No More Comic Sans

2008-08-05T19:53:00.001-04:00

Type in 3D

2008-06-03T15:56:00.002-04:00

Another fun little video about type. What would type look in 3D (apart from the obvious 3d extrude)? The video get kinda boring after a while, but look out for the tranformation from M to N and V to W... Wish there was more of this through the video

http://www.odd-but-cute.net/movie_popup.asp?file=LetterFlow&qual=high&scale=1

French Video "Le Houellebecq"

2008-05-22T16:34:00.001-04:00

Here's a nice video of someone talking about Michel Houellebecq. Nice motion graphics and interesting subject.

Cæsar Book, PRIN341

2008-04-30T22:00:00.006-04:00

As promised (quite a while ago too), here's my final project for my print class. The idea I got was to customize an old book, so I bought an old book from the used book store and took it apart. I printed on the spreads with my desktop laser black&white printer, as well as my color inkjet for some of the spreads. Then I bound it back together (which took forever), and I made a slip cover for it. The spreads I chose contained some of the memorable moments of the piece.

I also included some separate spreads I created using some of my favorite quotes. Those were printed on the the pages of an old dictionary.

Crazy Book Sculptures

2008-04-25T13:16:00.002-04:00

I've just stumbled upon a site exposing the work a Brian Dettmer. He creates book sculptures by "carving" into old books. It's really amazing and its along the lines of the idea I had for my last project in my print class, which was to give a new life to an old book. Anyway, here's the link:

http://centripetalnotion.com/2007/09/13/13:26:26/

Final project + Extra

2008-04-18T23:02:00.005-04:00

Alright alright, so it's done now. Dart331 that is, not school, cause I still have an essay to hand in next week. And I got 3 summer classes. And I work. But it's all good.

If I have anything to say about this class is that I learned alot. I learned alot from my mistakes, from my successes, and from myself. I learned what I like to do in the world of Design, and alot of it has to do with type. I really enjoyed the creation of my final project, bias magazine, and I'll try to create some more issue(s) over the summer. I really like making layouts and working with type, and I'd really love do more work toward that. What I did not enjoy, is making the physical product. I don't know, must be in my genes or something, but I'm just not good at making objects. Books, magazines, chairs, nutcrackers, you name it. There's always something wrong with it.

I didn't had time to take the pictures of my "Cæsar" project yet, so that'll have to wait. However, I've got the stop-motion animation I had to do for the final project of Tamzyn's class. I would also like to work more of these. But then, I would also like to continue working on my art history project... But bias is the dearest project for me, because it's more like the kind of thing I would like to work on when my degree is over.

Btw, I'll try to keep my blog going over the summer, posting some of my projects. The address might change, 'cause I bought a domain name for my portfolio, but I'll post a link when that happens.

Alright, so without further ado, here comes Mona Ligo (that's the cheesiest name I could think of):

PRIN351, Julius Caesar

2008-04-10T23:45:00.006-04:00

I haven't had much time to update my blog because of all the projects that were due this week, but here's a part of my book project I did for my print class. I'm gonna post the images of the real thing tomorrow when I get my project back, but here's the sleeve cover I designed for the book The Tragedy of Julius Cæsar by Shakespeare:

Why So Bold? (part deux)

2008-03-31T14:39:00.004-04:00

Alright so last Sunday I wrote about all this hype around bold geometric typography. It seems I am not the only that noticed because Kevin talked about that in class last Thursday.

So, the question is, is this new trend good or bad? In my opinion, it's only bad because it's a trend. It's this year's fashion. It's "in". Design really shouldn't be about being "in". In fact, it should be anything but "in" because "in" means looking like what everyone else wants you to look like. And design, in my mind, is all about surprise, shock, and thinking outside the box.

Talking about "thinking outside the box", I participated in a contest last semester. We had to design a t-shirt that represented what design is now. I drew a box, and outside of it a red dot with the inscription "think here"*. I won. However, I'm starting to think I was wrong. It seems to me design today, in Montreal and elsewhere, is all about thinking inside the box.

