#bookforms

For week 12, I listened to the Design Matters podcast featuring Tina Roth Eisenberg and read chapters 83-91 out of my Layout Essentials book.

There are very few things more inspiring to me than hearing someone gush about how they get to do what they love as a career. Tina Roth Eisenberg was such a delightful listen as I wrapped up two projects for two different classes in the same week. She talked about how ordinary objects that we see and use from day to day contain undiscovered beauty. To form this idea into a project, she carries a camera with her everywhere to photograph everyday life as it happens as well as the objects we interact with. This project helps capture a new appreciation for the ordinary in life, and I think that is very important, especially in times of distress and anguish. It truly is the little things in life that make it so beautiful, and it made me so happy to hear about how Tina expressed this through her work. As I kept listening, I grew more inspired by her outlook on life in general. She stressed finding small things to make yourself smile, which I think is something that we can all benefit from. But it was when she started talking about work that I was struck the most: “I love my studio. I love coming to work every single day. It’s my happy place.” Same, Tina. Same. My happy place is my “studio” as well; whether it is the design lab at school or my desk at home, my workspace is where I am most comfortable. As the semester progresses, I find myself—despite all of the stress I have endured—becoming filled more and more everyday with a love for design. I have a blooming love for every single part of design, from the struggles to the instant ideas, from the successes to the failures, and everything in between. You could wake me up and spin a roulette to determine my general mood on any given Tuesday or Thursday morning, send me to class in the lab from 9 to 5, and watch me leave with a smile on my face. It just makes me so happy, even when I am frustrated with a project. This semester especially, I feel a fire igniting in me—in the best way possible—with the work I am completing. I cannot believe how far I have come with my classmates, and I am so proud of all of us.

For week 11, I listened to 99% Invisible’s Ten Thousand Years podcast and read chapters 74-82 from my Layout Essentials book.

Ten Thousand Years piqued my interest in a much different way compared to the other podcasts I have listened to so far because it got me thinking more about the language of design rather than the process. The podcast talked about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the United States’ only center for discarding nuclear waste. This is where all of our country’s nuclear waste will be stored forever. A major issue here lies in whether or not WIPP is a good solution to the problem of a necessary storage area for discarded radioactive materials, but there is a greater question to pose here. If this waste is supposed to stick around basically forever, that means that it will last from birth to death and beyond for ourselves as well as for future generations. The generations of the future are going to need to understand what WIPP’s purpose is and the various dangers to human life that are associated with it. That’s when design enters the picture. When a government-organized panel got together to discuss this unresolved communication issue, they turned to symbols—the skull and crossbones, namely, per the suggestion of Carl Sagan. Like verbal language, however, the connotations of symbols can evolve over time. The symbol of a skull and crossbones has had many different meanings throughout history thus far, so it becomes more difficult as time goes on for us to predict how future generations of people will comprehend such a symbol. As designers, it is our duty to be able to visually communicate in an effective manner to all walks of life, including lives that have yet to exist. Connotation is so, so important in all of the work that we create. It looms over us while we are designing, and I think that it adds to our careful, precise nature in a way that isn’t noticeably visible in our process. Our final pieces—if they succeed—will display the meaning we are striving to convey, but outsiders don’t really see how we get there. It almost feels like a sub-language that only designers speak. For me, that’s one of the coolest things I’ll ever know.

This week’s assigned podcast was an episode of 99% Invisible titled “Ten Thousand Years.” The episode centered around a unique design problem presented by the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. The plant is really a massive underground repository for nuclear waste—waste that will not be safe for another ten-thousand years. Human’s today can understand well enough the dangers of approaching radioactive materials—the problem arose from how to protect humans from the content of the plant for the full lifetime of the facility. How could a team of designers, anthropologists, geologists, and science fiction writers accurately speak to an audience that they have not met and will never meet?

I was curious to hear the answer.

They discussed the pitfalls of any obvious solutions such as language or symbols. As different as we are now than we were ten-thousand years ago, human kind may be even stranger and more dissonant from us in the future. Language will change inevitably: there’s no way to make a sign that will be understood that far in the future. The meaning of symbols, too, changes: what could today say “danger keep away” could say something entirely different in a few generations. Idea after idea was shot down over this and that for years, until finally…

The episode ended. There’s an interim solution in place involving stone pillars, but according to the team in charge of solving the problem, a permanent solution will not be placed until 2028—45 years after the project was first commissioned.

What I took away from this was that even with the best most creative and ingenious minds on the job, an effective design project simply cannot be completed without knowing the audience. Knowing how the target thinks and feels and understands symbol, color, and language is critical to the success of a piece.

Our folios are no different: understanding how my design choices will effect how a viewer understands and appreciates my book is vital to my book being understood and appreciated (both goals of mine.)

This week’s reading in Layout Essentials was on handling layouts with minimal information and pictures without leaving a spread looking empty. This is an area I definitely need help in, I realized especially after being faced with the possibility of having to introduce some white space into my piece to match RENS’ new branding. However, I’m not sure that I’m going to undergo any serious design changes this close to the deadline. This weekend is all about putting the pieces together: printing, gluing, and slicing.

This week’s assigned podcast was an episode of Design Matters featuring Stefan Sagmeister. This particular episode was admittedly difficult to absorb. This was a “vintage” edition of Design Matters from the dark days of 2013. Debbie sounded like she was recording the interview with a Nokia brick phone, and it seemed as though she had yet to develop her signature edge as an internet radio host. She conducted the interview like a middle-schooler meeting Justin Bieber, at one point asking Stephan breathlessly if he had felt a change now that he was like, totally famous.

