Front Page News

A Professor sent me this link and I think it is really quite incredible. (Uses Flash)
Newseum: Front Pages

I really liked it from a news media outlet perspective, but also design wise. Being able to see so many front pages of the same day is quite remarkable. A few days ago, after a plane crashed in Buffalo, NY, I checked the site, and it was clear which papers thought that was an important news story and which ones (like papers in NYC) thought it was an article better saved for the inside sections. Just a great resource to keep an eye on things whenever you're feeling like you're out of options on how to design a piece--remember, hierarchy.

Thievery Corporation Poster

The group, Thievery Corporation is coming to Rams Head Live in Baltimore soon. They [Rams Head and/or TC] were ever so kind to invite students to participate in making a poster/art for the show. Below is what I've been working on. Any thoughts, please? Black or white? Does it fit the band? Is there anything to add? Things like that would be helpful.

Concert Poster

I do a lot of design work for local jazz ensemble, Quartet Offensive. For those in Words & Images, the first project (profile), I did the Rolling Stone article about their bassist. 

Most recent poster done for them:

It's Good to Be Home

I'm sure this has been much anticipated by my faithful followers, and I am pleased to announce ::sweeping low bow and gesture:: I'M BACK!

All jokery aside, I am returning to write for the Gray Suite. I've been busy in my absence, writing for film review site: www.womenonscreen.com (go take a look, but please excuse the disgusting decor and design, not my fault), as well as maintaining the simple and low-brow humor of 24 year olds at telephonepictionary.wordpress.com (not for the easily offended.) So feel free to visit those, or just curl up with me here in front of a roaring fire and ultra cool, faux bear rug (because killing animals is wrong.)

For those who don't know my plans here they are: I plan to develop a fabulous site designed to all these me and design. The Gray Suite will be transitioned to that site when it's up and running. However, considering I only have designs of the new site on paper in pencil, it won't be any time too soon. Since I enjoy manual labor and getting my hands dirty, I've decided that I'm going to build it myself rather than hire a developer (although, I'm sure I'll have help from friends--right? please?).

In the mean time, I'll be keeping you up to date with some of my work, the site's design and thoughts about whatever I might think up.

So, check back soon.

Come back again!

Dear Guests,

Thank you for visiting during the semester to read my writings and leave your comments. I hope you found your stay inviting and thought provoking. It’s been quite an enjoyable experience for me as well, so much that I will continue to keep the house open even though the class assignment is over. I’m taking a hiatus to update the site (perhaps switching hosts?) and to determine a new purpose… I’m sure it will remain as a design/writing haven.

So, if you’d enjoy your stay at the Gray Suite, please come again. I should be back up for business after the New Year, hopefully with a new a look. I’ll be sure to send out a note for those interested. If you have similar aspirations to continue your blog, please let me know in the comments, so that one, I can continue reading, and two, so that I can (with your permission) keep my suite linked to yours.

Once again, thank you, and see you soon.

Your host,
Heather Van De Mark

!!! >:O

F*******************

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******************CK

FUCK! 

Due to my USB not being that great, I have to erase it every time I transfer files on and off it, otherwise it says there is no room and I can't add new/updated files to it. Well, I just erased my 80% completed revision of Project 4: Classification. I previously posted images of this revision in a state of about 30% revised, so you can imagine how different the final revision was going to be. 

AND I JUST DELETED IT ALL!!! At 4p.m. the day before it's due. To make matters worse, I'm subject to the lab hours, so it's not like I can pull an all nighter to redo it. I either attempt to cram it in the next 4 1/2 hours--starting from almost scratch--or let it go, that A grade I tried so hard for, painfully slipping from my grasp. 

Fuck.

Ugh, my blood is rushing. The muscles in my upper body are pulsating. Ugh. I think I know when I'm defeated. 

Take a Break and Laugh

While we all manage through that final push, I thought I'd post these just for laughs. And I think they're fantastic design. Well, the condoms are.The bear is just funny art. I don't really expect anyone to be checking this, but in case you've fallen into that routine of procrastination of checking everyone's blog before doing any work (not that I do anything like that), then well, here you go, just for you:

Show & Tell: Collections

A little late is better than never... I made that up myself. I wasn't sure if scanning my precious, stuffed Elephant was a good idea, so instead I have these cute odds (not the ends) from my collection. 

