50 Albums. 50 Typefaces. 50 Days.

Our first assignment at the start of last fall was to produce 5 album cover designs per week for 10 weeks. The parameters were simple:

Black and white or grayscale.

No images, only geometric shape.

Choose a single typeface (variations within the family permitted).

No one face could be used more than once.

No one album could be used more than once.

Include: the band name, album name, track names, track numbers, and track times

Design in the time it takes to listen to the album.

The final step was to create a package design to contain all 50 printed album covers and a CD containing all the files and a Keynote presentation of all covers as well. I chose to do a sleeve and insert. The insert would contain all the covers and a divider that pulled up to reveal the disc. The disc was sprayed with a spray varnish that subtly shows the number 50 in the areas left without the spray.

The purpose? To consider hierarchy and formal typographic relationships; experiment with form, space, composition, structure, and to practice quick decision making and to aid in the discovery of new music.

Fifty days of discovery.

Click on the thumbnails below to view some select album cover designs.

Type Specimen Poster

The typeface, Agnes Serif, is a free font by a French design company.
The file that is downloadable only offers upper and lowercase letters.
I love the playful architecture of this face. The thin lines and large
bubbly serifs give it an informal and alien feel while also seeming very
structured and almost reminiscent of music notes as well. So I de-
cided to use music lyrics for the body copy. The song is “La La La La”
by The Bird and the Bee. I wanted to play up not only the structure but
the playfulness of the face as well in the poster.

Psychogeographic Map

My psychogeographic map was a compilation of many elements. Reading through the material about situationism and mapping, the story about the man using a map of London to navigate a city of Germany stuck with me as did Guy Debord piece that was a city made up of female body parts. I decided to use my palm as a map because of its map like qualities. The idea to use the Spirograph as an element was inspired by a visual mapping project done for a poetry competition. (http://eagereyes.org/blog/visual-mapping-of-poetry.html) I photocopied my palm and enlarged it to a size that I could see and draw on more effectively. I had a friend of mine drive me around town as looked at my “map” and told her where to turn in relation to the map. Overall the work was very planned out yet had no clear finishing point. I had no idea where each turn would lead, which is the whole point of using a map. When it came to the design, I wanted the unpredictable nature of the project to continue. I just did what felt right and fitting for the piece.

For the spirograph, I created a numbering system for the letters of the alphabet. I took street names from the journey and translated them into numbers by adding up the letters of the name in relation to the numbering system. I then used the sum of the numbers to correspond to the gears of the spirograph. Each individual mark was made by taking the individual letters’ numbers and using the pen hole on the gear that matched that number. For example, Holtzclaw street looks like this: 8+15+12+26+3+12+1+23=120. The gears 72 and 48 were used (their sum equals 120). The holes in each gear ranged from 1 to 26, so for the letter ‘H’ which corresponds to the number 8 in the numbering system, the #8 hole was used on gear 48 and so on.

I layered some quotes from our drive within the final piece. One in particular I feel sums up the whole process; my friend said, “It’s weird driving around without a destination.” There was no real way for me to know exactly where each turn would lead or how each graph would turn out.

Memory Mapping

For this Xerox mini-project, I chose to use a memory from my child-
hood that pops up in the memory banks every now and then. When
this project was due, it was almost a year to the day since my grand-
mother’s death. I had been thinking a lot about my experiences shared
with her and how special they were. It got me to thinking about all the
trips we used to take with her and my grandfather out to the Millington
military base outside Memphis.
We went several times during the years, but all the trips have melded
together in my mind. I looked at my feet a lot as a child because I was
shy so I seem to remember a lot of the ground but I know there was a
lot going on in my peripheral. The memory map represents that sort of
image space filled with words and phrases that meld together to form
inarticulate banter while some words pop. It also mimics the empty,
boring road that we would drive to get to the base.

