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I’ve always had a love for photography. I used to hog my mom’s Canon on vacation. I capture scenes of nature more than anything else, so I decided I’d share my ten favorite nature photos that I’ve taken.

I’ve always been drawn to nature. Many of my subconscious doodles are organisms, mountains, and leaves. The way I see it, organic shapes have yet to be outperformed. I’m also very inspired by animals. Other lifeforms trying to survive and be comfortable, just less developed. Each species is another type of alien -- but they’re here, with us. You can learn so much about nature by watching animals. I try to capture animals when they’re most alive: when they’re thinking.

I also think that the best palettes are found in nature. Some of my favorite ones come from photos I never edited. For instance, seven of these ten photos haven’t been touched, but the colors are so rich. Delicate pastels and vibrant analogous schemes are all over, just waiting to be captured. By the way, I love nature photography.

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Designer Spotlight 2/2

Saul Bass is one of the most influential graphic designers ever, but I only started learning about him recently. I’m fascinated by his work with title credits. He literally helped redefine the function of an integral element of film. Being that he wasn’t a filmmaker, that’s amazing to me. Even more impressive, is his ability to balance simplicity and character. More often than not, this is the key to a strong logo, so it’s no surprise that he designed some of the 20th century’s most iconic logos. I know relatively very little about Bass, and I’m already a big fan of his, so I’m definitely going to do more research about him.

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Designer Spotlight 1/2

According to his website, Tobias Hall began his career as an illustrator and then moved on to typography. I’m aware that he wrote that, but I disagree with him. I think he began as an illustrator, and is now both an illustrator and a typographer. Most of his work, even his purely typographic work, is full of detail. I’m assuming that this stems from his illustration style, which utilizes cross contours and hatching to describe form and texture. His larger clients seem to be after his ability to give personality to letterforms, but I’m most impressed with his balance of visual hierarchy and level of detail. In theory, the more elements in a composition, the more combinations of visual order one can establish. Given that his illustrations are packed to the brim with detail, his ability to carefully move the eye through his compositions is admirable.

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Tyler The Creator has an extremely interesting fashion taste. He seems to be obsessed with bright colors AND brown, which feel like two different worlds to me. That being said, I really love his use of color. From listening to his music, reading about him, and watching his skits and interviews for a long time now, I think his use of color stems from two places.

First, I believe he’s genuinely interested in vibrant colors. Second, he wants to use his platform to encourage others to “be who they are” (Where This Flower Blooms by, Tyler, The Creator). Many uninformed people think of Tyler as a divisive figure, although the acceptance of others is a huge part of his brand and stage persona. He’s been preaching this message through his music and media content for practically his whole career.

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Trip to the library

Last Monday, I went to the Parkway Central Library with my University 101 class. We had the opportunity to see an exhibit currently on display at the library, and speak to one of the graphic designers who worked on it. The exhibit, called Voyages by Road and Sea, celebrates the shared bicentennial of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville.

I noticed that one image was cropped differently than the rest. I wasn’t sure if this was intentional, so I asked the designer about this choice. He admitted that it was an accident, and provided a reasonable explanation for it. He explained that the glass case where this image appeared took the longest to complete of all 22 cases. This was primarily due to issues with the text featured in the display. By talking to this graphic designer, I learned that, when one detail is particularly hard to get right, you should pay extra close attention to the overall design, as you’re more likely to overlook something else.

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The official travel website for Iceland has everything you’d ever want and more. The homepage features a well organized menu and breathtaking photography of Icelandic nature. The menu navigates the viewer towards information about sights and activities, historical information, and even flights. One menu item labeled “Iceland Academy” leads to six video courses to prepare oneself for a trip to Iceland. Each video is followed by a three question quiz. If you answer all three correctly, you get a badge for that course. Once all six badges have been acquired, you have graduated from Iceland Academy, and are well prepared for your next vacation. I don’t like to brag, but I graduated. Yes, it went straight to my ego.

The combination of sleek design, well organized hierarchies, beautiful photography, simple typography, mild humor, and well phrased text makes for an extremely enjoyable browsing experience. I didn’t want to stop clicking different menu items and watching videos because each click was so rewarding. I now want to travel to Iceland even more than I did previously, and thanks to this assignment, I know exactly what to do when I’m ready to go.

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These 10 pictures are all great examples of color combinations. My favorite one of these is the illustration of the skull in the field. It’s a wonderful combination of warm cools and cool warms. The illustrator did an amazing job blending these two worlds together, but these types of colors, blue violets and red violets, pair so nicely on their own. The addition of reds and blues helps add depth to the palette. It’s beautiful.