Sagmeister shrugged audibly and told her that no, not really, and that he was really only famous to designers.

I knew that his name sounded familiar, and after a quick Google search I found out why: we literally looked at his firm’s work in class just weeks ago, and I looked through his “Things I Have Learned” piece myself. Beyond Sagmeister & Walsh’s strange live-feed homepage, I also found that Sagmeister himself is a king of experimental typography. Light, fabric, splatters of paint, hair, and even people are all up for grabs in his works, and his canvases range from thin air to human flesh. One piece I remember Steve Skaggs showing us back in Intro was a talk poster of Sagmeister’s where he had an assistant help him carve the details of the event into his own skin.

It makes my own experimental type feel really pedestrian by comparison.

This week’s assigned podcast was an episode of 99% Invisible titled “Awareness.” The episode told the story of the red AIDS awareness ribbon—a symbol that arose from a society that largely wanted to ignore the epidemic. The ribbon was conceived and mobilized by a group of New York artists called Visual Aids. The idea was to make something simple and understated that anyone could wear to show their support for those suffering with AIDS and as an effort to bring AIDS into conversation. The campaign was hugely successful—the boosted awareness led to both a better understanding of AIDS in America and in actual money driven towards research to cure AIDS. The campaign was so successful, in fact, that almost every organization and cause imaginable has appropriated the ribbon symbol for themselves in a different color. AIDS doesn’t even have the color red to themselves anymore; Mothers Against Drunk Driving and several substance abuse movements have claimed the color red for themselves.

While I couldn’t really articulate a way that the lesson here applies to what we’re doing in Bookforms aside from the idea that art has power and value in the real world, I did see an interesting parallel between the Visual AIDS vision and the efforts of the artists I am creating a folio for, rENs. They both place particular importance on the color red, for pretty much the same reason. Red can symbolize a wide range of emotions—Visual AIDS wanted a color to represent blood and death, but also passion, love “like a valentine”, and compassion. A great deal of rENs art focuses on exploring these exact connotations of red—what makes a red foreboding vs. comforting and warm? It will be important for me in my study of rENs to express their ideas and feelings towards the color red appropriately, and to carry that spirit of experimentation into my own work.

This week’s assigned podcast was an episode of Design Matters featuring illustrator and writer Marian Bantjes. The interview started with Bantjes discussing her illustrative typographic style and the “downright weird” experimental pieces she would create. The focus of the episode, however, was on her recently published book I Wonder.

The book is a collection of her thoughts and reflections on art and life in general, but the real interest around the book is centered on its presentation. The book is printed in full color with gold leaf spread throughout; each page is adorned with a variety of Bantjes’s trademark swirling patterns and motifs. Beyond the messages and lessons in the words, the book itself makes an artistic statement because the book itself is an artistic object. The way the illustrations are handled help to facilitate the book’s message, and guide the reader emotionally as they read.

In what Bantjes has created, the act of turning pages and enjoying the spreads of the book visually has become a decadent experience. It is in this idea of bookmaking as a journey for the reader that our Dutch folio project begins.

This week’s readings in Layout Essentials were focused on horizontal hierarchy. Most relevantly, there was a chapter especially focused on using timelines on a spread as illustrative elements instead of just displaying information. This is cannot only be directly utilized in our current projects, but correlates with the kind of artwork that Marian Bantjes was talking about. Beauty can be used as an aid to written communication, or even guide the meaning of words.

I am actually pretty appalled at this week’s podcast. This episode of 99% Invisible told the story of a certain public art piece by a man named Richard Ankrom. Richard got confused by a poorly marked road sign, and then held a grudge over it for ten years. Instead of at least attempting to call the department of transportation to correct this grievance, Ankrom decided to skip straight to taking matters into his own hands in an act of what Roman Mars adorably called “Guerilla Public Service.”

After spending months researching and painfully recreating the missing signage, Ankrom’s plan was to install the piece himself 30 feet over the busy highway. He was an artist acting on his own for the good of the community, and I thought it was all really cool right up until he started talking about his preparations the night before. He sat in a tree and contemplated the job before him, and briefly considered that if he, an amateur, were to make a mistake, innocent people could be seriously injured or even killed. Then he shrugged and did it anyway.

His friends watched on and eagerly recorded as he endangered himself and strangers. Crazy Rick’s at it again. Not one of them thought to reason with him or tell him how incredibly selfish he was being for valuing his art over human lives.

Even if the installation went without a hitch, Ankrom had no intention of telling anyone what he had done and he would have been happy to leave his sign there forever. If so much as one screw wasn’t in quite as tight as he had thought, that sign could have actually killed someone.

Word did eventually get out however and actual Caltrans workers came to inspect Ankrom’s DIY project. They found that his craftsmanship was in fact up to snuff, and while they weren’t happy with his methods, there was really no harm done. Wow, said my literal first thought, you reaaally have to do your research.

I don’t think what Ankrom did was okay, but to give him credit he did really do his homework—his handiwork was so good that the city wouldn’t have even noticed that it wasn’t their sign had someone not clued them in. A poorly researched and thought-out project could result in an embarrassing critique, or in catastrophe. Putting in the time and the research needed to do something right is imperative.

The parallels to my current Bookforms project are obvious.