Anyway, what I should really be doing write now is working on my final projects, so I'll leave it at that. For now. Now here's my shirt and more bold typography for you:

*btw, I wrote this 'think here' in helvetica italic. Was it laziness, irony, or just a poor font library? We'll never know... (I know, but I'll never tell anyone)

DVNO Videoclip

2008-03-26T21:07:00.002-04:00

Here's a link for Justice's clip DVNO on youtube. The clip is by So Me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_XzCR2MbrU

I just find it's a really fun and original way to create a clip with almost just typography.

Why So Bold?

2008-03-23T21:49:00.003-04:00

Alright so, as everybody knows, every couple of year, some of the world's top typographers get together in a secluded and top secret bunker and argue on what are going to be the next grand tendencies in typeface design. It seems they have decided the hand drawn type era is now officially over, now is the time for the overly bold and almost unreadable typefaces.

Seriously, just take a look at these images from various posters and books. I wonder what Piet Zwart would be saying about that. According to him: "Pretentious [letter forms] oppose the utilitarian task of typography. The more uninteresting a letter is in itself the more useful it is in typography".

Interesting link

2008-03-16T19:43:00.003-04:00

Now... here's a website that I don't really understand. But it's great. Reeeally great. From what I can understand it's images bookmarked by different users from around the world. The great thing images 1) the images are beautiful, and alot are related to design and typography 2) the website changes almost every seconds with the users posting things in real-time

Anyway, without further ado, here's the link:
http://ffffound.com/

Book and Album Covers

2008-03-16T19:19:00.003-04:00

For my Print class, I did some research on albums and books covers. It's something that I'm very interested in. I find the capacity to render the spirit of a book or album that some designers have is really fascinating.

You've seen from my last post how I've used my research to make an album cover. However, it was an album without any content, so I could have done just anything really. For my final project in this Print class, I will take apart a book, print on it, than rebuild it. I also want to make a sleeve for it. I got an old book of Shakespeare's piece "Julius Caesar" from an used book store, so that should be very interesting.

Anyway, here are some examples of book and album covers from an earlier research:

PRIN351, MUTE album

2008-03-02T15:20:00.003-05:00

Ok so, for my Print project, I was inspired by some articles found in Kevin's book/magazine Dot Dot Dot 9. The articles in question talk about the band Stereolab, a british alternative band formed in the 90s. In the article, their album covers are mentioned as not only as mirroring their music, but also elevating it.

Being a musician, I'm very concerned about the state of today's music scene. To me, music now is more about image then it is about music. Maybe it's been this way for ages, I can't really tell, but this seems very wrong to me.

What I decided to do for this project is to make an album cover and posters for a band that does not exist. This band is all about the image and not about the music. I wanted to see people's reaction to the imagery of the band, without ever being able to hear them. I decided to actually draw the images for the album. It's the first time in almost 2 years that I've actually picked up the pencils and drawn for a project. This is probably thanks to the book Chasing the Perfect that I read earlier this semester. Maybe next time I'll draw a mouse instead of birds...

Some people thought they were an Electro/Techno band. I had people telling me they must sound like Radiohead, and others like System Of A Down. Here is the visual:

DART392, Posters with typography

2008-03-02T15:15:00.003-05:00

Here is the poster I had to create using the type we made for my 392 class. After the Internet, now comes the Outernet. What exactly is the Outernet? Well... how about everything the Internet is not.

Brief 2: Half Empty, Half Full

2008-03-02T15:08:00.005-05:00

Yeeah, I know... Long time no see. Anyway, here is my final for the second brief and another version with the same text and image:

Type and Video Games

2008-02-12T15:02:00.000-05:00

For my DART 392 class, we had to make a type in a group inspired by the theme of Visual Pollution. We chose to theme of video games, and we went to an Arcade to take some pictures. Let me tell you that Arcades are a fantastic research ground when talking about visual pollution, noise pollution, and just pollution in general.

I've experimented a bit with perspective and pixels, because that's what video games are all about. I also noticed that the letters are often surrounded, sometimes with another color. This makes the letters look bigger than they are, which is important for arcades because you have a limited space and you need to attract the attention.

The type that we settled on incorporated some of the elements mentioned above. Perspective was something we all wanted to work with. The "surrounding" of the letter was also something interesting we wanted to play with. In the end, we decided to play with the idea of "fake" 3D effects used in video games. We used different perspective for all the letters and played with the 2D VS 3D and the expectation of three dimensional plane by removing some sides from the perspective. You can see the whole alphabet lower.

