only trip to Canada. That actually happened. My mother still cries sometimes whenever she talks about the overexposed film canister. I guess that’s stuck with me ever since.
View the full thing here: https://vimeo.com/111302222 9
TIM HO
Connection I do best in the projects that give me space to express myself. I treat design like art. To be honest, it’s pretty hard to find something that I like in my portfolio. I think it’s this way with a lot of designers and artists as well. We’ll always be our own worst critic. I find with many projects we do in school we end up getting pushed so close to the due date that we just end up rushing something to get it done, and then look back thinking we could have done so much better. Occasionally I find a project that I really like to do. Not to say that I don’t like design, but some projects would just draw me in completely and I’d lose my sense of time. Usually these projects give me a lot of breathing space and creative freedom and I end up treating the Illustrator canvas like an actual paint canvas, where I’m just free to explore and play. When I hit that point with a project, I just know that I’ll be making something really great by the end of it.
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FOURTH YEAR
Pokegraph This infograph categorized the original 151 Pokemon based on their types and locations. This was one of the final projects I did for Information Design. I was glad to have something I could finally place in the poly zip that I considered “done”. I don’t get that with a lot of projects to be honest, but every once in a while you will run into something that you truly like. I think a lot of it had to do with how much I enjoyed creating this piece as a whole, especially with my appreciation for information design and my topic (Pokemon).
JESSICA BRENNAN / FIRST YEAR
The last step… The final submission The final submission is all about how well displayed my work is. Not only is it about displaying what it is that I’ve created at the end of a project but also about how clean cut, neat and well-organized the final piece is. For example, my portfolio into YSDN took all that I had learned about making presentations, from my last 3 years of way too much school, to create what I believe to be one of my most accomplished pieces thus far. As a first year who comes from way too much college prior to YSDN, I have had my fair share of submissions. I’ve gone from taping films for finals of Sault College gen-ed’s submissions, to No. 27 Card Stock, and everything else handed in online to Sheridan’s Visual and Creative Arts (VCA). For that my final pieces were glued to cardstock and all process was thrown into a great big brown folder. I’ve had the joy and horror of cutting into my finals, gluing or taping on an angle, accidently wrinkling my work while gluing to card stock and accidently smudging my final moments before it was due. I was unable to reprint out of fear of being late. YSDN’s PolyZip and coil binding is by far the easiest and best way I have found so far that not only presents the final gorgeously but the
The joy and horror of cutting into my finals, gluing on an angle, wrinkling my work while gluing, accidently smudging my final moments…
PolyZip manages to keep everything crisp and clean without any worries. Overall that 10% to 15% marks of presentation may not seem like a lot but it’s that one last step that can bring a project from a C to a B to even an A. After weeks of endless nights staring at that computer screen, with who knows how many cups of coffee and whatever else are finally at an end, do you disregard your work as you hand it in as loose poorly printed sheets thrown into one large bag for your teacher to figure out which is which. Wouldn’t you feel much more accomplished knowing your project is printed on
is what. Try to keep an overall theme as you flip through your final to your process, it makes it more related to one another. What I do is add title and sub-title pages to my process and finals and a personalized label on the back of each piece to add an extra personal touch to everything and a unified flow through my final. I’ve even seen some students who have started to add cover and title pages to finals and process to just give it that extra touch. All these are little extra add-ons that taking a day to do will not only make your work stand out but will also help punch up that grade from a B to possibly an A.
