2020 Foundations

Working only with black and white for our project 1.1 reminded me of the artist Adam Pendleton.

Adam Pendleton is a conceptual artist from Richmond, Virginia, and his practice ranges from painting, silkscreen, collage, video and even performance. He is a young artist still in his 30s, but his works have been acknowledged and were shown in MoMA, the Whitney, the Tate Modern and many other places. He was also featured twice in Forbes’ 30 under 30 list.

His works rearrange words, forms and images and provoke reflections on cultural movements of the past like Dadaism and the Black Arts Movement. In his exploration of social cultural movement, he defined the term “Black Dada,” which he explains to be “about radical juxtapositions, i.e. bringing voices together in a way that disrupts easy logic and established history.”

More works on his instagram.

“I am interested in what is interesting,” Ed Ruscha, artist

How do you evaluate—grade?— art and design work?

The criteria and issues that stand out for me are:

1. skill to describe/articulate and frame a design question or problem verbally, visually or via some other form

2. participation in the studio and contribution to the studio culture

3. ability to transform ideas and rough concepts; to develop, refine, and successfully express or communicate

4. curiosity and willingness to experiment/explore/discover and to distill knowledge from this process

5. mastery of materials and craft in completing project (to the level required)

6. synthesis and aesthetics – create forms and relationships – to put things together with a level of completeness and in an engaging manner appropriate to the project

7.  production of a body of work that demonstrates your design process and  expresses what is interesting about the work by embedding meaning (your point of view, argument, interests, questions) in the work itself

 

Grading and The Problem with Familiarity

Susan Kare is known for designing well-known icons for the first Apple Mac. She was one of the leaders of pixel art. She is known as the “woman who gave the Macintosh a smile,”.

“I like to think that good icons are instantly recognizable– even if someone’s never seen it, you can ask them what it does, and they get it– or it’s so easy to remember that if someone tells you want it is once, it’s easy to remember when you look at it. I think that’s a lot to ask of a symbol, that if you tested it everyone would all have the same one-word response as its function. But I think I had then, and still have, more of a common sense than a scientific approach to that kind of thing.” – Susan Kare

Before class Tuesday:
Print a final from Project 1.1 and trim to 10×10″
Print a tabloid set of 6 or more studies – put your name and a phonetic approximation of the sound in the caption area, and turn in printed studies

Final Project Submission:
Upload the two files as PDFs to the Course Folder– remember to flatten and save as Smallest File Size

For studies use the naming protocol: Last name.project1.1.studies.pdf
For final use the naming protocol: Last name.project1.1.final.pdf

If you have an mp3 file, you can upload it to this website and get a visual representation of the sound. I used the sound from this youtube video to make this image.

Then, I warped and distorted the image in illustrator to create this pattern.

If one of these images seem familiar, you’ve probably heard of Makoto Shinkai. If not, he’s a Japanese animator, filmmaker, and manga artist. His works include 5 Centimeters per Second, Weathering with You, The Garden of Words, and Your Name which are all animated Japanese films. Below are more designs from Your Name and Weathering with You, his two latest films.

I highly recommend looking into it on your free time. The animations are amazing especially for the two particular films above.

Josef Albers is an American-German artist best known for his color square paintings—the Homage to the Square series. The paintings in the series is formed by colored squares. “The arrangement of these squares is carefully calculated so that the color of each square optically alters the sizes, hues, and spatial relationships of the others. ” He also explored a lot of other abstract art in black and white.

An emoji for whenever you feel like a self-aware fool.

Sign Up for Sunday Tutorial

Two sessions on Super Bowl Sunday–go 49ers!

All final projects should be submitted to the appropriate folder on the Course Folder.

For Project 1.1:
Save a flattened PDF file of your final projects (saved as Smallest File Size) to the Course Folder in Project 1.1 Folder