Rougher Drafts

What I Discovered
So my critique on Tuesday actually went really well, I got some very positive responses about the direction I was working in. I'll start by positing a few images of stuff I finished after I last posted. The page layout on these was all a bit sloppy, I was looking more for the way my elements were working.

What grabbed the most attention was this:

There is a way in which all these forms emanate from The Roosevelt Institute that is important, that they also overlap and work with one another. People pointed out though the way in which those thoughts attached was a bit disjointed. Luckily, one of my other iterations was revealing about what might work.


The thoughts come from an identifiable point. I'd argue too the page's structure and composition is just naturally a lot stronger, so that may have skewed the read for people liking it more. What's more, people said the tagline as an entry was very successful. Hannah said that there is this rhythm between the black dot at the end and the tagline and the boldness of The Roosevelt Institute. She suggested seeing if there was a way to make that connection even clearer.

I've also been thinking long and hard about this idea of 'kit of parts.' Old identities were really static. The IBM logo hasn't changed in forty years, it has clear rules about what colors you can put it in, what size it has to appear, where it can appear on a page. FedEx is also a pretty good example of this, so are many companies from the 1960s rooted in a sense of clean modernism.

New brand identities tend to be more flexible pieces, they are components of a puzzle that operate separately, as well as together and appear in different sizes, colors, on different materials. A recent Johnson-Banks identity for The Hue Center in Philadelphia really gets at this (and also I'm finding an eerie similarity of color choice).

Which brings me to the next part, there's ways in which I can focus on specific word bubbles for a specific event or policy center, say Health Care:


You can zoom in, push the other bubbles to the side or corner, make them smaller, so while all those components are there, the focus is very specific.

Also, I've either settled or have come very close to settling on a tagline.

It's descriptive, pointed, clear. As I said above, I've not really decided about how it will interact with the other elements, but people in my small group critique heavily gravitated to something succinct and punctuated.

There's a lot I need to think about next though:

1. What does this look like in grayscale (elephant in the room)

2. What other ways can these word bubbles appear as groups

3. How can you make the tagline the start or endpoint

4. How do I ensure people know this is at the University of Michigan

5. What about a web presence

That last number, I've been thinking a lot about. Sometimes a web presence for student groups is really pointless, but in this case it actually might be very helpful. Each policy center meets at different times each week. It would be nice to have a concrete place to list those times instead of having to e-mail.

Although I think flash is overused, this actually would be a good project to use it. I'm envisioning a website where it would have a white background and just the tagline. You click on it, and all these word bubbles of different centers come out from it, they're sort of floating around freely on the page, overlapping with one another at different times. You can click on one, and it expands and zooms in, pushing the others to the side. It lists the time, place, director and gives an e-mail contact.

Just a thought, it may be a bit too quick to think about a website when I don't have things threshed out entirely, but showing how this identity could transcend just a web experience could be

What's Next
So I'm really excited about my project. I can't say how happy that makes me. I'm finding that a lot of the grueling work and sometimes unenjoyable iterations I explored is leading me to a place that is meaningful and has room for exploration.

That all said, I'm actually going to take this weekend to not work on these things explicitly.

Say what?

I'm all about the balance. I have a lot of passion for what I discovered, but I haven't quite found the direction I want to take it in. Looking at the timeline, I see that our next small group critiques are the class before our next rough draft is due. I don't think it's wise to do both concurrently. So I'm going to bury myself at Espresso Royale and get my second rough draft out of the way before I start to work again—that way it won't be hanging over my head.

How I Spent My Time
This week I looked through my thesis again and marked it up myself. It was like a Vietnam flashback, very evident I wrote it in the four days before break ended. I also spent a boat load of time creating those final iterations and printing work out. I've been going around, seeking out advice on them as well.

Okay, that's enough.