One is a beer coaster for Delirium Tremens, playing on the idea of the pink elephant which is quite witty for a beer company. The other is a bracelet from the Buffalo Zoo in NY that reads, I (heart icon) Elephants (elephant icon). Other things in my elephant collection:

• Statue from Thailand
• Statue from the Dominican Republic
• Wooden candle holder
• Photo of an obelisk that had an elephant at the base of it in Rome, IT
• Photo of me with a large elephant statue outside of a famous museum in Paris, FR that I can't remember the name of
• And a tiny little plastic statue that I think came from a gumball machine

I'm amassing quite the collection from people (most of the above were gifts), although I urge them that I'm much more interested in live elephants and not replicas, but they just don't listen. 

Project Green: Blogs

I was looking over the weekly handout about project green. I thought this is as good a place as any to get my thoughts together.
Here are some professional sites I enjoy:
Smashing Magazine
The Dieline
These sites function in highlighting design inspiration and techniques, but also serve as a platform to make themselves important players in the design industry. I'm drawn to them because they are routinely updated and include a variety of works--SM highlights creative inspiration posts right next to useful CSS tools next to Photoshop brushes; and The Dieline focuses on all types of packaging from labels to inventive repackaging (a re-useable, recycled-paper, water bottle!). I can't think of much that I don't like about them, which is probably why I go them everyday.

Also great blog, undesign related: 101 Cookbooks very clean layout and simple layout, but it really adds a calming feel which I think she is purposely trying to go for.

However, musician blogs I find tend to leave the most lacking. Everyone and everyone is supposed to have a blog. Yet, many people miss the point of a blog when they only update every few months. I feel that blogs are supposed to gain a regular readership and that'll only happen if there's something to read. For instance Kimya Dawson, her "News" page should act as a professional blog of anything newsworthy, however it went a whole year without being updated. I know she was not completely newsworthy from 2007-2008. But her diary--not for professional purposes--is updated with complete regularity. So, I guess that's something that irks me. You'd think they would want to really utilize this tool to maintain a strong fan base.

I really enjoyed doing this, because keeping a blog is something that I've been intending to do, but hadn't gotten around to it. I think there are three main divisions of things I post--intellectual curiosities, examples and personal work. I will probably redesign this blog with that in mind. I'm also considering switching to a different platform, or really looking more into Blogger, because there are some layout/design things that I'd like to fix. Nothing has really been difficult in maintaining this, I'm surprised that I've always found something to post about... maybe lack of readership/comments is disappointing. I'd like to have more of an ongoing conversation, but are blogs really conversations or just one sided presentations with a small Q&A (usually just questions) at the end?

Revision: Project 4 (Categories)

Hi everyone. I figure we're all feeling that last push in the semester. Maybe it's early for that... maybe it's just contractions at the moment? I'm starting the revision process, which I was crossing my fingers I wouldn't have to do, but the numbers (letters) just aren't going to add up otherwise. And I'm particularly invested in revising Project 4, because as Prof. Pointer pointed (ha!) out, I have a weakness when it comes to designing with a lot of information. My grid and hierarchy skills leave something to be desired. And for peace of mind, I just can't have that. Below are my revisions, any specific comments you could make I would greatly (!) appreciate-particularly regarding white space, hierarchy and grids. Or anything at all. Thanks!

Show & Tell: Unnecessary Process

Recently, I saw the new Jose Cuervo ads for their Living Notoriously Well campaign. On first watch, I found them really entertaining. There have been differing opinions on their entertainment value posted on various blogs, but I'll let you decide. To watch the ads go here: livingnotoriouslywell.com Enter your birthday and then click on the right under televised notoriety and watch the two commercials. I thought these were unnecessary processes, particularly How To Negotiate because one of the steps is: have a back up plan. What sort of process negates its worthiness by saying, this may not work, have a back up a plan. It's as if the step to a cake recipe was, buy cake from store just in case. I know it enhances the humor in the ad so I do understand its purpose, but generally speaking, I feel like a well written process should cover all your bases in a way that you'd be successful in the end... but that's just me.

