Monday, May 3, 2010

our artifact photo shoot













































































fusion is a five day long typographic conference meant to bring together professional designers and student designers to create innovative motion pieces through experimental typography. Our conference theme is the idea of objects in motion fusing together as well as people coming together.

TYPECON concept map in progress for friday

























Tyler's words about this: It is working as more of a positioning document. A concept map is suppose to show the connections between these categories.

THESE ARE EXPERIMENTS PREVIOUS TO THE FINAL MOTION

































This project has been really great for my group work experience. Collaboration seems like a muscle that should be exercised regularly. Although our group had trouble deciding on a concept at first, we pulled through and created a lot of stuff. I for one truly thought the three person group experience was a positive one because we had the option and expectation to go into new mediums. This produced a wave of new experiments which ultimately led to the creation of a unique invitational artifact. This was of course the moment I realized how my concept map was suppose to work.








While working in this group, I did feel a bit far away from the print side of things so I went ahead and got some new duties from Mo and Johnna. They were these awards that would be handed out after the event takes place. I do think that after the feedback on friday it would be a good idea to make this event a collaboration rather than a competition.

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.

Typecon advertisement: Semi-final phase of developement from Cameron Perry on Vimeo.

Typecon advertisement: Sketch phase from Cameron Perry on Vimeo.