Typolution

2008-02-10T16:56:00.000-05:00

Here's a link to a very great video from a design student at UQAM. Reminds me of the work of Marinetti and the Italian Futurists. It's really fun to see what other students are doing at other Universities.

http://kalomnie.ca/folio/images/animation_typolution_small.mov

Exhibition Review : “Sound Images” at the Montreal Contemporary Art Museum

2008-02-07T13:49:00.000-05:00

The exhibition "Sound Images", curated by Josée Bélisle, at the Montreal Contemporary Art Museum has a great concept behind it. Showing the power of the sound track as part of a work of art is a great premise for any contemporary art exhibition. However, in many ways, this exhibition fails to do justice to the concept behind it.

One of the first pieces in the exhibition, Christian Marclay's Telephones, gives you an idea of what this exhibition could have been. This work is composed of a series of short clips from film scenes involving telephones calls. Even though the clips are very short, between 5 to 10 seconds, you usually understand very quickly the context of the phone call because of the sound present in the short clips. The sound track, the actor's voice and even the type of phone bell used can help the audience understand whether this phone call is friendly or hostile. This is possible even if, in this piece, we have no access to the actual conversations.

Another work, one that is physically very close to Marclay's Telephone in this exhibition, fails to deliver the same kind of interesting concept. I am talking about Michèle Waquant's Les Bruits Blanc. This work includes video footage shot in different cities, with a sound track composed of repetitive white noise. While the use of white noise to represent the sound track of the city is already a doubtful concept, the quality of the video footage and even the quality of the white noise just makes this piece an annoying and almost unbearable work.

The inclusions of some of the other works in this exhibition are also hard to justify. While Linda Covit's Cloche Aphone, a silent replica of a traditional Tibetan bell, is easily justifiable because the silence, in this case, has more meaning than any sound, others works just seem included because of the artist's renown. The most obvious example is Michael Snow's Untitled, a series a silkscreen images displaying the hands of a piano player performing on a keyboard. Unlike Covit's Cloche Aphone, the silence here is hardly justifiable. A work by a less known artist actually using the sound track would have been much more relevant in this case, but it seems no contemporary art exhibition in Montreal can draw any crowd unless a work by Michael Snow is featured. Another doubtful choice is Ann Hamilton's work Bearings. Although the work in itself is quite interesting, curtains spinning around by the use of small motors hung on the ceiling, its inclusion in this exhibition is beyond explanation. The sounds made by the small motors are hardly anything else than an unintended background noise that adds little to no value to the work itself.

It was not in my intention in the beginning of this review to write a devastating critique of this exhibition. However, I will try to understand why this particular exhibition, as I have mentioned in the beginning of this text, fails to do justice to the concept behind. There is more than one cause behind this, but I think the words of Howard S. Becker in his essay A New Art Form: Hypertext Fiction can summarize one of the great problems involved in the creation of a contemporary art exhibition. In this article, he remarks "to exist fully, works of art require audiences as well as authors. Work that resembles what is already available finds an audience easily, for it requires nothing of audiences that they do not know how to do. Work that differs from what is current will have predictable troubles." (Becker) It is probably why, even in an exhibition where it would have been an obvious choice, there not a single work featured that employs a computer interface. Is this not an extraordinary medium when it comes to the subject of "Sound Images"? One hypothesis for this omission is that computer installations are an uncommon art medium that audiences are not accustomed to seeing in a museum. In North America, the speed at which new technologies are assimilated is so fast that experimenting with new technologies seems pointless, for it will be replaced by a better one in only a few months. (Manovich) This might explain why there is a very small output of interactive computer installations, and thus very few project to choose from for the curator of an exhibition.

Finally, the exhibition “Sound Images” is definitely not what we should expect from a contemporary art exhibition. It seems Danto had a point when he mentioned in his book After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History that contemporary art is so incompatible with the structures of today’s museum that a new breed of curator is needed, one that would try to engage an inattentive audience directly with the art on a personal level.

More Revolutionary Flavors for Mao Cola!

2008-01-28T15:07:00.000-05:00

I just finished working on my project for PRIN351. Now Mao Cola has new revolutionary flavors such as "Lenin Lime", "Stalin Grape" and "El Che Peach"!

