Holiday

My review went about as I expected it would, I was not confident I'd yet stumbled upon the solution I was looking for, and my faculty panel seemed to voice similar sentiments. My most recent explorations are just too tight and rigid to be voicing a progressive spirit. I think I was hoping to create something that felt more 'refined' to differentiate it from other students groups, but ended off too far in one direction.


So what exactly is progressive?

To me, it's a buzzword. It encompasses too many things to be meaningful. I think with my keywords of connectivity and overlap, I was trying to unpack the sense of what progressive means for this group. Progressive has taken on new meanings, when you think of Obama. Hope… Change… they are now inextricably linked to this sense of progress. Some free association that comes to mind:

Open
Forward
Developed
Modern
Reform
Liberal
New
Change
Innovative
Forward-thinking
Enlightened

Franc's comments were rather interesting, he said it seems like I'd run through so many options, that the challenge may not have a good solution, and usually when he's confronted with this kind of situation, he uses a text-only solution. He said that the word 'Roosevelt' itself has certain connotations, it conjures an images and ideals on its own.

I think he's right, but also I feel like it would be a shame to end up on something text based—after all this. More importantly, those connotations are deteriorating. If you're thirty and older or a bit of a history dork (such as myself), Franklin and Eleanor's contributions to the United States are quite apparent, and one might say what we see now with Obama is that history repeating, or being reinvented at least. Yet, the generational gap widens, and those connotations become less obvious.

I've been trying to take these past few days away from my project, to digest the comments I was given and give myself some room before I start to work again. I imagine that over the course of break I'll have one of the more active blogs, but the posting will be a little more brief with more images.

I'm in process of creating a sort of curriculum for break, as well as a timeline.

Looking Backward and Forward

I've probably spent my time the same way as many other people have this last week, trying to put together the final few pieces of their presentation, writing their abstract, and frantically trying to finish work for other classes.

I admittedly feel a bit out of gas.

Looking over my presentation materials I realize that this first semester was a lot of research, sifting through iterations, bad ideas, and aggravation to synthesize one tiny little logo (that I've still not quite fully resolved yet). Mentally, this has been the most challenging semester I've ever had.

Often, you get a brief with an objective. There's room within it for creativity, but a lot of the direction is spelled out. It's very different and exponentially more difficult to not only figure out what you want to do, but then figure out exactly what your project mean, and generate content.

I suppose that was the burden of picking a student group to dissect. I often felt like I was trying to push a brick wall over to discover new things, to really understand what The Roosevelt Institute was at its core—in conjunction with a class of people dedicated to pushing back on your ideas. Unpacking what the group means and then visualizing it is the fun part, but getting from Point A to Point B has been humbling. Not all my ideas have been good, some good ideas have been short-sighted.

Was it all pain?

No, there were moments when I was genuinely so pleased to discover something new. I remember when I stumbled upon the notion of overlap and connection that has come to define the visual aspect of my project. It was late, but I excitedly ran over to Anna's studio and said, "I think I have something! I think I have something worthwhile!" Only to realize, I was basically holding a piece of paper with a Venn Diagram on it and expecting it to make sense.

And although the push-back from people (Hannah, Stephanie, the cohort) has sometimes produced a more sluggish pace than I maybe prefer, what I'm getting from it is really more than I could have hoped. An unexpected consequence of this project is how much I'm coming to understand my creative process, the different ways I approach problems, how I could stand to better approach them, and how I work through ideas.

When I was watching Chelsea's mock presentation today, I began to see how short a year really was for an artist. On the timeline of a creative life, it's a blip. She spoke about how she considers her work now an extension of things she came to understand two, three years ago.

I started thinking about how, really, this project began for me two years ago. I transfered here from Michigan State, I didn't know anyone, I'd just broken up with my then long-time girlfriend and just had a real feeling of loneliness for the first time in my life.

I started writing for The Roosevelt Institute because it connected me with people who cared about similar issues, who saw the need for a middle road in politics, where decisions were made from careful reasoning—not knee-jerk reaction and party platform. When time could no longer permit, I tried to lend a hand with flyers and posters for events.

My father told me when I was a kid, "The best plans come with patience," and I consider myself to be rather methodical and analytical. Yet, this coming semester I need to ensure that doesn't obscure creative freedom, that I'm not too careful to create for fear of being hammered by someone for a poster not working.

I cannot, no matter how hard I try, extract criticism of my work from my personal being. That's not to say I consider a person's comments an affront, but rather, I devote long swaths of time and sleepless nights to what I do produce and my natural reaction is always one of anguish when it's not perceived how I hope.

Over break, I think it would greatly behoove me to create a timeline and some constraints to push myself along.

