from patterns to shapes

When Johnna changed her patterns to suit the needs of my motion piece it really began to help the whole identity take shape. She made the seams in the patterns less visible giving us much more of a spectrum to work with over all. From her patterns I chose to create shapes in photoshop which I would eventually import into aftereffects, placing them and moving them in front of a camera. My offshoot from the identity would eventually serve as both an advertisement sent digitally to the participants, as well as a tangential point of variety in our identity.

Although the motion piece has the parts that I want for the final form (with speakers, date etc), it definitely needs to be reworked. One thing I wanted to keep in mind when making this piece was that it was for design students. The message was kind of eluding to some deconstructionism and postmodern spirit because it was very user oriented. It is on the web, therefore the viewer can pause and extract the information as necessary. It may be a bit much though because it may give hopeful attendants the wrong idea and detour them from further inquiry.

Roland Barthes in "thinking with type" says that "the text itself plays (like a door, like a machine with 'play') and the reader plays twice over, playing the Text as one game, looking for a practice that reproduces it" (102). Lupton goes on in the very next paragraph to say "Graphic designers embraced the idea of the readerly text in the 1980s and early 1990s , using layers of text and interlocking grids to explore Barthes's theory of the death of the author. In place of the classical model of typography as a crystal goblet for content, this alternative view assumes that content itself changes with each act of representation. Typography becomes a mode of interpretation". Later on down the page Lupton said "the dominant subject of our age has become neither the reader or the writer but the user". Using this knowledge I was hoping to intrigue viewers to actively visit the website themselves to learn more about the event. Please help with suggestions on how I could better make this a more engaging piece.

My narrative: "we are students professionals and teachers working and learning together in a typographic experiment workshop"-lacking in intrigue

My database: speakers, date and website url-lacking in structure and useability.

I will be adding AIGA and some other stuff to my database

There are elements in my motion piece that did succeed for me. I think that the way I made the patterns look like many different things (archetecture, mechanical parts and perhaps organic matter) leads to some open interpretation and combined with the rest of the identity provides an educational, experimental collaborative connotation. Perhaps some professionals have a skill set while students have inspirations or maybe are just there to learn.

At its current state, the advertisement is not what I had completely in mind but it will hopefully get there on friday. However I do believe it helped us decide as a group how to go about blurring the lines in our artifacts as Tyler has talked about, and offered a variety platter.