Layers

Hierarchy

Heeber Caligraphy Workshop

Heeber gave a very casual and conversive calligraphy workshop. He was fascinated by a blackletter style that references some of the first fonts used in history.

Calligraphy is an ancient artform. Calligraphy was preformed as early as 800c by the Japanese and Chinese. Calligraphy was practiced in the west at the onset of antiquity with papyrus and ink. Deriving from the Greek words "beauty" and "to write" calligraphy literally means to beautifully write.

Gutenburg modeled the first set of moveable type after the blackletter style found in early calligraphy. Even after the development of the printing press, calligraphy continued to be valued and evolve. Although it is not as widely used today, there continues to be calligraphy heads who will pay 700$ per pen.

"Calligraphy is great, because it looks so cool everyone wonders how you made it". - Heeber

Pattern Play

Gestalt Principal Documentary Review

In the documentary about Gestalt Principals we learned that, simply put, gestalt principals are groups of objects situated in a way that forms a correlation between each other without being directly connected.

To expand upon the documentary, I wanted to find examples of this theory playing out in our every day lives. IBM, Starbucks, NBA and Girl scouts are a few examples of use of gestalt principals in logo design. They are seemingly "whole" images who are made up of smaller parts.

Amor and Keisuke

Amor and Keisuke were armed with an arsenal of knowledge. Foreign (to me) vocabulary like "painpoint" and "mind share" seem to be well worked out concepts that they picked up along the way. One golden nugget that I picked up during their presentation is their process.

1. Research and Discovery. Not restricted to books, magazines, scholarly articles and web pages. Focus groups, interviews and on the ground experience help to gain an understanding of the problem at hand.
2. Ideation. Once the problem is understood, how can it be solved?
3. Production. What are the processes that are needed to produce the chosen solution to the problem?
4. Implementation. At this stage most of the work has been done, you only need to follow through with the plan.

As Keisuke explains, this process could go on forever. The idea can forever continue to be evolved.  The only stop is the deadline.

Letterform Abstraction

Gestalt Principals

Color Documentary Review

Jim Krause drops some serious knowledge about color and advice on using it professionally in the documentary about color theory. He explained how to choose colors for clients that suit their audience, are unique and practical. An aha moment happened when he explained how to fake multiple colors by using one spot color and black and mixing the two together to get more "bang for your buck".

One thing that left me hanging is his apparent favorite quality of color: "value". He repeats it a few times, but never quite explains what it is exactly. When it comes to color, value is another word for light. Therefore when he says that hue and sataration are important but neither would exist without value, he means they woulden't exist without light.

Light is made from all of the colors of the rainbow. When light hits an object, the object either absorbs all of the colors contained in light making black or it reflects certain colors like blue that are then read by our eyes. Objects aren't inherently one color or another, but give off color vibrations based on how the object interacts with the light. In weak light everything seems greyish because there is not enough light for objects to grab onto.

I often find myself perplexed how a computer cannot create a gold, silver or any other shiny colors in the same way that we see it in the physical form. That is because the qualities of gold reflect the light in a way that gives it a glow or sheen. The computer can recreate the color, but not the shine because it cannot interact in the same way with light that gold or reflective surfaces can.

Communicating With Color

Color Studies