The Art of David Titterington

Last class of the semester!!  My drawing teacher showed us some of his work today.  Personally I think it's all gorgeous, but I can't share all of it.  His website is davidtitterington.com, you can head over there to see what he has up.  Here are a few of my favorite of his paintings:

Coke Bottle Redesign

Now for something completely different!  I just thought I'd share this design I found; it reminded me of our second project as well as the importance of considering going green in design.  The photos and description are directly quoted from the original article which you can view here.

"Industrial designer Andrew Kim has created a new Coke bottle concept that could significantly change the soda maker's footprint. For every 4 bottles currently shipped, the square bottle design could ship 6. This means every shipping container could hold 4,000 more bottles of Coke.

Kim also considered that Americans use 2 million plastic bottles every 5 minutes, so he made the bottle itself green. It is  100% plant based, made entirely from sugar cane byproducts. Which is amusing since Coke hasn't been made from sugar since 1985. Am I the only one who thinks the whole "New Coke" dibacle was really just a way to cover up the switch to High Fructose Corn Syrup?

So I propose a new Pepsi Challenge, which soda giant can make the greenest bottle first?"

Don't know if this design is actually going to be implemented, but I thought it was pretty cool.

Lantern Pics

While none of my designs for our lantern project are directly from any source, a lot of them sort of spring-boarded from pictures of real lanterns I found on the internet.  If anybody is still trying to finish the Bristol board prototypes (like me...) here is some inspiration!

Google is my best friend, seriously.  Once I've taken some photos, I'll show some of my favorite experiments for my lantern.

Project Three_2: Word Reflection

                 

We kept the construction of our letters simple because we felt that “include” is a very humble, down-to-earth and positive word.  We chose the serifa font for the detailing of serifs gave the font a more approachable feeling than the starkness of the futura font.  We also left the letters unpainted so the surface of the cardboard was exposed.

      In choosing the locations for our photos, we focused on both the definition of taking in as a member of a group and containing within a space.  For the former definition, we took our letters to places where a lot of social interaction takes place—the café in the design building and the Underground in Wescoe.  Both of these spaces are a part of student life and are filled with students from all walks of the world, so we thought this was fitting.  We intended to photography the word on Wescoe Beach as well, but when we had time to take photos, it was too windy to get the letters to stand in that location, and when we came back later there was no one on the Beach so it seemed more remote than inclusive.  We also took photos in the elevator of the design building, referring to the latter definition.  For a final photo we took our team photo with the letters on a staircase so that we could include all the elements of the project in one image.

       Within the image composition, we mostly took pictures at eye-level to keep with the idea of seeing eye-to-eye and not looking down on others, except in some photos we took on the staircases at Wescoe when we couldn’t take them to the Beach.  We used a bird’s-eye-view to include more of the setting in the photos.  Of course, we weren’t able to use an eye-level view on our staircase picture either, or someone would have been cut out of the photo.

Fernanda Cohen

New York-based illustrator Fernanda Cohen was our lecturer at our symposium a couple weeks ago, and she was my favorite of the entire lecture series--her personality, insights, and art style were all by far the most intriguing to me.  She mostly discussed the importance of networking and getting people to see your work, and she showed us several ways to do that.  Sadly we didn't get to see a lot of her actual illustrations--she's done work for all sorts of well-known companies--but here are a few.  We did see the last two in her presentation; the upper one is one I found on Google that I'm fond of.

Project Three: Final Word Compostions

I think my design with the letters plummeting over the “edge” is my most successful.  All three of my final compositions communicate the word follow’s meaning, but that particular design is intriguing to the eye and makes the most use of space and in the color versions, figure/ground relationship.  It employs multiple definitions of the word follow—ordinary following behind another, and following the directions of another, in this case in lemming fashion, plummeting over an implied cliff.  In the color versions of this design, the square representing the cliff has been removed for clarity in the image, but it is still clear to the viewer what the letters are meant to be doing.  The transition in chroma in the letters helps create the illusion of the letters falling down into space and creates depth and visual interest.

The ladder composition shows the meaning of follow by suggesting the words following each other up the picture plane.  In the black and white composition, the stark contrast aids the message, and in the color compositions, variation in chroma as well as color contrast creates the illusion of the follows receding in space and creates movement.

In the final composition, the letters of the word follow arc across the picture plane.  Contrast in size of the letters assists the movement in the composition and creates a follow-the-leader message; in the color compositions, fading chroma and the illusion of transparency created by different colors creates depth and emphasizes the movement. 

Altogether the compositions demonstrate the following definitions of follow:  to go or come after in the same direction, to act in accordance with, and to come after as a logical or natural consequence.  The viewer, having comprehended these different aspects of what follow means, will be able to follow, as in to understand, the meaning of follow. 

Parts of the Letter

Though typography is typically a digital medium it has its roots in handwritten letters.  Just as different people make letters differently, the different uses of the parts of letters in typography distinguish fonts from each other.  I like to play around with which fonts I use in printed projects such as posters, flyers, and invitations, but I did not realize that each type of stroke had a specific name, and that these names are sometimes part of the font name and can help you distinguish between fonts, as is the case of a serif, which is a short stroke finishing off the main strokes of the letter, such as the horizontal stroke below the diagonal strokes of a capital A in certain fonts.  There are also stroke types that are typical of handwriting—the apex and vertex, where are high and low points of a letter, and the ascenders and descenders which are principal parts of letters like b and p.

 Besides the styles of the strokes and presence or absence of certain strokes, a major factor in typography is counterform—the negative space within letters—which is especially useful in logos.

                I guess the lesson learned here is that knowing these terms and how the parts of the letter create their expressive effect can help you be more effective in your choice of lettering in any number of projects.