Tyler School of Art | Web Design
+Tyler School of Art 2013 Design MFA Thesis Exhibition | Good Measure
When you read books about how to become a great freelance designer, they tell you to stock your personal web site with work you want to do, not necessarily a smorgasbord of stuff to show you have variety. Took me a while to not say “I like everything!” but I finally narrowed what I’d like my specialties to be to “cover art” (inclusive of illustration, typography, text layout) and “identity” (logos, text layout, web design but not coding, branding).
So I’ve decided to do a series, of sorts, slightly indicative of Jenny Volvovski’s “From Cover-to-Cover” series or my former teacher Maria’s amazing “Wordless News” daily illustration. So whenever I read a book, or watch a movie, listen to an entire CD or watch an entire season of a series on television, I am going to redesign the cover for whichever title it is. I don’t have enough cover art in my portfolio and I definitely need practice. To stop myself from spending too much time on this, I’m limiting myself to 2 hours/design, which might soon go to 1, so these won’t be technically brilliant - I’m going more for concept. I might add more parameters later, like Jenny did with green/ white/ black/ futura/ typewriter/ handlettering, etc, but for now, here goes. Each will have a quote from me pertaining to what I thought of the piece, as an endorsement or criticism of sorts.
My first venture is “Restoration”, a movie from the 90’s that no one has ever heard of. My friends and I watched it on netflix the other day and it was so strange, because so many stars were in it and it was utterly ridiculous. Anyway, I attached what the actual cover design was for comparison. Sorry for the novel, the rest of the series won’t have so much text!
+
Screenshot of my final* nerdy lettering project for my Skillshare class with Neil Tasker.
*nothing is ever final EVER
+
Screen shot of what I’m working on for my illustration class. Next I shall be adding bright color in the form of rain, thunder-color-clouds, and texture! Heel click!
Suggestions?
+A sentiment I only recently adopted...
And I have been annihilating sketchbooks ever since.
(A link from my illustration course.)
+Now it’s personal
Alright, it’s time I put on my big-designer pants and start having a blog dedicated solely to my work and goings on. Alas, my enormously tiny amount of followers, this blog is getting personal.
On a related note, Skillshare is in danger of getting all of my money. I’m currently in the lettering course and the illustration course and I just signed up for this one, too - all with extremely talented professionals! Slowly becoming that poor designer you hear so often about on the internet. But at least I can letter a silly Harry Potter phrase!
Updates to come - I’ll be loading more stuff on my portfolio site as I take on more freelance clients (or take more classes, more like). And check out ByFarr to get an idea of how I spend my days.
And, because I’m addicted to inspiration and can never give that up, I sold out (I know, I know) and got a pinterest account. No judging!
+
+It’s been awhile since the design community has voiced its collective frustration over a major redesign, and because this post is about reactionary design, it feels like a good time to post it; while the water is calm. A few times a year, a major entity introduces a new logo or system that attracts the pent up fervor of the design community. The inevitable response is for designers to feverishly produce their own alternative; the most prominent examples being 2010’s Gap redesign, iTunes logo and the Jay-Z designed Brooklyn Nets’ logo in 2012. This practice is a poor representation of the design process, disrespectful to other designers, and poisonous to the general public’s perception of our profession.
Just a day after its unveiling, The Fox is Black wrote an incredibly subjective critique of the Brooklyn Nets’ new logo, and asked Jon Contino to design an alternative. While Jon’s reasoning behind his decisions make for a good read, the fact that he was working in a vacuum completely negates any comparisons between his work and the official logo.
Acting as though a logo made in a vacuum within 24 hours is at all comparable to something that took months, and involved numerous people with their own opinions, is being purposefully ignorant and disrespectful to the design process. How can designers speak out against things like crowdsourcing sites when they don’t even respect the very process they’re defending? Instead of capitalizing on the initial fervor for the sake of page views, I would have preferred to see a platform like The Fox is Black take a month or two, simulate its own creative process, and see what emerged. If you insist on proposing an alternative, (and I would insist that you didn’t) this would have been a far more accurate (but still inaccurate), and responsible (but still irresponsible), way of showing that better work could have been produced under similar circumstances.Graphic design involves a lot more than the final product; by focusing so intently on one piece of the puzzle we are committing a grave disservice to each other and to how our profession is viewed at-large. Were designers to simply offer their opinions on newly released identities or logos, that’d be one thing. Instead, by offering an opinion and an alternate solution that is presented as being better, we’re disrespecting the designer(s) that made the work while completely ignoring that the piece being critiqued went through the same process that we deal with every day. A little empathy towards work produced and, in turn, the designers that produce said work, would go a long way toward elevating the community’s discussion next time a redesign descends upon us.
+Richard Photo Lab
Branding and design studio Matchstic was approached to create a new brand identity for Richard Photo Lab, a high quality photography lab in Hollywood, California.
More of the rebrand design on WE AND THE COLOR
WATC//Facebook//Twitter//Google+//Pinterest
