Studio Journal Entry

So while I perhaps have been a bit negligent with my blogging, I feel as though I have had a pretty good past couple of days studio wise.  In Design III I was feeling super stuck with the last two projects and really trying hard to break through and revise them to a place where I was happy with them and excited to show them/work on them in general. 

The first project was the 24 hours narrative in which we were assigned to create a visual representation of something we documented within a 24 hour period.  My project dealt with everything that was audible during 24 hours to me.  Things I heard on the bus, on the radio, in the gym, at a party. Anywhere and everywhere I went.  My end product was a grid of 8.5 x 11 inch sheets of paper with text phrases of select things I had heard.  The critique of this that I got was that the phrases didn't necessarily stand out the way I wanted as a result of the format and that there was too much color going on.  I was stuck on this for a really long time until finally I realized that it was the randomness of each individual phrase, fragmented as I had heard it, which was central to the project.  It was the oddity of each that stood out.  So just as I randomly came across each phrase with my ears, what better way to pass it along than for someone to come across it with their eyes.  So now I have 24 3.5x4" stickers to place around.  What I love about this is that because it lives out in the world instead of on a wall people can take it as they will.  Some won't even note it probably, but others will see them, read them, and perhaps make their own connections, because we all have associations of our own that are triggered from perhaps the most random collection of phrases.  

The second project was my data set poster.  My content for the poster (autobiographical in nature) was all of the broadway shows I have seen in the past five years.  I wanted to document the tradition, the routine, the memory of each show.  Since the poster was so large, I struggled a lot with scale, wanting to draw attention to the playbills, it took me awhile to figure out how to incorporate all of the components into one unified "data set".  The breakthrough here came with repetition of iconography.  Through repetition I was able to display the key players (the people who I see shows with regularly), the favorite restaurants we visit over and over again, and the other things that over time have accumulated into such different memories, despite a pattern that is so habitual.  Really separating the information into two parts I was able to write a little bit about each show and the things that were memorable about it.  The poster really became about the people I was with and the things that happened around this routine.  In the case of both projects I am happy with the end product now that I have revisited each, but still feel a little bit of a struggle to involve my thesis interests.  Each does deal with memory and associations, and I guess on some level personality (type can have personality too!)  it is just perhaps a rather loose connection.   

The next challenge is a new cliche. I will have to update on that one later... 

Design III Reading Set 3

I'll be honest- I had some trouble getting through this reading set, the material was not jumping out at me as it had in the previous reading sets.  I had a hard time looking at and focusing on the graphically excellent examples, which perhaps is why I am struggling with my own data set. What I did come away from it with however was what I read at the very end. The Principles of Graphical Excellence, a checklist of sorts to reference while working.  Key lines to me were first and the last. "Graphical Excellence is the well-designed presentation of interesting data- a matter of substance, of statistics, and of design." and "graphical excellence requires telling the truth about the data." I imagine I'll be checking this list again before my poster is complete.

The second reading - Brief Notes on the Art and Manor of Arranging One's Books- was more interesting to me in concept than in actuality, maybe that's simply because I could not to relate to the scale of book organization that the author was referencing.  That said, perhaps the idea went over my head, but what it did make me think about was the impulse to organize any type of collection, not merely books.  How do you display something you hold dear, want people to see, have a lot of?  There are so many options and I think the point the author kept returning to was that it isn't the final organization that is important or what really matters to us, it is the process and what we find along the way.  We appreciate our own collections by looking at them, and we do this while we organize and interact with them on a much greater level than if they were just thrown haphazardly about.