Vocabulary Words

My first assignment in Graphic Design: type + meaning + message:

Each student was assigned two words and their definitions as provided by Graphic Design: the New Basics by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips, edited by Clare Jacobson. The assignment was handed out via a powerpoint file that had each word and definition provided, and students turned in their copy of the file with their slides and definitions filled illustrated. Working in powerpoint was fine for general layout and getting our bearings, but finite placement was problematic. With both these slides, I couldn’t get some letter’s pixels to line up perfectly  .

Hierarchy (and Emphasis)

It’s more like a puzzle than an immediately understandable explanation. The color coding helps identify which words go where. The “H” cropped off at the top is supposed to work with the “H” in the lower  right hand corner to give a cyclical feel to it, as though the hierarchy of color, meaning, and position would just continue again outside the frame. Was that successful? I wouldn’t blame you if you thought not. I was studying Jean–Pierre Melville’s film, Army of Shadows when I was working on this, and thought of the grey, red, and white ambulance in one scene, as well as the generally depressed blue and grey colors used in the film.

It turned out that the definition for hierarchy in the powerpoint mistakenly included the definition of another vocab word (can you guess what one?). I think the design works, but with a few caveats: the leading between lines is too large after the sentence ending with “anomaly,” which was an honest mistake. The change in font size between paragraphs… I can’t recall why I did that, or if it was accidental.

Proportion

In “Proportion” I liked the idea of using space, proportion, and the colon to give the reader the chance to see as many of the words inside “proportion” as possible (pr0–, port, ion, portion). I also wanted to have the o of “port” (or 2nd “o” of “portion,” if you will) become the tittle of  the “i” in “ion,” but again, Powerpoint is not made for such finessing. Perhaps a bigger problem are the white–space rivers running through the block of text providing the definition. Though I did tinker with it to get it right (and didn’t succeed), I was probably overly attached to the arrangement made by the placing of that block of text in the lower right. The colon looks a little goofy too, perhaps.

Film Society Poster #2

The more “accessible” one. In retrospect, I think  the information near the top is kind of cluttered, and should have done away with some of it.

Film Society Poster #1

This wasn’t an assignment from my graphic design class taught by John Schott, but it was certainly the first thing thing I spent a lot of time on tweaking, which helped me get used to a lot of the photoshop tools.

This poster was supposed to be a bit more “artsy” to gain attention while the other one was designed to be more readable so that people would actually attend the screenings. A third poster had the movie information at a diagonal running between the grey shape on top here, and the grey shape on the bottom of poster #2. The whitespace made something like a cannon blast, but it was pushing an already busy poster’s readability.

The posters were made to advertise a World War One film series hosted on campus. I was just learning photoshop at the time and through some happy accidents and discoveries with the pen tool, I got some of the violent shapes I was after.

In terms of inspiration,  I was thinking of Criterion Collection DVDs (an endless source of inspiration) for layout and a vague memory of an abstract, but charged Santa Fe Opera poster that used white, grey, and red colors. I tried to hint that the o’s were gunshot wounds, but when I talked to the professor he said it would probably be lost on people. In general, I’ve frequently been tempted to create visual puns, codes, and metaphors in pictures. I sometimes wonder if that came from studying Dalí paintings, or if it’s just how I think.