i went to the tate modern today to complete a brief that i failed to do when i shouldve gone on wednesday, but i guess that was for the better because had i gone on wednesday i probably wouldve wasted the day eating lunch with my mates and not got much done. much to my surprise i seemed to get quite a lot done and being alone in my own thoughts seemed to help me think about the work i was looking at in much more detail. aesthetically and conceptually. here are the fruits of my labour. well, only some of them. and i can hardly call it labour, i mean, farmers working the cotton fields in africa do labour. i was drawing in a fancy gallery in london. but yeah.
[each work of art is followed by my typographic response]
me? nothing. but stefan sagmeister has. you see he's a graphic designer and typographer and he's got a pretty cool book with the same title. its a nicely put together collection of sentences or 'maxims' which have been published in a fantastic array of fonts and type, such as this:
'trying to look good limits my life'
here's an essay which i wrote on it if you feel like getting your teeth stuck into some nice juicy words. sagmeisteressay.pdf
however, even better is the spin-off website which sagmeister created, called, yes you guessed it, things i have learned in my life so far. it's great because it allows anyone to contribute their own life lessons in a visually creative way. i find it really inspirational to flick through all the contributions. if i ever do learn anything in life, i'll be sure to post it on there.
heres a poster ive made using a font that i put together using a zip that i tore out of my manbag. im currently putting the finishing touches to the upper case letters and formatting it into a working truetype font, which once done will be available here for anyone who may someday find a use for writing with zips.
i finished this a couple of days ago in time for the crit at college, the last few hours of editing were so stressful. basically its an answer to a 'karaoke' brief, to produce some moving text in synchronisation to our choice of 30 songs. I chose a song called o superman by a performance artist called laurie anderson, who, as im reliably informed by wikipedia, is married to a certain lou reed. i chose it because it was a slightly strange song with clear vocal/lyrical elements that i fancied working on. after reading a bit about anderson and the song i found that some parts of it are about communications systems in america such as the planes, phones, couriers etc so i thought id work on that theme for a visual interpretation of the song. [i hope this is evident to you, the audience] i partly chose the song because i thought it would present me with a bit of a challenge. that turned out to be the case. most of the difficulty i encountered was technical. i struggled with the stop motion section on the fridge and although id managed to get my hands on adobe after effects and premiere pro i couldnt for the life of me figure out how to work them. so i better learn how in time for the next film based project. if there was an ideal outcome of the film, it would all have been shot in one go as one running sequence, because the cuts in the scenes really annoy me. also some parts are shot at night, when the film is set at daytime. and i had plans for the film to go on another minute or so but i left it too late to film these. aside from all this i do quite like some elements and i think my original ideas have come through quite nicely.
then again we cant all be our own critics so let me know what you think
[sorry about the pop-ups, couldnt get the video onto youtube]
right, business time. actually im gonna go off on a tangent before i get there. this morning (5am to be precise) i got up and went with my brother to the nokia shop on regents street because we'd heard on xfm that if you buy their new touchscreen music phone for 250 quid you get a pair of benicassim tickets to boot. now these tickets are worth over 300 and i was gonna buy myself one pretty soon anyway so i figured if i bought the phone and tickets, sold the phone and one ticket i'd be quids in. so i did. sold the phone to my dad for a ton, and the other ticket to my brother. smiles all round. turns out the phones pretty sweet anyway [here comes the arty stuff] and as i was rooting around its applications etc i found this amazing short animation, which i had in fact seen before, but at this point in time where it relates to what i'm doing at college, it made me realise how amazing it really is. 'i met the walrus' is a series of visual interpretations of an excerpt from an interview between a young budding journalist and john lennon, which is a pretty interesting interview in itself but taken to whole new levels with Josh Raskin's visuals. watch it. and watch it in HIGH QUALITY. you know you love that youtube shit
i gathered that since you're able to replace the title and description of the blog with an image i could create my own little number to make the blog more 'me'. i started playing around with the rosewood font but concluded it was probably too similar to one already out there, which i rather like;its actually a pretty good music blog too, check it out - http://ppelectro.blogspot.com/ although i'm sure if you've got any taste in music you've already stumbled across it.
i'll have another go at my own, more original title, some time in the not too distant future. then again, there might be something on the telly.
so yeah i got pretty intrigued, if not jealous of a mate of mine who's got a pretty cool blog (hi tom!) [edit: how rude of me to not include a link] and figured he could do with some competition, although i dont think it's me who's going to give it to him. also a lot of lecturers and talking people at college go on about blogs as if theyre the answer to all creative success. as far as i'm concerned i think if i do this it'll give some sort of structure to my thinking and we'll all be better off for the experience.
i looked at the gadgets that you can add to your blog when you set it up. you can have a slideshow of all your photos on flickr, if you have any of course. i guess thats the next thing to tick off on my list. they also have a south african joke-a-day gadget which was bizarrely one of the most popular gadgets going. i tried to add it to see what all the fuss is about but there was an error, something like source not found. maybe thats the joke
