final video Final movie!

Higher quality video

website

www.people.ku.edu/~cklee

When you have an advocacy poster due, who you gonna call!?

thought this was a pretty cool example of taking something familiar and obscuring it.

Successful Website design

first of all check out this site!

Fundamental questions to be had:

Where am i?

Where have i been?

Where can i Go?

Why should i go there?

avoid mystery. The ideas should be simple and clear to all viewers.

"Take a moment to give your site one last look. Know that you have a few specific metrics in mind, how usable is your page? Are there any parts of your page that might need some extra clarification?"

nice typography on a wend morning.

Inspiration

Without a doubt i would have to say that the most inspiring thing this semester was going to dallas. It was really nice to get to see profesionals work as well as other students my age from all around. I left there with mass amounts of excitement along with mass amount of free design reference material.

This semester has changed me a lot. No longer can i go out without realizing design factors all around me, and as geeky as i have become i find it incredibly awesome. I have found my niche and try and draw inspiration from all around.

I also considered the studio tours to be inspiring because we got to get a look at stuff that we could be designing in a few years which is motivation to keep working hard so that we can produce something awesome.

Larry Lessing

Larry Lessing // was very interesting even though he came off anti-technology at first. I agree that copy rights dont need to be so severe because it hinders creativity. I like how he suggests that we should allow users to take certain things if they "remix" it. By allowing copyright laws to be more free i believe we are allowing for kids to have more of an output. Creativity and making stuff is how i relax and i feel that by having such strict copyright laws we are not allowing people to express themselves. 

I enjoyed the Lessing quote: 

"Does culture belong to the participants, or the creators?"

Eero Saarinen

I find Eero Saarinen's clean style to be very intriguing. Especially his tulip chair, which i will eventually add to my collection. He was important because he developed quite a bit in furniture design and he was a prolific architecture, designing the Arch in St. Louis.

//BIO//

Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future is a comprehensive project exploring the work of one of the most prolific, unorthodox, and controversial masters of 20^th-century architecture. The project examine the architect’s wide-ranging career from the 1930s through the early 1960s. Saarinen’s international array of buildings will be featured, as well as his path breaking designs for furniture and his master plans for civic centers and universities. The journey featured full-scale building mock-ups, never-before-seen drawings, models, photographs, films, and ephemera. An international consortium of Finnish and American scholars and curators has been assembled to bring different perspectives to Saarinen’s work and to identify resonance between mid-century culture and that of today. The emphasis will be the global relevance of Saarinen’s work. Focusing on the stylistic plurality of Saarinen’s output and the collaborative nature of his practice - themes that resonate with today’s design preoccupations. The journey presents a timely and critical view of a formative era of American modernism that continues to shape contemporary culture.

Although his career was cut short by death at age 51 in 1961, Eero Saarinen was one of the most celebrated architects of his time, both at home and abroad. In the postwar decades of what has been called “the American Century,” Saarinen helped create the international image of the United States with his designs for some of the most potent symbolic expressions of American identity: the 630-foot-tall, stainless-steel St. Louis Gateway Arch (1948-64) along the Mississippi River commemorating the nation’s westward expansion; the aluminum-and-glass General Motors Technical Center (1948-56) outside Detroit, Michigan - hailed by contemporary critics as “an industrial Versailles”; and the TWA Terminal (1956-62) at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, where swooping concrete vaults thrilled travelers with the glamour of international flight.  

For these and other buildings, Saarinen rejected a single unifying style, preferring instead a diverse vocabulary inspired, he said, by each project’s unique “site, program, and spirit.” His multi-faceted oeuvre challenged the received orthodoxies of modern architecture. He advanced some of modernism’s most revered precepts such as its emphasis on new building technologies while, at the same time, turning away from its minimalist principles and moving towards sculptural exuberance, metaphor, and historical precedent.

Saarinen’s response to prestigious commissions from corporations such as General Motors, IBM, and CBS took the less-is-more aesthetic of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in new and surprising directions. For GM he developed a bold color palette of exterior brick walls in tune with the latest model cars, and he clad the new corporate headquarters for Deere & Company (1957-63) of Moline, Illinois, in weathered Cor-Ten steel to evoke the ruggedness of the company’s farm machinery. In contrast, the David S. Ingalls Rink (1953-59) at Yale and the Dulles International Airport Terminal (1958-62) outside Washington, D.C., identified Saarinen as a structural virtuoso of dynamic forms. The architect’s 1958 pedestal chairs and tables for Knoll International tended towards organic, space-age shapes.

