As promised

I have been thinking about my use of "inspiration" in my designs. Sometimes I worry that I am treading too near the source. In fact, I did use an illustration straight from a Bolshevik poster once. Which brings me to this weeks prompt.

http://www.art-for-a-change.com/Obey/index.htm

That is a website that details some of Shepard Fairy's 'borrowed' works. I was thinking that this could be an opportunity to get this sort of thing out of our systems, or at least give us the opportunity to explore our feelings on the subject. I was thinking that it would be fun to re use a design that we like for our own purposes. Anything is fair game, the design can be changed as little or as much as you want, but there must be a noticeable change.

Still here

I still plan to continue with this project, though not at this moment. I have one more week to go until I am done with summer term. I would like to pick this back up the week after next.

I was thinking that I would like to hear suggestions for prompts if anyone would like to do so. Full credit will be given of course, I don't plan to take credit for someone else's work. Until the next prompt, I would encourage everyone to pick a prompt they haven't taken part in if you would like to start back again a little early. If I find some time, I may do that as well. The next prompt I have in mind is quite provocative. I am very interested to see if anyone will take the bait.

New prompt/apology

I have been getting a little wrapped up in my other summer projects. I guess that about wraps that up.


Prompt: Message.

I had an idea for a prompt when I started this that involve three lines of text. I think that I should make it more specific, thus the message. The idea is that this design will help convey something that you would like to tell the world. To do this, the message should be legible and the ddesign should support the theme. Of course, the message content is up to you and it can be as political/personal/humorous as you would like. A possible idea is to use something similar to a facebook update. Conversely, it could be as serious as, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country." The last example is just for the sake of example, anything used in this design should come from your own brain so that you can 'own' it and create a more cohesive design. Just to clarify, the three lines mentioned are not part of this prompt, there should be as many or as few as required of your message.

I just took a look at what Kate did for the last prompt, it looks awesome. Especially the Gene Simmons tongue as underline.

Moving the due date/prompt

to sunday by midnight ya'll

Hey hey hey. ..

This week's prompt is inspired by an unrelated class. I am taking history of rock and roll 2 and I have to listen to listen to a lot of music, fer serious I have to write a paper every week. Anyhow, I was thinking that it would be cool to do a design inspired by a fave album or something. The only other concrete instruction is to put the name of the artist(s) and the album/mix title in the comments. In an effort to keep it design-y, perhaps it would be a good idea to try to make an album cover or a concert poster.

I imagine that this last week and especially weekend was pretty busy for everyone so it is no surprise that there weren't any submissions. I also think that the last prompt was a little on the complicated side. I think that I will try to come up with ideas that can be fully realized in under three hours, shooting for around one hour's worth of work. Then again, sketches are fine too.

I would like to compliment Julianna and Katherine's work. I really like the effect that Julianna got with the flower pot, I like that the colors are so different from the usual terra cotta. When I came up with the prompt, one of the things that I had in mind was like this, picture I found, shown on the right. In it, you can see how the adjacent colors can change our perception of those colors, mainly where the green becomes blue due the its proximity to the purple. Also when I played around with the transparency and stuff, I was able to mix the cmyk like paint, I didn't use that technique because it just looked like the colors that I mixed not the mixture of cmy if you know what I mean.

I would also like to thank Kate and Julianna for taking part in this excersize. I originally intended to do this by myself, I am pretty stoked to have other people involved.

I had mentioned that I intend to keep these prompts simple and hopefully less time consuming. On the other hand, you get out of this what you put in. To be quite honest, I haven't really been putting much time into this, but I intend to treat the subsequent prompts more like a class assignment. Just to be clear though, I still plan to make the prompts easy.

Happy 4th

I will put up the prompt tomorrow by midnight.

Moving right along…

I realized recently that I started this thing too early. For some reason I had the first challenge week associated with the first week of summer term, which is bizarre because I am taking classes this summer and I should know better. Anyhow, due to the level of participation so far, the "reward" is free for the taking. A design a week is quite a lot to aske of anyone, especially during a vacation. I plan to stick to the schedule because that was how this all got started, I wanted to challenge myself.

I got an email from one of the followers recently and they told me that they had some ideas for the first challenge, but didn't feel like they were worth submitting. In every sketch, there is a kernel of a design. I hope that I can encourage some more submission by explaining that this is a challenge, but it is only a challenge in the sense that we are pushing ourselves to come up with different ideas. It certainly isn't a contest to see who is the best. I realize that most of the people are going to go be traveling or otherwise occupying themselves with entertaining activities that are specifically planned to shake off the detritus of school. I still hope that ya'll with find some time to participate in a challenge or two.

In reference to the title of this post, I will present the next prompt. I have decided to try a more specific challenge, a logo. This logo must have something to do with psu. It can be a variation on the current one or something completely different. It may help to think of a logo for a specific part of psu. It could be for the vikings or maybe the art/design department.