And here is what I am bringing to class, because I found it amusing. The steps show (1) a hand crumpling this piece of paper, (2) the hand hanging the waded paper onto a christmas tree. 

TV and Web Harm Kids

I read this article on Reuters the other day: Lots of TV and Web harms kids' health.

Essentially, a bunch of credible institutions compiled data from studies going back to the 80s to the present, and tallied the information. The studies focused the health effects between children and technology/entertainment, specifically television, but also video games, films, music, computers, and internet use. The findings showed consistency that children who consume high amounts of media have poor health, "The studies offered strong evidence that children who get more media exposure are more likely to become obese, start smoking and begin earlier sexual activity than those who spend less time in front of a screen." Some people have drawn the conclusion that it isn't quality but quantity that is the issue. But, what really got me was the Reuters article constructed the issue like this, "Three quarters of them found that increased media viewing was associated with negative health outcomes." I mean, wow. Three quarters of studies say that our chosen field, effective communication and technological mediums cause NEGATIVE health incomes. Yikes! It really makes you wonder the consequences of the messages you're sending out there, as well as the consequences of the absence of the messages you're not sending out there.

Project 5, Phase 4: Movie

Hello again. If you don't mind repetitiveness, since you'll have to watch this on Saturday, would you mind taking a look at my Phase 4 movie and leaving me a comment for those points where the text goes by too fast or goes by too slow. I'd welcome any other feedback, but this is my biggest concern at the moment. Much appreciated. And, if there is music/sound effects do your best to ignore them, because they're not right at all at the moment. Thanks again. 

Project 6, Phase 3 - TEXT

Hello, class. I'm having trouble reaching the 300 words for Project 6 (Packaging). Below is my content so far. Hopefully, you'll understand what I'm doing by reading it, but in case you don't, I'm re-purposing bricks as book ends for a haughty home furnishing line. If you have suggestions for things you'd like to read about that would fit along the lines of what I've written, please comment!

General audience:
Well off home owners that prefer simplicity and understatements (or even natural antiquity) to opulence and luxury in their home decor.

Text so far:
Brick Ends
from No Mortar … building great design brick by brick

Uncomplicated design need not connote unattractiveness. At No Mortar, we prefer a minimalist approach to house furnishings. Our authentic class B engineering bricks in fire red will enhance your rugged, exposed brick walls or be a well-crafted juxtaposition to your home décor. This brick set are perfect shelf ends for the minimalist, au naturel or artisanal home.

Built for strength, this brick set is capable of holding books, heavy or oversize books, magazines, records, CDs, DVDs and other items in an erect position on shelves or mantels. Each brick has a unique texture with shallow caverns and pin-hole chasms. The three-hole pattern in each brick not only lightens the weight to prevent excess strain on its ledge, but also adds dynamic visual depth.

Remove the wire holders with scissors to release your brick ends.

• Class B engineering bricks
• Fired clay, water and sand
• 2 dimensions
• 2.7 kg per brick
• Made in the U.S.A.

No Mortar’s Home Collection includes well crafted, minimalist home furnishing made from the earth’s most natural sources of clay, sand, stone, wood and water. www.nomortar.com

Week 10 Reading: Insights

Here are two things that I noticed from this reading, that I'd like to point out because I'm not sure if I could make sense of them in class off the top of my head:

One of the follow-up questions to Jacinto Jesus Cardona's "Bato con Khaki's" is "Why is bato 'too bold' a word for the speaker's 'mother's blood?" (339). Then, right after that, in Jamaica Kincaid's essay "Girl," a dominate voice, probably female (perhaps a mother, older sister or older family friend) speaks to a girl about how to grow up appropriate. The connection between the two pieces highlights how it is the responsibility of the mother/female to raise the next generation both male and female, which is probably obvious because it falls into that domestic sphere.Then, wouldn't it also be presumed, that those children's failures are automatically projected onto the mother? It becomes the mother's responsibility (and shame) when her son becomes a bato or her daughter a slut. Considering all of the outside influences that act upon children--media, technology, peers, other adults, history, it's quite unfair that females are forced to bear this responsibility alone. Katha Pollit supports me (or I guess, I support her), when she wrote "They let parents off the hook--no small recommendation in a culture that hold moms, and sometimes even dads, responsible for their children's every misstep on the road to bliss and success" (399). And isn't unfair to fathers that they aren't given (more) credit for the responsibility or shame that they bear for their children's futures?

