Hi, I'm Tempestt & this is my Motion Blog

Deborah Sussman was born in Brooklyn, New York on May 26, 1931. Her father was a commercial artist and her mother was a linguist. She always led a creative life and took summer courses at Black Mountain College receiving a diverse education in the arts. She went to the Arts Institute in Chicago and got and landed a summer internship with Charles and Ray Eames. She received a Fullbright Scholarship to attend a school at the Ulm School of Design in Germany and worked in studios in Milan and Paris. 

She was drawn back to Los Angeles to work for Charles and Ray Eames and worked closely with them on researching and documenting communities in culture. Travel was a big part of her work and so she visited places like Mexico for to see their Day of the Dead Festival and India to understand the Nehru Royal Family. 

In 1968, she founded Deborah Sussman & Co., which became Sussman/Prejza in 1980 after she married designer Paul Prejza. As her worked developed she began to champion Environment Graphic Design and coined the term “Supergraphics.” Sussman described that its “not that it was just big, but that it was bigger than the architecture, that it didn’t have to fit into prescribed spaces in a traditional way. That it could have its own life and go beyond the ceiling, be cropped, be as though it had almost flown over the architecture.” This is very evident in her work for the 1984 LA Olympics that used graphics in such bold and way that the architecture was not obstructing the design, but rather upholding it. 

Her typographic work uses striking colors and large scale which served function in many of her wayfinding projects, but also defined the aesthetic for the city of Los Angeles. She has a discipline of playfulness in her designs that she called on through imagination. humor, and a full embrace of color and detail. She knew that a public space was going to be experienced and create a culture for it’s visitors. 

Bright Shiny Morning Title Sequence

My title sequence is based off the book Bright Shiny Mornings by James Frey. It is a collection of short stories and historical facts about Los Angeles. The author frantically jumps around throughout history and peoples lives just as their drama unfolds. The narrative is primarily revealed through a sequence of landscape imagery of the city shot on my lomography camera. It follows time of day sequence from a POV perspective. I showcased both the pristine nature and grittiness of the city to show the range of characters and scenes in the book. There are contrasting textures and transitions when comparing the day and night images. The day time images have a mirage effect to show the distorted view that Los Angeles has to outsiders or LA residence who live in a small bubble. The night images have a much darker and mysterious appeal that exists in many of LA’s unvisited towns. I chose not to show any people in my title sequence because I believe it is the city and its landscape that dictate what goes down in the city of Los Angeles.

Designer Promo: Tomoko Miho

Paula Scher Designer Promo

(andrea mi)

(Nimbus_)