I know I need to decide on color and typography, I also would really like to create a set of posters that express The Roosevelt Institute and potentially could be used by them. In doing so, I'd need to make some formal decisions about how I create white space, if I'm going to use photography, if I use imagery. If so, what kind? Do I want it to be purely typographic?

It makes sense then that I start those things at the beginning of the semester if they are my priority, I can worry about example ephemera (buttons, t-shirts, business cards) at the end if I have time.

That all said, I'm looking forward to a break, however brief, and hope that over the semester I've improved on showing my work, talking about it, seeking advice out, and showing precedent that entices me.

Read & Watch

This doesn't exactly pertain to my project, but I saw these three things today and felt obliged to post them:

Erik Spiekermann on the best piece of design

Michael Johnson on identity programs

Michael Johnson again on flexibility and the death of static identity

Presenting

What I Discovered
So over Thanksgiving it felt like I had a small breakthrough—huzzah for minor miracles—and was able to connect with a few designers for critique and advice directly after I returned (Dwayne, Franc, Ben, Jesse) and before I volunteered to be critiqued on Tuesday.

I simply asked people for what they saw when they looked at this image (ignoring that I've drawn on it since then).


The primary read I'm commonly getting is a sense of a shared point, a common space, or a connection. In almost all iterations, I'm happy that people are reading the letters 'R' and 'I', and I've not heard mention of Rhode Island.

The secondary read is the tricky part. To a degree, I worked in the idea of an eye—trying to think about notions of visibility, the action of reading paper. To me, it's not important that is the first thing people see. In my opinion, the read works without hammering home this idea of an eye. So, a careful balance is needed. Jesse pointed out that if I try to force both the eye and a common form, they compete and the viewer gets lost.

I also found that artists and designers, being visual people, are more likely to read other things—such as a house, a shelter, a lamp post. I think if I can pair down the imagery in a way that it eliminates or reduces those miscues, I'll finally have arrived at something.

Below are a few directions I started taking to:

1. Look at other typefaces
2. Consider the notion of gesutre
3. See what ways I can alter the form to improve the read

In this first part, I was more or less trying to see how I could pull the individual pieces apart without them feeling comical or strange. One aspect I found that I didn't like was I really began to lose the serifs. The thick-to-thin contrast was really important in drawing out the common dot of the 'I' and 'R.'


Feeling at a bit of a loss, I moved around to about two dozen other typefaces, to see what they had to offer. Through this, I essentially found that my intuition about a serif typeface was correct. A lot of the sans-serif look quite clunky and unrefined—something that is not just a product of the speed at which I created them. I also tried dropping the baseline of the I down.



So Thursday, when we had small group critique, I tried to weave and work with some of the comments I'd received. I tried to pluck out four or five iterations I found most compelling and in my head I identified what was working and what was problematic in each. Again though, I just asked for impressions.


Some people liked the rigidity of the original form I produced, but I felt an italic form really worked with the notion of gesture Stephanie has been suggesting I more carefully consider. It's a forwardness, progression, a movement of the letterform I think helps the overall concept. I'm not certain this is something I could expect an audience to get at every moment, but to some extent I feel if it's ingrained into the design process it is sub-consciously visible.

Push further, I think the problem with dropping the baseline of the 'I' downward in some of the above examples creates more problems than it solves. Although it goes the opposite direction, people wanted to see it as a J. The common baseline of an italic form removes that ambiguity (to some extent), and also eliminates the serif's feet crashing into one another, while looking a great deal more carefully considered.


This is essentially where I'm at right now. I'm going to need to edit the letterform by hand and print it out from sizes as small as a blueberry to as big as a piece of paper and see how the gestalt changes. I'll probably end up drawing the logotype, scanning it, then recreating it in vector format. Bodoni is a great typeface, but Giambattista Bodoni is dead, so he won't mind some alteration.


What Next
So I have two major functions between now and next week. I need to get as close as possible to final solution in this. Luckily, I think a lot of the legwork I did over Thanksgiving has paid off in that regard. My other focus is my presentation—which I'm about to go to my studio and work on.

A big part of my presentation will be outlining my 'curriculum' for next semester. I'd like to avoid the moment where four professors say, "You made a logo, now what?" I need to show how my process in arriving at this logo has created a wider sense of who the group is, what they are about, and how it influences their overall look.

I also need to be honest about my failures. This has taken a lot longer than I thought it would—or should—to arrive at this solution, and the first two months of my project I was working on unproductive, conflicting timelines.

How I Spent My Time
I spent a lot of time printing things out this past week, trying to see how these iterations look from a computer onto paper. Sketching has its utility right now too—especially when thinking about making quick changes to the form—but how far or close things are apart really does optically change with size.

I know we weren't supposed to be thinking about it, but I plotted out a lot of what I needed to say for my presentation on Tuesday. I've a lot of conflicting deadlines/timelines with other classes next week, so I'm trying to be as done as possible for next Tuesday.