Although McQuade and McQuade do a reasonable job to separate gender and race into different chapters, race is still a significant factor to consider when talking about gender (some people debate that it is completely inseperable when speaking of gender). I thought Judith Ortiz Cofer's "The Story of My Body" hit the nail on the head at the end, when she writes,

In college, I suddenly became an "exotic" woman to the men who had survived the
popularity wars in high school, who were now practicing to be worldly: They had
to act liberal in their politics, in their lifestyles and in the women they went
out with (349) [emphasis added].

The questions of exoticism and exploitation are really interesting. Conversely, in "How to Write A Catchy Beer Ad," when the ad makers were filming the ad, they wanted women "to look hot but approachable, someone I wouldn't be scared to talk to" and thus went with twins who were "All-american and real" (391). (Funny--of course they're real, they picked living, breathing humans?! And what does it mean to be All-American?!) They wanted women who were similar to themselves, but "approachable" which could be read as non-threatening, subservient, less than. And are exotic women thus oppositely viewed as other and scary?

Week 10 Reading

Yes, I am posting on Thanksgiving. Some people may make a big deal out of this, as in this isn't much of a holiday if I'm doing school work, but what's a better way to chill out and digest than blogging? Probably watching a movie, but blogging it is.

I was anticipating this week's reading, because I have a vested interest in gender studies (I wish more people did). Mainly I tell people I have my degree in English, but I doubled, and also have a degree in Feminist Gender Sexuality Studies. Try not to let the F-word scare you.

More or less I found that McQuade and McQuade had good insights and asked several important questions. I highly suggest:

• p. 343 Judith Ortiz Cofer's "The Story of my Body"
• p.353 Marjane Satrapi's excerpt from "Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood" - if you haven't seen the film from this graphic novel, Persepolis, Netflix or rent it IMMEDIATELY. It's brilliant (and entertaining) and showed me a world vastly different from the few stereotypes I had in my head about Iran.
• p. 366 Jane Slaughter's "A Beaut of a Shiner"
• p. 370 Portfolio: Nancy Burson
• p. 378 Susan Bordo's "Never Just Pictures"
• p. 390 Chris Bollard's "How to Write A Catchy Beer Ad"
• p. 398 Katha Pollit's "Why Boys Don't Play with Dolls"
• p. 402 ARMY ad "There's Something About a Soldier"

I don't have a highlight this week, however I will post a few insights I had (immediately following this post--yes one rock, two birds.) But I will end with this food for thought from Pollit's "Why Boys Don't play with Dolls."

Every mother in that room had spent years becoming a person who had to be taken
seriously, not least by herself.

Web Accessibility

Tonight, I went to the lecture regarding Web Accessibility for blind persons presented by Anne Taylor, director of access technology, Wesley Majerus, access tech specialist, and another gentleman whose name I didn't catch. These individuals were representatives from the National Federation of the Blind.

It was an interesting talk, and here are a few key points in no particular order:

• To make an accessible web site, you need to understand how screen readers works (which I don't, and still don't quite get after this talk), and you need to do user ability testing with blind persons.
• Blind persons have to invest a lot of money (a minimum of $2,500) in screen readers (even more money if they're deaf and blind), so they expect web sites to function accordingly to meet their needs (quite understandable.)
  
