Author: Jenise Roque
What I found interesting about Paula Scher through the videos I watched is that she wants to create typography that is appealing for her audience to look out while still successfully making the client’s message come true. An example was where she created typography that incorporated “Loudness” and “Noise” for when she had to design posters for Noise Punk. I really found that interesting because it reminded me of the designer Filippo Marinetti, who used typography where he bent and manipulated it into creating a chaotic and aggressive look in order to communicate his anarchist ideals through Futurism. Another thing I found out is that Scher hates Helvetica, calling the typeface “Solemn Work”. I can agree with her because Helvetica is pretty basic and it gives me a better understanding o why she is passionate about creating such outrageous typography work, because she wants to make something that is interesting and people will recognize her for her typographic choices.
I was really intrigued when watching the video of Louise Fili and her career as a graphic designer. Fili has designed over 10,000 book jackets in Random House productions. Drawing her inspiration from her Italian heritage and food, Fili shows her strong and elegant typography skills displayed onto food packaging and Italian products. I really like how Fili gets her inspiration from the things around her and incorporates it into her work. Her designs are very Italian vintage, and it is perfect for all the products that she has designed for, but they are also very recognizable, as viewers can look at the product’s logo and can clearly see that it was designed by Fili. Fili states that she loves to make her logos into products and making them very dimensional, as she showed an example of her logo work with a number 2 pencil design, where the design was very dimensional and dynamic. One thing that I learned from the video is that there is no right or wrong when creating designs, and that you just have to do what comes up with your head and make the adjustments over time, in order for your designs to become perfect. Fili also has an extensive visual library from all the photographs and books she has collected throughout her years, and I believe that a visual library is a great way to get inspiration to produce better designs.
Upon reading this article, I was surprised at how difficult it was to come up with branding names for the products. What I found really interesting is that there are some corporate companies turn to creative people to name their products instead of coming up with the names themselves for their own product. The article states that “Most Executives are not imaginative as Steve Jobs or Richard Branson”, and I agree on that a little bit. Even when the modernist poet, Marianne Moore, was chosen to come up with names for a new Ford car in 1955, all of her ideas were rejected. The Ford executive then decided to name the car after his son, Edsel, which was considered as “one of the great disasters, naming and otherwise, in corporate history”. Coming up with brand names is considered very difficult because there is no corporate and concrete method in how to do so, rather it is very ambiguous. But one thing from the article that was appealing to me was that coming up with name requires “love and sensitivity”. Sensitivity is what separates the designers from the amateurs.
My name is Jenise Roque, and I’m in my third year of City Tech, majoring in Communication Design. I am taking this course because it is required and also I thought that Identity Design was interesting when I first heard about it. In terms of my Adobe Background, I am very proficient in InDesign, and I have a little bit of experience with Illustrator. I don’t have a lot of experience working in Photoshop, however. My career goal is to hopefully have a job as an illustrator, because I really love drawing and creating art through traditional mediums, but other than that I don’t have any big plans for my future once I graduate yet. One interesting fact about me is that although I am Latina, I was never taught Spanish by my parents, which is a very big letdown!
