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.