These past two days I've been looking at my sketches, constructions and Illustrator files and instead of asking the question, "What isn't working," I began asking, "What is working?"
Sometimes, I find, reframing the question illuminates an answer.
Two things stood out as working, where consistently when I showed them there seemed to be a positive response. One was letterform based, something I actually created some weeks ago, but dropped in favor of further visual investigation. The other is a more recent, shape-based discovery. It's not to say either is close to resolved, but their form had something going for it.
The letterform in the upper-left, with the red and black cross-hatching garnered probably the most positive response. It was something I created somewhat arbitrarily after I felt the R itself could not stand alone. I took some of Dwayne's advice about using the letter I. I gathered from comments, what works most is the sense of overlap, or common space. It's visually apparent.
On the downside, a wood-block typeface, as pointed out by Erika some time ago, seems like something from antiquity. Further, the shape didn't really communicate anything. Yes, there's a sense of overlap, but the shape itself is quite arbitrary. Also, when you see a capital R and a lowercase or uppercase I, some people were prone to see it as the state acronym for Rhode Island.
On the shape end, this is something I created last Thursday. Further iterations are in the previous two posts. Jesse and I talked at length about it a few times this weekend and again today. The idea of a common shape, made malleable creating an overlap, and in the line version an interlaced connection, seemed to be working well. We talked a lot about density, e.g., how much was too much in terms of overlap, what made a happy medium between connection/overlap and visual density, how typography could play a roll.
He and I then looked at a bit objectively and began to think, how could this be used? If you pick a separate color for each square, how does it look on a color poster? You'd have to consider how the background color of the poster blended with those colors. Otherwise, you're stuck working with only a black and white reverse of the image, and that seems quite limiting.
It's not uncommon for logos to have approved variations, the primary, one grayscale, one for light colors, one for dark colors, some are edited for size. When we went to UMMA in my Designing Exhibitions course last week, I saw that their Pentagram designed logo was made considering a multitude of backgrounds it would be used on. The Nynex and Westinghouse design manuals I looked over this week had similar features. However, having to reconfigure the color scheme of the logo for every single poster or t-shirt would be mind-boggling.
Conventional obstacles aside, what made this work is actually quite similar to the letterform. An overlap, a common area, although again the shape is ambiguous.
Today after our cross-section critique and the practice workshop, I went to the gym, came back to the co-op, packed up my dirty laundry, computer, and banjo, then drove back home under the impression that tonight and Wednesday I would not work on IP. I'd sit around, eat cereal, and pet my cat.
After getting settled and sitting around for some time, my mind began to wander back to IP. I wrote on my list of things to do over break to post to my blog, preferably before I was in an absolute food coma.
I opened Illustrator to export an expansion of the shape I'd been working on.
After doing that, I sort of figured, "Well, Hell, I'm here anyways I might as well try a few things." I started working backward where I had last found something successful typographically.
I was just changing the typeface, seeing what new relationships would occur, but then I noticed something.
The dot on the end of the R and the dot at the top of the I. I'd never really looked at lowercase letterforms a lot before, yet looking at that I see a common shape and suddenly I thought of ligatures.
Ligatures are something everyone has used before, most text editing programs do it for you—even MS Word on occasion. They occur when two or more letterforms overlap because they are too close to one another. There are a lot of extravagant ligatures, but the most common ones are fi, fl and ffl, the top of the 'F' runs into the 'L' or the dot in the 'I,' so typographers create a new letter that is the combination of both. It's a unique shape that's created. Historically, there are a lot of ligatures in the Latin alphabet, like Æ, Œ, even the ampersand (&) is an evolved ligature of 'E' and 'T.'
I started to see a way, with less visual complexity, to create an interesting shape where, letterform could directly relate to the organization, a connection could arise, and there could be common space between two (or more) things at the same time.
The thing I find most compelling about this is the form it creates isn't entirely abstract—not to say abstract is wholly bad, but getting back to some comments from critique that the shapes created previously left something to be desired—the shape has utility, one piece informs the other. It also resolves a great deal of those overlap issues Jesse and I discussed previously. Maybe I was thinking in the wrong vein, overlap doesn't mean I literally have to show color or value multiplying over one another.
Then, as I'm beginning to think about color, about how this could look in a system, and began to see even more potential.
You could argue, rightly, the form could still use refinement, that the square or the ball around it is arbitrary (it really is at the moment), do I need accompanying text with it, so on and so forth, but I really want comments on this when I get back. I feel like I actually have something to bring in, not just a bunch of random shapes and the question, "Okay, so which one of these is working?"
I think I may have stumbled upon a medium between the success of letterform and shape itself.
Okay, enough yapping about that. I could be entirely off base when I show it to other people, but I felt rather excited about this evening's discovery.
A few other things I should point to. I was in the Duderstadt before my evening class Monday night and I stumbled upon a wonderful, wonderful book by Alina Wheeler called Designing Brand Identity
Well, I didn't exactly stumble upon it per se, but close. There's a graphic designer/professor at Marietta College named Todd Roeth who I admire, and I was looking through his course list, which he posts in their entirety, and I looked at his class about branding identity. This was the textbook.
I can tell you, only so much can be learned from looking at completed design standards publication. You get an idea of what the end result is, but not necessarily the in between or beginning. This book covers a ton of that. How cognitively we see logos (Shape, color, then text), working in teams, working alone, the creation of identities as a 'kit of interchangeable parts,' tapping into an organization to derive imagery and logos. I've just barely dipped my toe into it and found it to be quite enlightening.
I know I should be making and not reading, but for this there is definitely an exception.
What Next
CRITIQUE. I feel like I've created this worthwhile idea, now I need to get reaction on it. Ideally, I want to have a form finalized by the end of the week we come back, that way for IP review, I can begin to dissect color choices and speak with confidence about the overall look of the visual system I intend to create.
In the same vein as review, I need to outline what exactly creates my visual system. That's not to say I have to be settled, but I need to talk about color, imagery, size, and typographic choice as it relates to what I have created and discovered so far. This is both for the benefit of my audience, but also to give me a sort of 'roadmap' for second semester to follow.
Later this week or early next week I'll also post the consolidation of what I learned from campus bulletin boards.
How I Spent My Time
I spent a lot of time deriving one specific shape by means of cutting, pasting, taping, tracing, and so forth. I also made some connections with Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo, a new design faculty member here, so I'm going to try and have a meeting with him as I've heard he's done quite a bit of non-profit work before. I also got a meeting setup with Dwayne for this coming Monday. I was actually hoping I'd catch him this past Monday, but I think it's actually better I'm seeing him after this break now.
*Edit*
Here are a few things after the fact I forgot to post last night, they didn't really fit in with my content directly so I didn't have them at the forefront of my mind. The first is an amazing in-house redesign of the New York Public Library. Cost was a huge consideration, as there's been backlash against public organizations because of the exorbitant cost often encountered with identity projects.
The other is the identity of Hofstede Design firm— whose portfolio is equally inspiring.
