TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "design"
Cover for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Peter Mendelsund
he was covered in the detritus of his work
Comics and Information Design
A map I doodled way back in 2007, back when I was thinking about going to design school. (I got in, but moved to Texas with my wife, instead…)
Test Prints by Aesthetic Apparatus
I saw these fellas speak this spring and forgot to post about their test prints — when they screenprint posters, they use the same sheets of paper to test their new screens, they layers of which result in these unpredictable collage images. They then sell these prints as one-of-a-kind art pieces:
All test prints are one-of-a-kind (monoprint) products of the screen printing process and are signed and editioned “1/1.” Because these prints serve a very specific, conventional function before they are crowned “beautiful”, there may likely be bent corners, smears, scuffs, dirt or all of the above on any test print. This is evidence of the print’s previous life and is considered a “character building” part of the process.
I tried to pair prints with similar imagery together so you can see the different results. What’s interesting to me is that it’s obvious that these test prints influence their more intentional designs — I had to check as to whether this Explosions in the Sky poster was a test print or not!
Also, a great example of selling by-products/artifacts of your process.
(Thx Kate for reminding me of their work.)
All memory has to be reimagined. For we have in our memories micro-films that can only be read if they are lighted by the bright light of the imagination. —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics Of Space
Something weird happens when we try to recreate cultural artifacts from memory: the result has less to do with the artifact, and more to do with us.
Here’s type designer Erik Spiekermann on what he does when he finds a typeface that he really likes that would work for his clients, “but it’s already used by somebody else, or it’s too old, or I can’t afford to buy it or it would be a ripoff.”
I look at it for a long time, I draw it, I sketch over it, then I put it away. And the next day I sit down and draw it from memory. And then it’s different. I read a novel and I rewrite it the next day in my own language… [In that way I’m] influenced by it, but it’s not a copy. I think that’s pretty much how everybody works. Everybody is influenced by somebody else. You sit down to write a tune and you have all the other tunes in your life in your head.
When Dirty Projectors’ frontman Dave Longstreth was helping his parents move out of his childhood home, he found the cassette case for Black Flag’s Damaged, but the tape was missing. So, he decided to rerecord the songs from memory — those songs became the music on Rise Above.
“I had to completely inhabit my early adolescence, the time when I used to listen to Damaged,” Longstreth has said. “[I was] trying to access the memory crystals stored from when I loved it back in middle school.”
The beauty of Rise Above is that Longstreth used his memory of the original Black Flag songs as a starting point to create “new” songs. “I wanted to see if I could make this album…not as an album of covers or an homage per se, but as an original creative act.” It was his imagination that made them great.
Ivan Brunetti has a drawing exercise in Cartooning where he has his students doodle cartoon characters quickly, from memory:
When drawing characters quickly, from memory, one can be quite inaccurate, almost as if one is inventing new characters, and these “mistakes” can serve as the basis for new character designs. This lets the students see their own styles more clearly. A page full of these doodles can help the student discern certain qualities that are consistent within their set of drawings. These qualities are a clue as to what makes one’s particular “visual handwriting” different or unique, and these should be embraced by the student.
I love this idea: we can actively use our imperfect memory to lead us to discover our own thing.
Note: I self-plagiarized (HA!) this post from a 2008 blog post that pretty much led to my ideas behind Steal Like An Artist. (Spiekermann quote via via)