Memory Project, DART392

2008-01-28T15:00:00.000-05:00

Here is the documentation for my first project in DART392. I decided to make a portrait of my niece in the manner of Victorian stamps. It is also influenced my the concept of "Uomini Famosi", the portraits of famous men during the Renaissance.

Talking about Russian Constructivism...

2008-01-26T02:48:00.001-05:00

I've been working on a project involving Russian constructivism for my print class (PRIN351), so here is one of the posters I've produced so far for this class using works by Rodchenko and Lissitzky. Behold Mao Cola, the Revolution in Cola!

Offensive? Yes. But who should be more offended by this really? Is it the Chinese, living in a hypocritical regime of so-called "communism", or Westerners that will use any possible icon as long as it sells. You be the judge.

Love Letters

2008-01-21T13:57:00.000-05:00

Here's what I have so far for the Love Letters project. I also want to work on another concept, this time using the "big bang" as a metaphor:

Chasing the Perfect

2008-01-20T16:10:00.000-05:00

As I picked up Natalia Ilyin's book "Chasing the Perfect", I couldn't help but think it was going to be one of these post-feminist insecure writer telling me how I should think and design. Maybe it was the cover, maybe it was the title, or the subtitle. I was wrong. Although, thinking about it now, maybe not entirely.

Let me start by saying I hate that book. I hate it because it makes me doubt. It leaves me pondering on a profession I've devoted time and effort to (although that might just be my mid-degree crisis). I hate it because it's telling me the truth when I just want to put on earmuffs and scream "LALALALALALALA". I hate it because it scares the shit out of me.

Anyway, back to the book, the first couple of pages are a bit ordinary. After a bit of explanation about how graphic designers are born, not made, and how the inability to draw is a prerequisite "skill" to become a graphic designer today, the author brings us to another direction. She brings us with her, through her insightful journey as a human being making discoveries about the true nature of graphic design. She points for us the corrupted dreams of modernist designers that wanted to create "universal" design, but which resulted in the individualization of society. Thought-provoking is an euphemism for describing this book

After reading Sagmeister's "Made You Look", and Kalman's "Perverse Optimist", I thought I'd never again be shocked by any book about design. But believe me, this book shakes you up in a subtle, but profound way.

Typography in Public Space

2008-01-15T13:44:00.000-05:00

Here are some examples of type found in public spaces:

Another Video With type (by me this time)

2008-01-12T15:10:00.001-05:00

After uploading a video that was using type to illustrate a song yesterday, I remembered I pretty much did the same thing back in my years in CEGEP de Maisonneuve, so here's the video. The song is "Scapegoat" by Atmosphere:

Cool Video using Typography

2008-01-11T20:30:00.000-05:00

Some of my favorite Design quotes

2008-01-11T19:51:00.000-05:00

Here is a collection of quotes regarding Design that I've collected over the years through some books I've read:

Oliviero Toscani

Clichés are our cultural history

If you are sure. you know you're doing something old

Tibor Kalman

Every rule about what is appropriate narrows what's possible

The cultural lights of this century are all maniacs

I'm not against beauty. It just sounds boring to me.

Our vernacular is Kentucky Fried Chicken. Our common experience becomes the common experience of network TV. Our idea of cultural diversity is cable.

Graphic design isn't a profession, it's a medium

Consumption is a treatable disease

Consumer culture is an oxymoron

Wealth is poverty

Religion works better for corporation than for people

Rules are good. Break them.

Good designer (and writers and artists) make trouble.

Graphic design is a means, not an end. A language, not content.

Paul Rand

Between designer and artist is no difference. They both work with form and content.

The fundamental skill of a designer is talent. Talent is a rare commodity. It's all about intuition. And you can't teach intuition.

David Carson

If everyone loves your work you're playing it much too safe.

Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe

It is better to be good than to be original

Ivan Chermayeff

When in doubt, make it red. If you're still in doubt, make it BIG.

El Lissitzsky

Typographic arrangement should achieve for the reader what voice tone conveys for the listener

Jean Cocteau

The greatest literary masterpiece is no more than an alphabet in disorder

Marc Steuer

I submit to you, creativity's not talking; it's all about the ability to listen

Raymond Loewy

The most difficult things to design are the simplest.

Unknown

Art is not a mirror. Art is a hammer