COMD3504 - Section OL02 - Fall 2021

Month: December 2021 (Page 2 of 3)

Assignment 8

From November 1 to 2, it was Dio De Las Muertos also known as Day of the dead. Mainly celebrated in Mexico, this festival is about remembering your loved ones that have deceased. During this day, people offer food and other things (ofrendas) to their deceased one’s picture. 

Throughout the year, the LGBTQ community has been one of the sensitive topics. They have fought for their rights to be whoever they want without any judgment. Recently on Dio De Las Muertos, Doritos, one of the well-known American corn chip brands came up with their ad that represented LGBTQ. 

The ad opens with an old lady with her family and a young girl with a red Doritos bag offers ofrendas to her deceased brother’s photo. Suddenly the color of the sky changes from orange to blue when the brother’s soul (top picture on the right) shows up, while talking to his family another male soul pops up and the brother introduces the soul as his lover. While everyone is shocked, the sister claps and says “I thought you will forever be alone.” The ad ends with the quote “It’s never late to be who you are.” Although we see a glimpse of Doritos in the ad, the company focused on a festive day but mainly about LGBTQ giving a sweet and wonderful message.

Assignment 7

In the second reading, Marshall McLuhan explains how technological advancement is changing everything around us over the years. He states “All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical. The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing, an extension of skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system. Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act- the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.”  “When this circuit learns your job, what are you going to do, jobs represent a relatively recent pattern of work.” Basically, technology and media play a way in how we design. As we progress into the future, design becomes more simple and modernistic for the audiences we design them for.

(No) Assignment for December 14

As we prepare for our final class session your last remaining task should be to make sure all your work for the semester is posted to OpenLab.

This means confirming that you’ve uploaded:
– Your bibliography for the final,
– Images/files of your presentation,
– Any missing assignments for the semester

Note: If you shared a link to a pre-recorded presentation, you are still responsible for posting images of the poster/powerpoint. Ideally this will be a pdf, but if you created a prezi presentation, or are having issues with file size, you can post jpeg(s) of your document.

With regard to past assignments, the Assignments page on this site should serve as a checklist. (You can click on your own name in any of your recent posts to filter your submissions, then open the Assignments page in a separate tab to cross-reference.) Please email me if you have any questions regarding any assignments.

Looking forward to our second round of presentations. Please be ready to engage with your peers’ presentations, and please let me know if you have any questions in the meantime.

Assignment 6

Karl Gerstner was a Swiss designer, typographer, author, and artist. He developed a systematical solution for when he was making Swiss Typography. Karl feels that problem-solving is the best way to approach design, he viewed Graphic Design as a very technical field, as he states, “This implies: not to make creative decisions as prompted by feeling but by intellectual criteria. The more exact and complete these criteria are, the more creative the work becomes.” Karl created this table and labeled each box with a potential solution so that after he’s through with a design, he can simply check each category and see whether he received anything from them. He organizes with grids, which he claims to assist him a lot. In “Designing Programmes,” there is an abundance of numbers, equations, units, and quite frankly, a whole lot of things I barely understood. “The creative process is to be reduced to an act of selection. Designing means: to pick out determining elements and combining them. Seen in these terms, designing calls for method.”

Jan Tschichold was a German calligrapher, typographer, and book designer. He played a significant role in the development of graphic design in the 20th century – first, by developing and promoting principles of typographic modernism, and subsequently idealizing conservative typographic structures. Just like Karl Gerstner, Jan also had a similar outlook and believed that art and design are a balance of creativity and logic. “Every part of a text relates to every other part by a definite, logical relationship of emphasis and value, predetermined by content. It is up to the typographer to express this relationship clearly and visibly through type sizes and weight, arrangement of lines, use of color, photography, etc. The typographer must take the greatest care to study how his work is read and ought to be read”.According to Tschichold, a typographer should design in a way that is clear and uses other forms of design to relate to one another in a logical relationship; they work well with one another and in harmony.  Jan Tschichold emphasized the change in typographers’ priorities; reforming their typographical designs to have a stronger sense of clarity rather than “beauty,” or the aesthetic of the typography. Tschichold states, “It is up to the typographer to express this relationship clearly and visibly through type sizes and weight, arrangement of lines, use of color, photography, etc. The typographer must take the greatest care to study how his work is read and ought to be read.” 

Josef Müller-Brockmann was a Swiss graphic designer, author, and educator, he was a Principal at Muller-Brockmann & Co. design firm. He was a pioneer of the International Typographic Style. Josef Müller-Brockmann states “Every visual creative work is a manifestation of the character of the designer. It is a reflection of his knowledge, his ability, and his mentality”. He goes into detail as to why the grid is so important and how it has been helpful in the creative process. Josef takes on an approach that highlights the very same idea but that those elements that can not be categorized from Gerstner function, which are unable to be organized or chaotic that can indeed put places into a program that does the opposite of what they are. He believed his system should contribute to the general culture in terms of the “ clearly intelligible, objective, functional, and aesthetic quality of mathematical thinking.” Müller-Brockmann considers grid system literacy to be important for professional designers. This is a statement of professional ethos: the designer’s work should be plainly comprehensible, objective, useful, and attractive in mathematical thinking quality. “The use of the grid as an ordering system is the expression of a certain mental attitude inasmuch as it shows that the designer conceives his work in terms that are constructive and oriented to the future.” 

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