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Design & Explore Assignment

Celia, Evan, Sara, and I spent the afternoon in Chinatown. We went to a place called Chinatown Square, which we found out was a collection of many restaurants. At 11:00 am on a Sunday, Philly Poke was the only restaurant open, so we ate there. Most of us ordered poke bowls. It was actually the first one I’ve tried. As expected, it’s just lazy sushi, but sushi is amazing, so I was very pleased.

Chinatown is a fun area to explore, but it was pouring, so we didn’t walk around that much. We did however, see plenty of design. The first picture on the left is a cleverly designed electronic billboard. The screen wraps around two sides of the building, essentially doubling the viewership of a standard electronic billboard in the same location. The next picture to the right is a sidewalk panel that stood out to me. It was designed using a specific pattern style to complement the aesthetics of Chinatown. Seeing this served as a reminder that design can be anywhere. Don’t take a single piece of surface for granted. Each one has potential. The third picture, the logo for Chinatown Square, I thought was interesting. Though it’s not such a creative logo, I appreciate the simplicity and organization of the layout. On a sunnier day, I will definitely be back in Chinatown.

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Best of 2019 Package Design

Last year was a huge one for package design. A lot of extremely creative ideas came to fruition. I think about packaging in three main attributes: uniqueness, aesthetics, and physical material. As with any design, standing out from the current trends ensures for a more memorable product. At the same time, the aesthetics should employ basic design principles to become something you enjoy looking at. Designing with physical materials leaves room for a lot of creativity. 

In the case of Bzzz Honey, the wooden beehive is guaranteed to catch your eye at the store, and its balance and cleanliness hold your attention. It’s a remarkably simple and effective design. The Note perfume container achieves the same attention-grabbing effect with its unique shape. Seeing this on a shelf next to mostly glass and plastic fragrance bottles helps this brand stand out. Fish Club Wine is another great example of packaging designed with storefronts in mind. If you’re looking at a wine selection, there’s almost no chance you miss this one. It’s important to recognize that innovating with physical packaging materials is getting both increasingly difficult and important as our need to be environmentally conscious grows rapidly. The Vancouver Supermarket’s plastic bag campaign is a clever way to address this. While shaming consumers for using plastic bags instead of bringing their own is hilarious, it’s not a long term solution. The Soapbottle design however, is made with an outer shell of soap, so there’s no bottle to pollute the earth when you’re done. If all packaging could follow this self-containing product model, we could drastically reduce our overall waste. There’s still hope!

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I’ve always loved comedy. I have four brothers and two parents who are all hilarious. When we’re all together, we spend our time telling funny stories and making sarcastic comments to one another. When I was younger, my brothers and I were competitive about who could tell the same joke in a funnier way. Overtime, we started to figure out tricks and strategies for making people laugh and telling engaging stories. As the youngest sibling, I have many vivid memories of my brothers  interrupting me saying, “That’s not funny,” or, “That’s not how you tell a story.” These moments contributed to the development of my observant nature, which allowed me to learn comedic practices by watching other people.

As our appreciation for well-crafted humor developed, we took interest in talented stand-up comedians such as, Dave Chapelle, Louis C.K, Chris Rock, and Robin Williams. I’ve watched countless youtube videos and Netflix specials and talk-show clips of comedians and actors telling jokes. These are all cut and edited before they’re posted online, so I’ve never experienced an authentic stand-up comedy show. I’m soon going to change this by checking out the Philly Comedy Club.

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I recently attended a slam poetry competition at the Pearlstein Gallery, courtesy of The Philly Pigeon, a group that organizes poetry slams, workshops, and other artistic events.The room was dimly lit, had rows of chairs set up in front of a small stage, and a DJ set the mood with hip hop infused reggae. The event was structured as a tournament-style competition, with multiple rounds of performances and a winner. There were so many people who signed up to perform that they held a head to head haiku slam off to determine who would perform in the real competition. I think it’s really interesting to start an event about the power of word with short and compact stories. The haiku portion also allowed the event organizers to spend less time on the elimination round and more on the rest of the event.

After the elimination round, a guest poet from the Philly area performed some original poems. I was actually very disappointed with her performance. Her poetry felt like it was forced to sound “artsy,” which made for a pretentious tone, rather than an interesting one. I was following very closely, yet I didn’t understand most of what she said. The competing poets, on the other hand, shared interesting stories in a more concise and tangible way. It was very cool to watch so many people of different ages, races, sexes, and ethnicities perform on the same stage. Each poet had their own unique stories, style, and perspective, which made me want to perform my own poetry. There’s no time like the present, and I write a lot of poetry, so I’m currently searching for open mics and other venues to try performing my work. I’m not sure if I’ll enjoy it, I’m not sure I’ll be good at it, but there’s no reason not to try.