LESS TALK
MORE WORK

Bubblegram

What I Discovered
So at the beginning of this week I tried to take a few ideas that I had pursued last week and refine them further and test out another idea:






What I learned was what I'd been told already both by Chris Pullman and a few others in small critique. The conversation seems more like a binary, and with the quote you can particularly see how it gets confusing. While with the key words it's really nice I can work the name it, not much is said by it. Near the end, with the multitude of thought bubbles and shifting hues seemed to be more expressive of the group.

So after talking with Erica for a bit, I started working on some new iterations, focusing on color, conversation, multitude, and networks:

I find these to be a lot more meaningful, it's more playful, more visually engaging, less rigid. I'm using the same style of tagline in both, both I still haven't settled on that. It's been evolving in response to the criticism I've had.





I also have to admit, it's kind of interest how indirectly influenced I was by the poster I did for the faculty exhibition:


All these thoughts about connectivity and overlap were circling through my head and weighed heavy when I created it. So maybe, I should instead say the faculty poster was influenced a lot by IP.

What Next
I'm not quite done with stuff for Tuesday. Erica had a really good suggestion about how maybe these word bubbles from different sections can play with one another, where the yellow turns to green, and the red to purple, etc. I also want to do another 13" x 19" with different tagline ideas. The descriptive route seems to be working more. But with a few more iterations I'm going to try to have 8–10 things to show on Tuesday to get feedback on.

How I Spent My Time
These past few weeks I've just tried my best to approach the problem from a different, more playful, more open direction. I've been trying to worry less about the level of refinement and just trying to put forth different ideas. I'm finding though, that a level of unrefinement might actually be valuable.

I also spent some time looking through my paper, since turning it in I'd really done nothing with it. I realize we are supposed to shoot for five pages, but the writing tutor was constantly telling me not to be afraid to expand and elaborate—I'd realized large passages I'd cut were actually quite useful. I'm just going to write more for the second draft, if it turns out to be ten pages, so be it. I feel like I need the room to really rigorously discuss my influences and how I found things weren't working. But, that's a couple weeks off, trying not to worry about it quite yet.

Group Groping

What I Discovered
I've been trying a new approach this semester.

Last semester I really enjoyed looking at other people's work and going through a list of blogs I love for inspiration—but I found I was actually becoming quite depressed about my own work. I think there's a point I hit where it became distressing to see other people's professional, finished projects each and every day. You don't have any context, it doesn't give you any idea of the struggle they went through to produce their work, and makes it seem as if it was effortlessly produced.

So I've tried to stay away from the daily blogs and simply focus more on creating new ideas for my own work and it seems to be working better.

I met with Chris Pullman today—a bit nervously I must admit—but actually his comments seemed to echo a lot of what the half-group said on Tuesday, that it seemed I had found something rich for investigation.








So I think the venn-bubblegram is a useful device, but I still want to push a few other ideas around simultaneously.

What Next
I think I've come across a really interesting idea, but I need to ensure I don't limit myself strictly to what I've developed. Be free, allow the elements to play around on the page and see what's successful. Some notes I jotted down between teh two meetings I had were:

1. Seems like opposing ideas
2. More about center area
3. Multiple voices, multiple bubbles?
4. Common hues, similar ideas
5. Taglines very instructive/helpful
6. Elements aren't all quite working together
7. Parts seem moveable/adaptable
8. Different shapes creating something more coherent?
9. Arrangement of bubbles

This is the stuff between now and next week I'd really like to explore.

Also, thinking about my timeline, I may not have made progress toward in selecting a logo, but I am working on the advertisements a lot earlier than anticipated. Through those and the concept of the tagline, I am actually making some decisions about the logo, so I'm fairly pleased with my pacing.

And for the record, I have to say, I really appreciated the time in class to work. I know not everyone used the time wisely, but getting some room to worry less about deadlines, papers, resumés seems to make me less tense and feel more confident about exploring.

How I Spent My Time
This week I didn't do as much work as last—I was more interested in feedback from people about the direction I was taking. I tried to work on another idea I was having (shown above).

