Type III: progress work on Russel Wright

The book cover, half title, copyright, contents, title page, three essay spreads, three plate spreads and bibliography, so far (images from Russel Wright: American Designer by William J. Hennessey)

Narrative in Sound and Motion: Sounds and visuals

Here are three ways to present my collection of sounds, image and movies related to growing lettuce. These interface designs are very literal: a section of ground, looking though a kitchen window and looking out the window of a shed. I wonder if I can come up with another interface which speaks more about how gardening relates to the process of growing as a human, the difficulties in life etc, then the sounds could amplify the different stages in life, like the sound of breaking a brick wall down for the plant growing...



Click here to listen to my collection of sounds.

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Postcard 1

Kyle: "The microphone in this image feels like a very powerful object. The repeating background of microphone mesh almost reads like stadium seating with a very powerfully charged speech taking place. Along with the diagonal placement of the blurred background it gives a sense of energy and motion. The microphone seems to have a glowing line around it to even further its importance in the composition."

Tom: "The tight cropping gives emphasis on the microphone. Harsh lighting, the red colors and something shown of the facial expression give the sense of power and charged atmosphere. Using the cut paper technique only added to the sense of energy. I like how the lines and blurred out microphone mesh behind the mic helped you get that feeling of energy and motion. My intentions were to convey a feeling of angry preacher man thinking he is the only voice that matters. I think you got this but described it differently saying 'powerfully charged speech'. That kinda means the same thing to me so I think this worked."

Communication in design

The process of design and how the viewer understands the information that is presented has always intrigued me because as designers, we have a responsibility to win the viewer somehow and not all design has its desired effect. Not all of it really works. Much of it is redundant, and that's sad. I'm always looking at the junk mail that comes through my door. So much of it goes unread. What a waste.

Stephen Heller writes in The Education of a Graphic Designer that design should be about meaning and how meaning can be created. Working in the field of design for 13 years, there are so many out there in the field who just want the job done and don't really care about the process of research and experimentation to find the best possible solution. It takes too much time. This is understandable given the current speed at which life happens but at the same time, it's not understandable. If we could just take the time to think about what we are doing and how we are communicating, maybe our design might take longer to produce but it might have twice the impact.

Richard Buchanan, chair of the department of design at Carnegie Mellon University says that through designed objects, "designers have directly influenced the actions of individuals and communities, changed attitudes and values, and shaped society in surprisingly fundamental ways." What a responsibility we have to communicate.

It's amazing how many perspectives need to be considered in design; grammatical, semiotic, theatrical, anthropological, physiological, philosophical, political and social. This is clearly not just putting images and text on a page and making it look nice.

In J. Christopher Jones Hierarchy of Design Problems below, we can see that it's not simply about thinking about the component or the product, we have to think about how that product is going to affect related systems and even the community around it.

Five postcard ideas

Not sure which will be the final yet...

It's a microphone!

Beginning Project 3: Twenty-five words associated with microphone - speak, stand, hold, mc, rap, shout, declare, attract, electronic, sound, on/off, word, freestyle, sound wave, current, transmit, amplify, record, broadcast, radio, instrument, modulate, acoustic, waveform, record, signal, and hardware.

Swiss Book Design!

An amazing collection of Swiss book designs here.

Process, final artifact, statement

Statement
The original poster design by J. Paul Verrees was commissioned by the National War Garden Commission during the second world war to promote home gardening and canning as a way to provide food for the troops fighting abroad and increase the chances of winning the war.

J. Paul Verrees' work uses a mode of appeal called 'logos'. Aristotle defines this as being a means of communication where the argument presented makes logical sense.

The brief for this project was to redesign Verrees' poster using two other modes of appeal - pathos and ethos where pathos is about drama, drawing on the emotions and ethos is an ethical mode of appeal, the product or object is often endorsed by a reputable person or company.

Process
My previous posts on this project show the following process (you can click on the link 'Vislang' on the right to see the process in more depth with images):

1. Study of the three modes of appeal: ethos, logos and pathos
2. Find a poster to redesign from given resources
3. Research chosen poster design and post artwork and research
4. Sketch fifteen new design ideas using pathos and fifteen using ethos
5. Choose ten of these thirty designs and make larger more detailed sketches
6. Complete four different samples of ways to render the final piece. I chose pen and ink, pencil, cut paper and marker
7. Choose one final design of each mode of appeal and further iterate out in sketch form paying close attention to hierarchy
8. Select the final design layout from each mode of appeal. We selected the design using the image of the jar with the label, 'You Can Preserve Your Future' for ethos and the 'Grow your own economy' design for pathos
9. Take some initial photographs in different settings and begin making some poster mockups, also ink some further renderings of the pathos poster
10. On seeing the photographs for the canning poster we chose to shoot a few jars in the studio and in addition to the pathos poster design we decided to switch the ink rendering to a magazine article layout.
11. In addition to trying the shots in the studio, I also tried the home pantry, the kitchen and an outdoor garden setting
12. Design five different ways to lay out the article and five different ways to design the poster
13. Choose one final mode of appeal and one design layout. We chose a four page layout of the article. This would communicate the same idea as the original poster but this time using ethos as the mode of appeal - the article is written by the Kansas City Community Gardens
14. Fine tune photography and article layout
15. Print color samples on the Konica
16. Present article on black mount board and in a sample magazine, alongside the original poster design

Final Artifact
This is the final artwork (the original poster is shown below):

Narrative in Sound and Motion: project 3 sounds

The following sketches are ideas of how to present all my images, words and sounds into an interactive piece. The action I want people to do is grow a lettuce, the theme is 'all you need is love."



Here is a sample of sounds I'm collecting to go with my growing a lettuce interactive environment:

Crow Calling by tommorsebrown
Night Sounds by tommorsebrown
Poem Two by tommorsebrown

And 'All You Need is Love' by the Beatles.

Type III: three essay spread options

Here are three initial ideas for laying out text and image on the essay spreads:

Type III: book design for Russel Wright!

My next project for Typography III class is to design a book for the American tableware, furniture and landscape designer Russel Wright. Here's a few of his projects from the Russel Wright Design Center on the web:
Silver Flatware, 1933

Easier Living Furniture, 1950

Residential Plastic Dinnerware, 1953

Stepping Stone Bridge

Courtyard Entrance

Final three layouts

Digital layouts

First, some sketches of poster and article layouts.




Here are some iterations of the canning poster design. The tag line on the jar uses a mode of appeal called pathos; it tugs on the viewers emotions hopefully making a connection.









Here are some article layouts using the same photograph. This time the image is used with text, which is about an increase of the amount of people canning across the nation, because of the economy. The article is written by a gardening authority and therefore falls under a communication category/mode called ethos.

Narrative in Sound and Motion: Final Project 2

Growing a Lettuce 3 from Tom Morse-Brown on Vimeo.

Narrative in Sound and Motion: making letters with clay to look like hard earth...

The clay is a dark color which helps make it look more earth like.

Adding earth to the clay for greater effect wasn't so easy. I asked a ceramics student if he'd ever done it and he replied, "na, we don't ever add earth, we're always trying to get it out!"

Putting the letters on the furnace in the basement overnight made them really brittle. Perfect!

It's amazing what you can do with a camera, a tripod and some clay.