the best paper, with the best ink, without printer lines, and all neatly packaged nicely for your teacher to go through? My advice is this. When you finish a project, come back to it the next day to print, bind, put together whatever and package everything neatly into that PolyZip. Take the day to print that final on the best paper. Bind all process, possibly labeling everything as you go so you know what
JACOB COLOSI / THIRD YEAR
To the jury: Contest and conference as hegemony What is the process that shapes our ideas about what goes inside that clear over-sized sandwich bag and what gets trimmed out? If there is a level of acceptability that our work must achieve before entering that bubble of display, what systems have created these levels? I would argue that there are hegemonic practices we subscribe to that shape our ideals of aesthetics, as well as effectively shape our ideals of design theory and our personal philosophies. In this sense I would like to reflect on two practices that hold power to form our ideas of what is and isn’t worthy of the PolyZip. The practice of the design competition has established itself as a form of qualifying design for display, as well as creating a pseudo-quantification of just how good that design is. If a piece claims one of these awards it becomes a benchmark or standard of what “good” design is. The subjective qualities the esteemed jury is looking for is somehow translated into undeniable proof of the right this object has to a pedestal. Does it use that trendy qr code? Does it fold into a cute hat after I’m done with it? Wow, blue, is so edgy! The actual piece is removed from any context about what restrictions, investments and emotions we’re
pressured aesthetics, experiencing an anxiety that our work will never be included in the PolyZipped awards list of Adobe (7 points) or the rgd (5 points). However, I would like to make one thing clear: I am not saying that those of you who have won those awards have created bad work. In fact, I am in awe of the talented young professionals ysdn produces. What I am saying though, and only because I learned this after many late night breakdowns, is this: your work does not need to adhere to any outside factors that do not directly influence the context you are creating within. There is another container of design that has the ability to shape what is PolyZipped and what is not: the design conference. The design conference is a place (or blog, or magazine, or All–Singing– All–Dancing Vegas show) where design in its less conventional forms can enter the bubble of display—however without proper reflection to their purpose, this practice of discussion can easily turn into a design competition for ideas. What are the recent trends in workspace arrangement? Can my creative process be revolutionized through 3 easy steps? While presentations like this can definitely forge new thought processes about
involved. As well, this beauty pageant approach completely dissolves any criticism about what the design is actually doing. Sure that little moustache is popular, and is crafted beautifully out of feathers—or maybe that’s macaroni—but is it really saying anything. The design competition has become a form of style-maker, through it’s proclaimed ability to establish the best. Forms become pre-packaged and formulaic. Through this fetishizing of the design award, we turn design thinking into a quantifiable skill—the more awards you have, the better designer you are. We begin to create forms that suffer from
design philosophies, they can be fetishized just as much as the objects of design competitions. In essence, we become so obsessed with thinking about how we think, we forget to think. Once again, I’m not saying that going to conferences is stupid, but rather, never stop developing your own philosophies (including learning about others work) about how you establish good work. What you put in that PolyZip should be the culmination of your own, context appropriate, development of form and ideas. The PolyZip does not define you ~ you define it. 13
FACULT Y LET TER - PROFESSOR ROBERT GILL
Dear YSDNWYA, (YSDN Wherever You Are): I’ve always wanted to write you this letter: its like someone has given me an opportunity to write an imaginary letter to myself as a student! Back then I was struggling—as I continue to struggle—to write about curating the spaces in which we encounter and experience art and design. Look at what artist Barnett Newman says about painting: The onlooker in front of my painting knows that [she’s] there. To me, the sense of place has not only a mystery but has that sense of metaphysical fact. I have come to distrust the episodic, and I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of [her] own individuality, and at the same time of her connection to others who are also separate. And this problem of our being involved in the sense of self, which also moves in relation to other selves … the disdain for the self is something which I don’t quite understand. I think you can only feel others if you have some sense of your own being … (Barnett Newman quoted in Michael Auping’s Declaring Space). This publication named Saddle is about stitching; maybe we’re stitching ourselves into the text of our own lives, together and apart? And then, how do we become the kind of reader that Newman imagines here, a reader through whose eyes, ultimately, the text becomes a portrait of self and the self’s desires of and for the Other? In this season of wishes YSDNWYA—in whatever space that wherever finds you—I’d wish you a portfolio that revealed—to you—a portrait of your happiest face! This perhaps uncanny happy face might be: yearning, passionate, confused, ecstatic, buoyant, joyful, curious, mournful, regretful, grieving, angry, rebellious, avenging… but, alas, I take up too much teacherly room. Love, really, Rob Gill
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Illustration by Hannah Lee (third year)
THE NEXT SADDLE
New year’s resolution: 30 dpi Starting 2015 pixelated Enough with judging our own work and thinking about our favourite projects. The next Saddle focuses on how we are perceived by our own YSDN peers. Through just 30 small snippets of each student’s work, we can study the different styles these students use to communicate their ideas. Do you want to help out in the next Saddle issue ? To be a part of the next YSDN Saddle, contact the horse. ysdnsaddle@gmail.com
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TYPEFACES UNIVERS FAMILY ADOBE JENSON PRO FAMILY PRINTING YORKU TEL LAB STUDIO 2 YFS PRINTING CENTRE
FEATURING HUNTER CARON RAMIS HASSAN ANGELINA TJHUNG TIM HO ILLUSTRATION HANNAH LEE
WRITERS PROF. ROBERT GILL NATHAN GRIMBERG JESSICA BRENNAN JACOB COLOSI
SADDLERS ANGELINA TJHUNG JOANNE VONGPHACHAN HYOJUNG JULIA SEO