Last year, around this time, with freelance work abating for a bit, I gave myself a personal project to keep me busy. It was a good time to take a break, look back on the year, see my progress as a designer and evaluate some of the inspiration that it took to get me there. 2008 for me was all about explosive color, dynamic compositions, and heavily layered intricate grunginess. And it was reflected in the artists that I followed regularly and drew upon for passive inspiration. For me, working on personal projects is a symbiotic combination of something that simultaneously forces me to push my boundaries while at the same time driving me crazy. It may be that sometimes my ideas are not so much final products, but something more nebulous like “what would happen if I took this element and performed this task in this particular iterative way?” (That may need some elaboration – future post-worthy…)
So I decided that my project for the end of 2008 was to produce a piece (or, as it turned out, a series) that both addressed where I had come over the course of the year via a personal take on some of those artists’ work as well as a modest attempt to give something back to community out there. The project took the shape of a 2009 quarterly calendar, where each of the four pieces had a few simple constraints and were each inspired by a designer who had struck me over the previous year.
For the first piece, which would represent the months of January, February and March, I imposed a guideline of using only circles and cool colors and created a piece that was inspired by some of the work by Fabio Sasso of the ubiquitous design blog/tutorial site Abduzeedo. His site provided me not only with a constant source of (albeit sometimes a bit trendy) inspirational design, but perhaps more importantly, many of the techniques used to get there.
The second piece was a big bite to swallow and took many times longer to complete than any of the other four, and was inspired by the work of Guilherme Marconi. Again, I constrained myself this time to squares and cubes and a spring-like color palette for the months of April, May and June.
The third piece was inspired by the mighty (he always says that) James White, a.k.a. Signalnoise, using hot summer colors and limiting my forms to James’ iconic hatched lines.
Finally, the last piece, inspired by some of the work of Pablo Alfieri, involved the use of triangles or lines that would convey triangles in a dark purplish crazy monolithic future space scene… or something like that.
I printed the series on 11″x17″ Epson Enhanced Matte paper and gave them away to family and friends for the holidays last year.
So here we are again, less than six weeks until the end of the first decade of the second millenia (whoa…) and I’ve decided that due to the personal satisfaction and great feedback I’ve gotten on last years’ calendar, that I should probably try to make this a regular project. So this weekend, I started to flesh out “Calendar MMX” or whatever the hell it’s called, with an emphasis this time on typography. Looking back on this year, I’ve become far more infatuated with type and lettering than most other aspects of graphic design – whether its the type-as-illustration work of Si Scott, Jessica Hische or Seb Lester or the type-as-sculptural element work of 19th century and modern printmakers, type has really made its mark on me this year.
So stay tuned for MMX (check out some sneak peeks on my flickr stream) and hopefully I can finish it by the end of the year!
If anyone is interested in a copy of the 2009 version, contact me. I am hoping to have the 2010 version up for sale as well.
Curation Culture & Moving the Zeitgeist à la Frank Chimero, et al.
Ok, so if you don’t know who Frank Chimero is yet, you obviously are new at this internet thing. But Frank has updated his site a bit with some new work and a new blog for his really insightful writings, one of which really caught my eye the other day.
Chimero writes about Curation Culture (which I think he may have coined as a term) as a rebuttal to John-Kyle Mohr’s critique of the current state of content on the internet. Mohr writes that since the turn of the 20th century, there has been an inescapable and ever-forward-pushing move towards more automation, more replication, and less original work that is certainly evident in the plethora of web-publishing platforms that are pervasive today (ie. Twitter, tumblr, etc.). Chimero counters that although Mohr’s point is true (and likely due to the fact that work is hard), it’s not always for the worse. Certainly, in many cases, there isn’t much to be gained by a repost of someone else’s thoughtful work, with the exception of the superficial exposure it gets you – which by the way, as Chimero notes, is a helluva lot easier than actually making something yourself. It is through thoughtful curation of those inspirational nuggets we find as we troll the tubes that actually adds something to the zeitgeist of the design-o-sphere.
I think there is something to be said about a ‘pure admiration’ post, not only from the perspective of the author, but also for the audience. Obviously, by taking the time to admire someone’s work and finding out a bit about them and doing a little bit of a write-up about their work and what you like about it, you are inherently consuming and absorbing more of the that person’s work than you would be by just perusing their website or nodding and stroking your wizardly beard as you flash by a cool poster on ffffound on your way to the inevitable booby shots. And from the perspective of the audience, you are adding context maybe not to the work itself (although ideally, you would), but to your own personality as an author on the web. Yes, if you post a picture and say “Here lies the work of Mr. XYZenstein. It is totally wicked,” you really aren’t providing anything useful. But by making some comments on the work and allowing yourself to speak the language of constructive critique, you are providing your readers with personality and insight into what makes you tick and what your eye sees. Then when they come back later and see the next poster you created, they have a context, given what you’ve written about previously with regard to who inspires you/your work.
That said, I can’t deny the affect the internet and these thoughtful ‘admiration posts’ have had on me over my nascent design career. After all, I did a tribute design to some of those that have inspired me and plan on doing another one this year. Not a replication, but an interpretation through my own lens.
The big However: I have no patience for blogs that are endlessly boring catalogs of other peoples work without any context. These easy-to-spot blogs feature posts like “25 Dark website designs – Spooky!” and “1001 Jumping Hipsters with flashy lights!” or “200 business cards made out of water-jet cut 1/4″ Steel! ROCK!” and “Logos that start with the letter J” (sorry I could go on forever). These posts provide nothing to the zeitgeist except to perpetuate trends which most likely need to die hard. Instead of spending an hour finding all those dark website designs, how about pick one and tell me why its successful, or unsuccessful, or how the content drives the form. Or pick two and explain how these two very different websites can both successfully employ a similar design theme, etc. etc. etc.
Frank makes the point that
To which I would add that curation is hard work too! And maybe thats why there’s isn’t much of it around either.