In contrast, his round brick Kresge Chapel (1953-56) for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale’s concrete-and-stone Morse and Stiles Colleges (1958-62) were frankly historicist, deferring to their time-honored university settings by drawing on images, respectively, of ancient grottos and Italian hill towns.

Saarinen’s stylistic range came to represent the postwar American ideal of an open-ended society of unbounded choice and diversity. Key to the successful projection of this ideal were Saarinen’s visionary clients - businessmen like IBM’s Thomas J. Watson and CBS’s Frank Stanton who presided over the development of progressive technologies like computers and television. Saarinen, working in close collaboration with his clients, deployed equally progressive construction and mechanical systems for new office buildings set in bucolic corporate parks. At the same time, Saarinen himself embodied the free and creative individualist. Together, Saarinen and his work represented the image of capitalist America, ever new and dynamic and in full control of its domain.

Saarinen was also completely conversant with modern American media, garnering huge press coverage and presaging today’s celebrity architect of signature buildings. Popular magazines such as Vogue, Playboy, The New York Times Magazine, and Time, which put the architect on its cover in 1956, heralded him as the most important architect of his era, both in terms of career success and artistic genius.

At the same time and continuing after his death, leading critics such as Vincent Scully questioned Saarinen’s commitment to the egalitarian ideals of the modern movement, his disregard for the urban fabric that surrounded his sculptural masterpieces, and his aesthetic inconsistency. Another leading critic, Manfredo Tafuri, cited Saarinen as a prime example of postwar American modernists who commercialized the socialist ideals of the European modern movement, and then tried to invest contemporary buildings with meaning, especially by emphasizing symbolic form over structural logic. To date, Saarinen’s work has received uneven attention in the architectural press, and most important surveys of 20^th century architecture reduce his contribution to a few well-known projects.

By exploring more than 50 of the architect’s built and proposed projects, Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future is the first opportunity to understand Saarinen’s collective work in the larger arena of postwar modern architecture.

Hillmancurtis.com videos

David Carson // the video on hillmancurtis.com was interesting in that he talks about how he was a change in typography and how its inevitable to happen a second time, but he didn't expect such a big gap. This video showed a lot of good work that he did, and is interesting in the fact that he was so different for his time and something new could pop up any day. 

At the time that you were creating a new style others didn't know how to handle such a radicle change, how did you cope with other designers?

Paula Scher // Paula brings up the idea of using type as image. Her work is very heavily type based and she uses the type to relay a message or an emotion. I find it funny how she says that she designs within seconds of hearing the problem and the first or second choice is the one that prevails.

If you believe that craft is such a large part of design, how are some other ways other than painting on your own that you keep that part still there?

Sagmeister // Sagmeister is interesting in how he uses quotes quite often. I enjoy the quote all the things i do come back to me. And found this video to be more interesting than the others.

Being very experimental with type allows for more to go wrong, how do you go about making something visually appealing and innovative at the same time?

Now its time to meet the real chris klee...

DSVC National Student Conference...

Did you say liquor... or design, This weekend Jovan, lauren, brian, cat and I attended a design conference in Dallas. Between guessing that type face and listening to professionals the weekend was nothing short of inspiring. Loading up with pounds of free samples, t-shirts and some stolen posters... we enjoyed our time to the fullest. This experience has opened my eye to new design, type solutions, and others work around me. I definitely plan on attending this conference next year along with any conferences in between.

I recomend this to anyone, as it is extremely eye opening!

FINAL VIDEO!!!!!!

journal entry

i read Type Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry and  Ways of Looking at a Typeface and found them very interesting. I find it funny that so many people used futura yet i haven't found myself using it once. I enjoy how our type class expects a reason for using a specific type, for example my book covers i used interstate because it was highly legible and was very propaganda like.

I enjoyed ways of looking at a typeface because i found it amusing how it relates freedom of fonts to being primiscuous. I felt this way at first in type 01 when we moved to the computer because i was allowed to use a wide rage of fonts.

a few substitutes for futura could include...

Gill sans- not as pointy 

Akzidenz Grotesk

mews gotic

rotis sans

trade gothic

Univers

some cool package designs

A new way at looking at those old products.

round 2

Shining City on a Hill from Chris Klee on Vimeo.

Type in Urban Settings

This project reminded me of an assignment from my highschool photo class. We were shown the same example of the alphabet from looking up. We were required to go around and shoot things in nature or urban settings that resembled letters. On top of that we were required to shoot the photos in order from a-z. I feel that this assignment was kind of like it but more eye opening because i have a new understanding of type that i didnt have in highschool.

MY JOURNEY THROUGH L_TOWN