• They don't believe in text-only pages on the basis that separate is not equal. Reasons against separate text-only sites: they're not maintained as well, they tend to be boring and plain, and it's not a cost effective solution for a company to run two sites.
• Apparently, Flash sites and PDFs can be made accessible if they're labeled appropriately. (Unfortunately, she didn't get into how to do that--maybe it's a given?)
• In the next 20 years, the market demand for accessible websites is going to increase rapidly--all those baby boomers who know how to use computers will want to continue to use them in their declining eyesight, old age.
• Other reasons why you should go out of your way to improve accessibility: by improving accessibility you will automatically improve usability, it differentiates your company as one with particular values, and to avoid legal litigation (the NFB just settled with Target.com for $4 million, an amount she said could have been avoided with about $50k worth of accessibility redevelopment to the site!)
  

I wish she had gone into more detail as to what needs to be precisely done in the coding and what not. Rather than being a tech informational lecture, it was more of an tech advocacy lecture, which is fine, just not what I was expecting. Although, she said much information could be found at their website: The National Federation of the Blind. They also do website certification that is somewhere above federal 508 compliance, which is the sort of thing I'd want to see as a norm.

Choosing to attend this lecture, I missed out on the Bringhurst/language talk at UMBC. If anyone went to that, please post about it or let me know how it went. Thanks.

Call to Action Posters

I feel like these campaigns, sort of put us all to shame... ahh, back to the drawing board. Check it out: Design as a Force of Good from PSDTUTS.com

Week 9 Reading: READING ICONS

I'm going to do this week's recap of the reading a little differently. I was surprised (and yet, not surprised) that the icons the chapter chose to use and questions it asked, were icons I had seen in the past week and questions that had been asked in other design forums. I found this very coincidental, and expected, they are icons after all and chances are their "easily determinable meaning" is often parodied and reconstructed for that very reason.

So, to go along with the bathroom icons on pages 499-505:
I like this design very much, particularly for the angles of their heads. However, if could easily be misinterpreted as one bathroom being for well, number one, and the other bathroom for number two. Nevertheless a good try. And much better than the image of the dog's face on p. 504 from Hong Kong, which I don't understand at all... anyone?




Then to go along with p. 508, Grant Wood's "American Gothic." Which I've seen parodied a hundred times, but really knew nothing about, and was very glad to read Guy Davenport's "The Geography of the Imagination" for insight, I present:



















This chapter's Profile is of Tibor Kalman, who altered the racial identities of high profile people, pages 546-556. In true Kalman style, someone/some people altered the racial identities of Barack Obama and John McCain--who to give credit to, I'm not exactly sure:
















To sum up, I'd like to look at the Mercedes ad on p. 520-21. It says "Glimpse at them for a split second, and you know exactly what they mean." I feel like the reason we redesign and parody iconic images, is because as message makers we understand that NOTHING has a definitive meaning, icons change according to audience, culture, time, place etc. I'll admit I might be putting words into people's mouths, but this is the way I'd like to see the world: We, as image and message makers, toy with these icons because as much as we create design and images to market, persuade and sell ideas, we'd much prefer to market and sell to an astute and interested audience who would rather read messages and interact with images, rather than "glimpse at them for a split second."

Show & Tell: Favorite Words

Here are some of my favorite words:

RE words: revelation, reactionary, revolution
*These words sound strong and round.

Words whose synonyms I detest: flatulent, skivvies
*I loathe the word fart. And dislike the word underwear. I'm also not crazy about diaphragm, like... and others I will add when I think of them.

Words with a story: wonderful, via
*The first time I saw the movie from the Lemony Snicket (sp?) books, I remember being so content when I left. I loved how it was so imaginative and there was so much child like wonder. And then I realized it was full of wonder aka wonderful. The meaning of the word really hit home in that very moment, and I realized it wasn't just a synonym for good or hapy or pleasant. A character from Jitterbug Perfume (by Tom Robbins) argues, "There are no such things as synonyms!"
*The story for via (pronounced the British Vie-a, not V-a) is that I heard someone talking on NPR and they say vie-a and it took a moment to register what they were saying and it was probably the first time I was aware of the differences of English and the significance of the pronunciation.


Words I mispronounce: mountain (moun'in) or any word with a strong 't' in the ending syllable, it tends to get skipped or rounded out to a 'd', when (win), pillow (pellow). I find it funny that I mispronounce them, so I don't mind at all, unless I'm talking to someone academic/scholarly and then I feel a bit like a joke.