Some links that may be helpful in this challenge are,
www.welovetypography.com
www.ffffound.com
www.thedieline.com

welovetypography is a neat site of various exapmple of type, some are duds but there is some really cool stuff too. ffffound is a site of general art and design finds on the internet. The dieline is a site that concerns packaging, there are lots of examples of logos and such to be had here. BTW, FFFFOUND.com is of not safe for work and sometimes welovetypography is as well.

Whether you guys are designing or just enjoying your vacation, I hope you are having fun!

'ello everybody

This weeks prompt is: Rational

This is just as open ended as last weeks, with one requirement, there must be a readable rational for the design integrated within the design. It doesn't have to be verbose by any means, still it needs to be somewhat believable. I recommend using as complicated a design as you wish with the idea in mind that you will have to explain your decisions.

Part of the reason for this prompt is page design. It will be important when you guys take art200, if you haven't taken it already. Of course for the one page design, illustrator is more than adequate for the task, although you will be using indesign in art2oo. If you have access to indesign, now might be a good time to familiarize yourself with it, it is an awesome program! I will extend the offer of tech help with indesign if anyone wants it, you should have my email. Part of the problem with indesign is that the power of the program is often .not readily apparent until some instruction is given on the subject

For those of you following along at home…

I gave the deadlines some more thought and came to the conclusion that I should give the next prompt at the deadline. Since I was going to make saturday the deadline already, that will be the day that I give the prompts as well. The time for the deadline will be midnight. I may give the prompts earlier than that, but hopefully never after.

This challenge is tentatively scheduled for the eight weeks of summer term. I would like to keep it going until the end of summer break, we'll see how we feel after the first eight weeks

On to the challenge!

Now that ART116 is no longer offered and its redistribution into the other art class being uneven, I thought that I would start out with a little color theory. In my color theory class, most of the assignments had a color restriction, like we had to use only one complementary pair for example.

PROMPT: CMY

These are the colors that you can use for this week, that means that your pallet should consist of only pure cyan, pure magenta and pure yellow. This isn't as limiting as you may think, as you know, most printing is done in cmyk, so there are ways to get all kinds of colors out of the blending of these colors in illustrator. The challenging aspect of this is to figure out how to get the effect that you want out of a limited pallete.

There are a few ways of getting different colors out of cmy. The most obvious one is to use the multiply transparency and overlap shapes. To imitate the cmyk printing process, you can use small dot or shaps of the colors and place them near each other so that far away, it looks like one color. The way that we place the color in the design can effect the way that it looks too.

ADDITIONAL GUIDELINES: As I have stated, the purpose of this exersize is to have fun and not worry so much about the 'right' way to design. That said, I advise that you do not use work that you did not create yourself (i.e. pictures and illustrations). This is partially to get in the habit of creating our own content for when we get paid to do this and I think that it adds a little more challenge and more control over the project.

This is due at midnight, saturday the 20th of June. Feel free to upload to flickr before the due date for feedback!

Here 'tis

This is the meeting place for the design a week for the summer challenge. This is just a preliminary message to anchor the blog. I have made a flickr group here, http://www.flickr.com/groups/1087902@N25/ that should take you to the group page. I made an assumption about this, I assumed that everyone is 18+ so I made the group 18+ for extra creative freedom.

I would like to say a few things about my ideas for this project; I don't expect that all of these designs will be polished and perfect. If nothing else, I expect that will be an opportunity to shake out our bad designs without our GPA on the line. The prompts will be simple, sometimes vague, but completely open to interpretation. The important part of this exercise is to get an appropriate response to your intent in your design, not to find the perfect response to the prompt. Keep in mind, we are only taking a week to finish these solutions, so try to figure out your intent as soon as possible.

An idea that I have been kicking around for this project is a possible reward for participating for every week. It isn't really a reward in the sense of getting fabulous cash prizes, but a reward of controlling the final product of this challenge. I would like to put together a book that represents the work from this project and I feel that it is only fair that those who participated all the way through get a say in it. I am not certain how that would be handled, but we have time to work it out.

As for the logistics of the challenge, I was thinking that I will give the first prompt sunday the fourteenth and the first design will be due the next saturday, the twentieth. And it will follow in that manner, sunday prompt and saturday deadline until it ends. I would like this to go at least as long as summer term, butI think that it would be best to go until fall term. We could break it into two challenges as well.

I was thinking that using the 8x10 size would be convenient because most of our printers won't print bigger than 8.5x11 and it would make them read better in book format if we are going to use tabloid sheets.

Typing this, I realized how serious I sound. I feel that it is important to have a single person to organize this project. I would like to say, however, that I do not intend to take the role of instructor or judge. I just want to get this going and provide the prompts and whatever else pops up.

I hope that everyone is okay with this and if not, please leave a comment.