Posts Tagged ‘graphic design’

Hand-lettering Hampshire projects

February 10th, 2010, posted in art, photos, projects

I won the commencement poster contest for this year’s graduating class, and I’ve just been finishing it up the last few days.  The final file is 1.54 GB, and 67 layers – it got too big for my computer to handle, so I had to go to the media lab to work on it.  I’m glad I did, because I used Photoshop CS4 for the first time, and discoved it pretty much rules.

I wanted it to be celebratory, and representative and unique to this year’s graduating class.  I hand wrote as many Division III titles as I could collect in the background.  The guy jumping is a first-year friend of mine, Devon, who’s a ridiculous tricker/acrobat.  All of the text is hand lettered – a lot of work, but  I’m so happy with how it came out!

Commencement_poster_web3

Also recently I designed a t-shirt for Admissions, that they’re going to send to accepted students.  I’m really psyched about how the 2010 roots turned out.

Hampshire - Admissions ShirtI seem to be slowly rebranding Hampshire with my personal hand lettering style… I think I’m also going to submit a signer sweatshirt design in this style as well.  With these projects and several others I’ve done recently, I’ve become far more confident in hand lettering, and doing things by hand in general.  My process for these was to do a few quick pencil sketches of the design, then do a layout on the computer for more precise placement of text, do refined drawings of the design, then scan them back into the computer, clean up the drawings, and composite everything together.  I like this FAR better than designing 100% on the computer, as I used to! (Even though it’s more work…)

Speaking of doing things by hand, I’ve got some very exciting projects in the works for the rest of my Division III, and I’m going to be spending a lot of time in Lemelson, plasma cutting, blacksmithing, and welding…

read more 1 comment

ALPHABIKE

November 18th, 2009, posted in biking, general thoughts, photos, projects

Two weeks ago I had a little idea that blossomed into a wildly popular project entitled ALPHABIKE.

alphabike**UPDATE JULY 2010: Posters of ALPHABIKE are now for sale on Etsy!**

It started with these two books I found called Graphic Design: the New Basics, a guide to design principles illustrated primarily with student work, and Teaching Graphic Design, a collection of syllabi from undergraduate and graduate design courses all over the country.

I noticed a project being done in a lot of intro to typography classes was creating an alphabet out of random objects, ranging from banana peels, to army men, shoes, food, bodies, some physical, some photographic.  I thought, well, what do I love as much as I love typography and photography?  BIKES!  Hence the birth of the ALPHABIKE.

I spent a couple days taking photos of bikes (and am now intimately familiar with most every bike on Hampshire’s campus).  G, R, K, and F were the most difficult to find.  I had to think a lot about distinguishing letters from shapes, what the essential lines of each letter are, and many of the photos are all about perspective.

People have already been asking me about getting a poster of it, so I think I’m going to sell prints as a fundraiser for my circus troupe’s bicycle tour next summer.  So let me know if you are interested, and I’ll have them available some time in the next few weeks!

read more 1 comment

Ambiwho? Ambiwhat? AMBIGRAM!

June 10th, 2009, posted in art, inspiration, projects

One of Tara and I’s obsessions while traveling was creating ambigrams. They first came onto our radar when we were discussing the design possibilities for our next circus venture, Downside-Up. With a name like that, there are so many graphic possibilities, but I realized an ambigram would be the most apropos.

What is an ambigram?  According to Wired, ambigrams are the hottest trend in typography since Helvetica.  An ambigram is a word-image that can be read from multiple vantage points, most commonly by flipping it 180 degrees.  Ambigrams were popularized a few years ago by Dan Brown’s book Angels and Demons, which features several ambigrams as plot points, including this one to the left.

Now, the complex gothic ambigrams from Angels and Demons were the only ones I was very familiar with, and I believed them to be for advanced artists, mathematicians, designers – not for amateur typographers and doodlers like us.

ambigram in progress

ambigram in progress

NOT SO!  Ambigrams are fun AND easy to make!  Tara and I made loads of them on our many long train rides around Europe.  It’s pretty simple – I just start with writing the word below itself upside down.  Then look at each of the letter pairs, think about the key components in each letter necessary to define it, and start doodling different ways those letters can be combined.  Think about how to turn necessary letter strokes into decorative elements.  It also helps to consider both upper and lower case letters, I thought ‘SEATTLE’ would be impossible, until I thought to try it with lower case letters.seattle_ambigramI’m in the process of digitizing the Downside-Up ambigram for a logo now, but meanwhile here’s another one I’m working on.  Try making them sometime!  And don’t go looking for any lame ambigram generators on the internet – get out a pencil and pad and do it yourself.   It’s like solving a logic puzzle.

circus_ambigram

For more on ambigrams, check out:

http://www.johnlangdon.net/ – the website of the Prof who’s one of the leading ambigram scholars, he also made all the ambigrams for Dan Brown.

http://www.ambigram.com/ – online magazine about everything ambigram.

read more no comments

Graphic Design, Feminism, and Me – Part 1

February 3rd, 2009, posted in general thoughts, media, soapbox

As I’ve become more familiar with the graphic design and typography “world,” and begun to identify more of my favorite artists  and type designers (Robert Slimbach, Matthew Carter, David Carson…) I’ve started to wonder why I don’t have more female role models.

The other day I happened upon this fantastic video (I highly recommend it) of a panel discussion on the art of the book, with Milton Glaser, Chip Kidd, and Dave Eggers, moderated by Michael Beirut. I’m very familiar with all of their work, and all four of them are some of my top heroes – my idols! The coolest, savviest, most interesting designers I know! And seeing all of them together in the same room talking about book design, it was a real treat. Until the very end during a Q & A, when there was a question about why there were so few female “superstar” graphic designers – “is there a glass ceiling in graphic design?” Milton Glaser’s response:

He said that the reason there are so few female rock star graphic designers is that “women get pregnant, have children, go home and take care of their children. And those essential years that men are building their careers and becoming visible are basically denied to women who choose to be at home.” He continued: “Unless something very dramatic happens to the nature of the human experience then it’s never going to change.” About day care and nannies, he said, “None of them are good solutions.”

The crowd was silent except for a hiss or two and then Eggers piped up that he and his wife both work from home and share child care responsibilities — but added that maybe New York was different (although we don’t think Eggers really believes this). Then it was clear to everyone in the room that it was time to move on.

In Helvetica (the greatest movie ever) why are only two of the two dozen interviews with women?

Shira asked me once when the first time I was really conscious of my gender was. There are probably some times in my youth that I can’t clearly recall (other kids questioning whether I could play Huck Finn because I was a girl), I think the first time was in a class my freshman year of high school. After completing a month’s worth of assignments for an Intro to Technology class in one day, my parents and teachers realized something should be done. So I was transferred into Visual Communication, where I was the only freshman and the only girl.  I thrived on the material, but I felt really uncomfortable and out of place in that environment.

I’ve take a number of computer and technology oriented classes in both high school and college, and I’ve always been in the minority.  I think it always made me subconsciously want to work harder, to prove that I could be as good or better than the boys.

Graphic Design, Feminism, and Me – Part 2: what I’ve learned from doing design and animation on the documentary film Heretics: Stories from a Feminist Art Collective for the past two years… coming soon.

-Molly

(p.s.  if you read this, you should comment!  the more you comment on our blog, the happier we will be, and the more often we will update.  it’s nice to know when your writing is read.)

read more 4 comments