Publication Design for “Eye” Magazine

I spent a lot of time with the particular copy of Eye I was given study-
ing its layout, color schemes and articles. The headline font was
consistent throughout the publication and it had three variations of
positioning at the start of each article. I meticulously measured the
positioning of elements on the back and front covers. When I began to
add in my own content, I kept in mind the publications use o negative
space within the layout and the additional information hidden away in
image captions and footnotes.
The images were mash-ups of the Sagmeister book cover and im-
ages related to artists’ work mentioned in the article. For the cover
designs, I made up my own articles for the back content and used
one of the fictional articles as inspiration for the monome image on
the back and front while using roughed up vector line art based off
the die cut cover of Sagmeister’s book.
I wanted the design, overall, to look and feel as if it could truly live
within the pages of Eye. Because each issue is so unique, I think it is
somewhat hard to pinpoint what makes something look “Eye-like”.
But taking close look at and paying attention to the grid and details
make almost any design Eye worthy.

Museum Promotion: Type II

For the Museum Promo project I focused on creating a cohesive
group of elements that was unique to the particular “exhibit” I was
designing for but could also be a template that could fit the ones that
would follow. Simple changes in typeface, images and color palettes
would be made for future collections shown at the fictional museum.
I chose to design in such a way that the logo for the museum became
a subtle element within the design as seen in the organization on
the back of the poster and in the navigation bar on the splash page.
Because of the nature of my images, I chose to not use one single
image throughout all of the designs, but chose the images that fit
each piece and its specific purpose and design.

The typefaces chosen for the poster are Din, Another Typewriter
Font, and Gotham. Gotham is easy to read for the written copy on the
poster and is carried out throughout all of the pieces. The typewriter
face is simple and readable but adds a bit of visual interest. Nothing
else seemed to fit the name of the exhibit quite the way it did either.
Din was chosen for the museum logo and information. It was chosen
for it’s subtle authority and architecture and for its cleanliness.

“Glue Factory” Copy: Since man domesticated animals, there has not
been a creature more revered as the horse. Horses have served man
for centuries and have been the subject of countless works of art and
been a part of religious tradition as well as mythology for many cul-
tures. Since the growth of industry, the use of the horse as a service
animal has waned. To own a horse, or a great number of them, for
pleasure and sport has become a sign of social status. Breeders and
managers collect exquisite specimens to add to their collections and
stables. “Glue Factory” is a collection of finely crafted horse replicas.
This collection gives a visual commentary on the variety and majesty
the horse embodies and voice to one person’s collection of a beast
whose status cannot be determined by who owns them, but by the
spirit they represent.

Logo Research

Hooray for logos! I looked at a variety of logos for museums primarily I looked at ones that used geometric form and ones that used more gestural forms and also some that used simply text.

I have used this inspiration in some of my ideas thus far, but so far i have not come up with a solid solution or track.

Cadek Calendar and Poster Creation of Goodness

From the start the seemingly distant finish, I thought this project was quite the challenge. Initially the thought of designing a calendar was, “hey, this will be a piece of cake. A piece of crumb cake.” Not so much. Simply organizing the information provided from the “calendar” from Cadek, was frustrating.

I worked hard to create a composition that was functional and easily readable. It went through many renditions until I finally settled on a large title in the center of the page, with ‘Cadek’s baseline resting on the center line of the page. the actual calendar element were scaled down from the first rough to make it more digestible all at one time while still keeping the terms separated. I’m quite pleased with the final result.

Moving on to the next step of the poster, I really focused on using my inspiration (posted below). I found myself running into problems with scale, composition, and image space. I knew I wanted to incorporate colored shapes and image. I found that my calendar placement was becoming secondary to the image and I had to find a solution to make them interact together as opposed to separate parts put together for the sake of aesthetics. I worked hard to refine the design and placement of the image of the little boy and the trumpet and finally got it to a place I was more pleased with. My favorite piece, and what I think makes the entire composition more resolved, is the color pallet. It’s warm and cohesive, and is visually stimulating.

Overall, I didn’t want something too bright and childish, but I also didn’t want it to be too “designer” for this is a conservatory of music geared toward the education of young people. I feel I found a happy medium between being appealing to a young audience, their parents, while still considering function and legibility.

pretty pretty posters

In searching for some inspiration for the next part of the Cadek project, I specifically looked  for poster designs that contained a significant amount of text. Most these have a decent amount of text and image that work together without one overpowering the other.

I am particularly fond of mixing images of different textures and subjects. At the same time I am drawn to clean, simple image/text combos. The first example is a good medium between those two.

Each poster has its own element of dynamism that appeals to a viewer while still informing them legibly.

Let’s roll out.

Some More Calendar Inspiration