Foundations of Art, Design, + Digital Culture

“The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things.”
(from p.13, in Cities and Desire)

That line nicely summarizes a way of thinking about project 1.3. For this project select one story from Calvino’s Invisible Cities and visually represent (without illustrating) the signs and symbolic meanings expressed in the text. As in the previous work, the final should include 6 studies on a tabloid page and a final design printed 12×12” — full color. Project specifications and examples are on the blog.

You might consider this exercise as a project to produce a painting or book jacket image. Here are a few interpretations:

 

There are few brand logos as iconic as Nike’s “Swoosh.” The designer, Carolyn Davidson, created it while still a student at Portland State University. Originally a journalism student, she switched into design after her success with the “Swoosh.” Initially, Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike, said of the design, “I don’t love it, but it will grow on me.” Hard to believe after the great success of the brand’s logo. At the time, she was paid only $35 for the design, though she was after given a number of shares in the company. This logo led Davidson to a career of designing posters, ads, and flyers for Nike

This is a museum/art installation in Japan, done mostly through digital projections. People travelling through the exhibit/space influence how the projections change. While you move through the rooms, a companion app on your phone tells you a bit about the projections in the room and how they interact with the other projections and with the people in the room.

For example, in the picture below, the waterfall makes the flowers grow, while people’s shadows passing over the flowers will make them wither/fall away. In addition, flowers will grow around people standing in place.

Also, the various projections generated in different rooms interact with each other. In one room, when you stand still, butterflies are generated. These butterflies will scatter into all of the rest of the exhibit. They are only generated from that room, and when people come into contact with them, they disappear.

There’s (probably) a lot of code behind this that keeps track of what should be projected and what no longer should be projected. The coolest part about the exhibit is that because of all the interactions, it’s constantly changing and will never look the same.

Here’s a link to their site, where they have a video of the various exhibits on the home page:

https://borderless.teamlab.art/

The Heads of State is a graphic design collaboration consisting of Jason Kernevich and Dustin Summers — together, they’ve worked on award-winning posters, book covers, branding, and illustrations for clients such as Nike, the New York Times, Starbucks, Penguin, and many musicians. Here is a link to an interview of them.

 

Marian Bantjes is a Canadian based artist that works in design, typography and illustration. She is especially know for her extremely detailed and precise vector art and her work has been published in more that 100 books/magazines. She regularly travels to speak at art conferences worldwide.

Mr. Doodle is an artist I stumbled upon about 2 years ago. When we first began project 1.1 I was immediately reminded of his work just by the look of it. He mostly works in black and white, but occasionally branches out. I recently stumbled upon a video of his doodled version of “The Great Wave of Kanagawa” by Katsushika Hokusai, which I thought was really appealing to watch.

You can see it here.

This past August, Mr. Doodle collaborated with the brand Fendi, who recently has been promoting street art. They even made a bag together that surprisingly still looks like high end fashion, despite being freehand doodling.

He call his style OCD – “obsessive compulsive doodling”!

Peter Saville was tasked by Joy Division for designing the artwork to their cult-classic debut, Unknown Pleasures. Saville was inspired by a collection of images the band gave to him, in which he found the data visualization of a pulsar wave which would become the cover.

 

The design is intentionally antithetical towards major pop records at the time through the absence of any text on the cover, which Saville feels is “patronizing” towards the audience.

Additionally, the image first proved indexical for emerging post-punks and goths. However, as the post-punk revival of the early 2000’s took place, the image would become ubiquitous; something that most people have seen without actually knowing a thing about Joy Division.

The omnipresence of Saville’s pulsar design in sub-popular culture allowed for the image to be reimagined and parodied. Take, for instance, this design by Adam J. Kurtz.

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Marian Bantjes is a Canadian artist who specializes in graphic art. Her style is inspired greatly by baroque ornaments and Islamic calligraphy with the curly, wrapping, and overlapping lines. She also creates a lot of her own typography, often embellished with curving elongated asymmetrical vectors. She works with patterns, and is known for using precise vector art in her designs. I find her work to be incredibly visually engaging — both images I chose have a strong sense of movement and depth. The multi-colored one uses very simple repeating and rotated strokes coupled with varying intensities of blues, yellows, and reds to create a piece that looks as though it’s flowing off the page. The black and white image reminds me a lot of the work some of the students in this course did with Project 1.1. Although only black and white are used, the image feels three dimensional with these shapes (that almost look like organs/intestines to me) twisting about each other.

Lee Bontecou is a prominent sculpture artist, but a lot of her drawings actually remind me of several of the Project 1.1 designs that were shown in class. Most of Bontecou’s drawings are used as a place to ideate her sculptures. Consequently, she often goes back and forth between her drawings and the development of her sculptures, developing abstract and often otherworldly drawings. This continuous toggling between drawing and sculpting parallels the sort of exploration that we did in Project 1.1 (and something we will continue to do in Project 1.2). Bontecou’s method is one that is largely based off of discovery; she recognizes this process of thinking out her pieces through drawings as an art form within itself.

On top of the process, Bontecou’s drawings incorporate a wide range of materials. She draws with materials such as soot, graphite, and knives on surfaces ranging from the likes of muslin to plastic. This variety of materials provides distinctly unique characters to each of Bontecou’s drawings.

For more information on Bontecou and her drawings, click here.