Artomatic

So as a whole I enjoyed Artomatic, although I will admit I only visited three floors: 1, 2, and 11. I enjoyed the concept of getting all these artist together in one building and devoting the entire building to it. I wonder about the entry requirements for the show, as the styles and level of quality (for lack of a better word, don't judge me) varied pretty drastically. Some of the site specific installations were awesome! I loved most of the graffitti that was on the first floor, and there was a sculptural thing coming out of the wall that vaguely looked like monochrome graffitti (I think it was on the second floor, or maybe the 11th, I forgot to write down which floor it was, and honestly the floors started to blur together). I took a lot of pictures of examples of the art and artists that I liked as I wandered around. I will attempt to put links to them on this blog over the next few days (I've never done that before so this might prove to be tricky). The way that some of the art was displayed was also very creative in a lot of cases. There was one artists who made little purses out of books, and to display their work, they hung them up on little nails on walls that they had completely covered with pages from classic books including Alice in Wonderland. Another artist, Maria Cristina Belaval, showcased her work of abstract neon colored lines and dots on black canvas on a wall that was covered with neon colored post-it notes! An artist named Gary Norton showcased his photographs of nature against a terracotta colored wall and the frames made of metal from Haiti. Some did innovative things with everyday concepts or objects. One artist, Atti Vakil,  worked with shells, arranging them into lines and waves, and them spray painting them with metallic paint. It was eye catching form afar and drew me in to inspect it more closely. Kirsty Little, a sculptor, made a sculpture of the human spine, displayed it on a black board and dramatically lit the piece from above. She also had a small round dias of her pottery displayed with dramatic lighting, but it was kind of crammed into the back of the room, and you couldn't walk around it, which was disappointing to me.   I am hoping that I will get to go back there, although I am not sure when I will get to go.

Logos

So this blog post will be about Logos. Or rather one logo and its designer (I think?). So let's get down to business. The designer I chose was one of the few famous female logo designers, Ruth Kedar. She is known for designing the Google logo.

 According to Wikipedia (yes, yes grain of salt and all that), she was asked by the inventors of google for some preliminary logo ideas. The playful use of color along with its use of Times New Roman-esque typeface was what was attracted them to her design. The other search engines at the time of Google's launch were commercial portals first and search engines secondarily, so the logo had to be different in order to help differenciate themselves and their search engine centric ideology from the other companies. . The  typeface chosen is :

"based on Catull, an old style serif typeface. Catull borrows elements from traditional writing instruments such as the quill and the chisel with a modern twist. Search, by nature, is an activity that requires we look into the past. Therefore Catull’s historical ties seemed appropriate, as did the bridging between the old analog world and the new emerging digital era." 

 In addition to designing the Google logo, she has done other logos as well, albeit none of the companies are as famous as Google. She also is fairly well known for her designs and redesigns of playing cards (and as her master's thesis was on playing card design, this makes sense) She also has artwork and exhibitions that have been shown around the world.

Sources used :
http://blog.inkd.com/inkd_website/most-famous-logo-designers-in-graphic-design-history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Kedar
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-01-14-n16.html
http://www.kedardesigns.com/

Web 2.0

So I looked up "Web 2.0 websites" and found a large list of them at AjaxProjects Web2. I clicked around and found a Web 2.0 website called Endeve. It is a business selling an electronic invoicing program for businesses both large and small. It is obvious that the graphics where designed/made in Illustrator. It is very clean and simple. It has lots of gradients, textured backgrounds, and hints of three dimensionality in the buttons, with the illusion of rounded highlights. The graphics also give the illusion of transparency through use of color changes and gradients. It is very clean and professional looking. I hope I can do something like that in the future.

"Art Gallery"

So i went to the "art gallery" downstairs. The one on the ground floor. My thoughts are ....meh. As an art Gallery, its not very good . As a showcase for student work and their involvement in the community, its great. I just feel like calling it an art gallery is trying to make it into something its not. When I went to UH, there was an art gallery on campus. It was also small, but at least larger than the space here. In addition to showing student/faculty work, it also showed artists (mid career, not fresh from school, but still alive and creating work) and artist collectives. The gallery actually had curators (I was an intern for one of the curators there)and created exhibition catalogs  for each show they held. While most of the "gallery" in AIW was professionally done, it seems a little strange that some parts of it were put up with pushpins. Really? pushpins? Ugh. Anyways, I'm just not sold on it being a "art gallery". The work was great, and it showcases the student's and their involvement in the community very well. It's just not an "art gallery".

web design - circles

I am wondering if there is a way to arrange the information on a page using the circular shape and have it be still legible and easy to navigate as most normal websites are. We have been learning about the grid, and while I understand that concept and that its important to use it in order to organize information, I just wonder if we could use a circular system and still achieve the same results. Since the computer screen and the window on the screen acts as a framing device for the website this is probably part of why rectangular and square shapes work well in website design. But in my graphic design classes at UH, I also learned that it is sometimes interesting to break the rectangular framing device with circles. I think it would certainly be eye catching, but I'm not sure if i could organize it well enough for the audience to understand it and for it to be intuitive. I have tried looking for some examples of using circles to organize information on the web but haven't really come up with anything. If you know of any examples, please let me know.

Trends

So I was looking around for a site to talk about and after finding many sites that seem to either fall into either geometric or possibly corporate, I finally found one that I -think- is organic. The site is Rocket Dog, a shoe company. There are several reasons that cause me to think the site is organic. For one, it uses an earthy color scheme, using mostly light browns with a robin's egg/sky blue for visual contrast. The texture in the visuals is slightly organic too, reminiscent of the texture of rough rocks or tree bark. The picture in the background is asymmetrical, with the woman only being on the left side of the screen. In the side scrolling main cell, the visual designs often blend together, overlap, or seem to peek into the cell frame slightly, giving a sense of fluidity and asymmetry. the structure of the site is still very blocky, and the text used is an often chunky san serif , which while not terribly organic, is probably used to help keep the site looking clean and professional, as well as easy to read. (PS, is this a long enough blog post, ro should it be longer?)

Trends

In class today, we talked about several different trends with regards to web design. They were: Organic, Geometric, and Grunge. For Organic trend, I chose the example of Traders Joe's website because it has a light brown color background fitting with a "earthy" color palette of Organic, as well as images of birds and leaves, and it was not as rigid as other websites. Some of the images leak out of their boxes, and the site is not perfectly symmetrical. For Geometric trends, I feel that the Blaffer Art museum's website is a good example. It uses geometric shapes, such as circles and rectangles, as well as thick bands of color to help give a very orderly, clean, and rigid feel. As for Grunge trend, sites like Spencer's are an example of the graffiti and dirty look often associated with that trend.

The trend I am going to talk in depth today is Organic. Organic is usually associated with earth tone colors, greens, browns, sometimes yellow and blue. It is normally flowing, or asymmetrical keeping in the theme of living, growing things (mostly plants). Most of the time it depicts objects or animals found in nature, like plants, leaves, flowers, birds, various animals, etc. It is appropriate for use with some businesses and non profits, but not with others. Businesses and non-profits that deal with nature, food, and environmental affairs will get good use out of this trend, whereas businesses and non-profits dealing mainly with commerce, technology, urban life, etc , will not find this trend useful.