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These ten advertisements all stood out to me as simple and powerful ways to convey a message or idea. Some of them use the common method of assigning new meaning to already recognizable images. The advertisement for New York Film Academy does this very well. Combining the imagery of popcorn and a garbage can of scrap paper grabs the attention of people on both sides of the movie screen. The McDonalds billboard achieves a similar affect. Using the word “variety” and the clever image of an LGBTQ flag comprised of different sauce labels, this ad finds common ground between the McDonalds experience and the LGBTQ community.

The other advertisements mostly rely on more conventional design principles. For example, the ad for Allbirds primarily uses contrast and harmony to portray their product as something that will make the consumer’s life more lively. The shoes match the leaves in color, and the texture of the leaves is similar to the wood at the bottom of the frame, harmonizing the photo from top to bottom. The use of white also contributes to this effect. Contrast in color is used to accentuate the shape of the shoe, while contrast of line quality emphasizes the liveliness of the product. The only horizontal lines in the ad are placed at the bottom of the frame in the background. This stability is contrasted with the many angles of the leaves, pant tassels, feet, shoelaces, and italicized text.

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For the book design assignment, I chose “The Art of Maurice Sendak,” by Selma G. Lanes. This book instantly stood out to me because of the iconic illustration on the cover. I grew up loving “Where The Wild Things Are,” written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, so the choice was a no brainer.

The title is laid over the cover with a transparent sleeve to visually separate the text from the cover illustration, thus emphasizing the illustration. The texture for the cover illustration was well chosen, too. The book designer used a rough, canvas-like texture which beautifully compliments the hand drawn hatching style of the illustration. It feels exactly how you’d imagine the illustration to feel. This book also does a wonderful job of displaying the many styles of Maurice Sendak, which is very important in understanding him as an artist.

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These are ten examples of very strong typography usage. My main take away from looking at these examples as a unit is that there is no magic formula for good type. All of these examples are strong because the designers thought hard about the way people would interact with their designs, as well as, what ideas and messages needed to be conveyed specifically for that project. I love typography :)

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Response to Abstract episode 6: Paula Scher

This is my first attempt at conveying my deep appreciation for Paula Scher, and I probably won’t do it justice. I’ve watched her episode of Abstract (Netflix Docu-series) at least 20 times, and it gets better with each watch. Paula Scher is near the top of my Creative Inspiration List, among others like Picasso and Jon Bellion. Her process is nothing short of inspiring.

In order to create the most powerful design solutions, visual and non visual ideas must be broken down to their core and simplified, which Paula does spectacularly. Her words, “If it’s random, it’s wrong,” perfectly summarize my own philosophy on storytelling, as well as, the core of design: function. Every detail should have a purpose, whether obvious or subconscious. I immediately resonated with this quote when I first heard it, in the summer of 2017. Since then, I often repeat this line in my head while working on design projects.

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Fish town, Philadelphia is a colorful neighborhood that feels like a successful blend of suburban and urban lifestyles. It’s liveliness is cultivated through murals, funny signs, and fish icons everywhere one can see (not as ubiquitous as a beach town, though). It’s a nice area to walk around, but some warmer weather definitely helps.

Celia, Fiona, and I ate lunch at LocoPez (Spanish for “crazy fish”), a small Mexican restaurant and bar. Pushing aside the curtain at the entrance feels like stumbling upon a secret hideaway. The food took a while to come, but given how understaffed LocoPez was, it was very understandable. There was only one waitress. She was running around bartending, taking orders, and bringing food to about 40 customers. The quesadilla I ordered was quite good, but not big enough for my stomach to classify as an entire meal. The best part about LocoPez is the sauce bucket. Each table gets a metal bucket with six different sauces: three different hot sauces, including one with habanero peppers (not as hot as I expected), barbecue, salsa verde, and regular salsa. Salsa verde was the best of the six, but they were all pretty good. After lunch, we made our way towards a local second hand store.

We walked around two different second hand stores. Each space had a unique feel. The first one, called Urban Exchange, was guarded by a life-size Homer Simpson dressed head to toe in colorful fabric. The second one, Circle Thrift, had more reasonable prices and a larger selection of clothes and other items. Before we took the subway back to campus, we walked around the area for a little while, admiring funny signs and taking everything in. I’m sure I’ll be back in Fishtown.

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I really enjoy the style of the bottom illustration for a few reasons. For starters, the palette is a very well balanced version of the classic teal-red-orange-white-blue combination, which I happen to usually enjoy. The colors are vibrant enough to draw in the eye, and contrasted enough to let each shape stand on it’s own. The huge range in scale helps create movement throughout the illustration, as does the curviness of the shapes and the form of the human figures. The range in scale also allows certain areas to be emphasized, such as the people’s faces and the rocks below. Many of the shapes in this illustration feel like they were inspired by Matisse cutouts, which personally intrigues me. Overall, this piece is well-balanced, dynamic, and intriguing.