#through process

Be sure to take a look at Venezky's website—there's a lot of great work in there (including the signage he did at Facebook a few years ago that is stunning in real life.). He was also interviewed on Through Process last year and serves as a nice supplement to this visual process.

I had a portion of an interview transcribed and typeset onto a 6x9 art board in Illustrator. I located and circled every “You,” “I,” and “Design” I could find and then joined them all with a thin line. The transcript is then removed resulting in an isolated form––I also created an alternate version to see how colour relates to the composition. More to come on the concept behind it all...  

Experimenting with an analog approach for my continuing ‘You, I, and Design project.’ Please visit that initial post to get some background on the project. I’ll soon have a dedicated Tumblr for this whole thing. Here are some notes about what I experienced doing this with a pen, ruler and paper instead of going into Illustrator. I found that working digitally was very slow and not so fluid. I became obsessed with lining up points and making the geometric result perfect rather than enjoying myself, experimenting, and just having fun with it. I used a ruler for the first time in years and had to learn how to hold it properly! Overall I don’t like how the geometric shape can’t be isolated like the previous digital version because I haven’t incorporated vellum or anything transparent yet to do the tracing. That means it’ll take more work to get the same thing--why bother? I’m also unhappy with how everything didn’t line up as perfect as I’d hoped. I blame working in the digital realm for so long--no smart guides, no align tool. What I did find pleasant was being able to observe the object being created from different angles (2D). I enjoyed the effortlessness of not having to deal with layers and so on. I liked how I would get the unexpected ink skipping out of the old pen I was using. When I scanned it using my iPhone scanning app, I enjoyed making this imperfect thing look even more imperfect--Interesting. There I was obsessing about it being perfect and getting upset, but then enjoying that imperfection at the end. 

Multi-hyphenate creative person and co-chair of VCFA’s MFA in Graphic Design Ian Lynam interviewed me and my Through Process co-host Mitch on podcasting, design criticism and what movies we’d like to show our students (or, do show as the case may be).

(In the most recent episode, they mention the film The Five Obstructions, which caught my attention for obvious reasons