Taglines and Ads

Unfortunately, this weekend has exactly been great. I sprained the SI joint in my back at the end of last week and have spent most of the weekend at the doctor's/in PT/in pain.

What I Discovered
I've been going back and reviewing some of the work I did last semester, searching for things that might have been useful, but ultimately I passed over. The first thing I began working on was just a name with a tagline


The first half I was just trying to move around the text and see what happens. I was playing with some different taglines, different sentences pulled out of the mission statement—I was thinking about it as being straight-forward, not cryptic. The second image is something I began to develop with more though, trying to think of the name and tagline as moveable components.

I was on the phone last week, just sort of sketching on a piece of paper, when this idea popped into my head as well.

It features a lot of the ideas of overlap I had been thinking about previously. So I tried taking it and spinning it into a few advertisements:



There's also another set of advertisements I have in my head right now, but haven't really worked them out yet. I'm hopinh by Tuesday I'll also have those.

What Next
I'm beginning to understand that the work I did first semester wasn't a hopeless endeavor, that a lot of good and unique ideas did come from my work—it's just that in working so close to a problem some were either overlooked or not quite fully developed. I've found that talking about my work can be really nice, but this spurt of just working on some ideas has also been really enjoyable, a lot more so than spinning my wheels in aggravation.

So for Tuesday, I'm hoping to have two different thoughts of advertisements to present and then more logo revisions. The tagline seems promising, but I'd like to take a few of the visual options I came up with earlier in the year and refine them more as well.

How I Spent My Time
I spent a lot of time hunched over my computer, looking through old blog posts, sketching in a notebook, and coming up with stuff in Adobe Illustrator. I still need to print a bunch of work off as well.

I'm glad I saw a schedule of what this semester was like, it made me realize we actually all have about two and a half months–not four months to finish.

I have a lot to do, and like I said in our half groups on Thursday, I can't let talking and writing get in the way of working. I feel last semester there were times I was trying to be so careful and so considerate of what I was making, it stopped me from working.

I need to be freer, partly because I think it will help me regain confidence in my work—but also because I can't afford to wait around.

This was the timeline I was thinking of, but it's going to need to be shortened up a bit:

January 6–12
- Redefine keywords,
- Describe tone for logo and advertisements

January 14
- Refine three disparate logos
- Test on various colors

January 19
- Show three logos on example advertisement

January 21
- Feedback on logos and advertisement

January 26
- Select logo (hopefully)
- Refine further
- Create black and white, color and reverse versions

Early February
- Formulate idea for advertisements (type of imagery, color, use of white space, repitition etc.)
- Use earlier research on campus to decide on color and size
- Start half size sketches

Mid/Late February
- Print full size versions of at least three different routes for advertisements
- Get critique on ideas

March
- Finalize advertisements, preferably in a series of three different ads
- Select suggested typeface to be used by the group (preferably that used in the advertisements)
- Begin writing design standards manual

April
- Write succinct creative brief for design standards manual
- Create guidelines for logo usage and advertisement placement
- Print run of the design standards publication and advertisements
- Present to The Roosevelt Institute

So this break hasn't quite been the renaissance I was hoping for my project, not exactly one of the more 'active blogs.'

Several times over break I'd tried coming back to my project to start working again and had found I just didn't have anything to say—not necessarily that there wasn't anything more to uncover—but rather that my mind was still numb from the process.

I think the question I'm still really stuck on is tone.

In many of my iterations, I'm looking at them now and it seems I'm trying to describe visually the group's actions (connection, overlap, people coming together to produce something new), but am leaving the motivation for the group ambiguous (progressive, forward-thinking, open).

It also seems like I've been trying to fight with the name itself, "The Roosevelt Institute." In my opinion, Roosevelt becomes increasingly meaningless over time as the generations in proximity to what he did pass on. In fact, Obama has maybe even replaced that identity for my generation.

I just finished the outline of the thesis of my draft, and these sorts of questions I see weighing heavily on it.

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.