Tuesday, January 27, 2009











Who is Chipp Kidd?

Chipp Kidd is a legend in book cover design. His inspiration that was drawn from book design led himself to become an author. Overall, Chipp Kidd comes off as a highly entergetic designer, with a keene since of design, designing ov

er 1,000 covers. He is important to us because as young designers we are trying to find our sense of design and we can take is jackets and view them as good design.

 

Who is John Gall?

John Gall is another famous name in cover design. He is known for his unique covers that push the limits of design. His covers are very simplistic. Like Chipp Kidd we should know who Jonh Gall is because his work serves as a good example as design, and it is good for us as young designers to get an idea of the famous designers.


The index in general theory of

 love is the two chairs leaning onto each other. We interpret this as a sign of affection between two peo

ple even though its only a picture of two chairs.

from this series we view the index of an animal representing an idea. such as two deer getting ready to fight as the conflict. and the lion being the leader of the jungle so leading by example.in the case of suicide hill the index is the money and the gun so we assume its about crime.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

type 02 book cover research

Christopher Klee

Typography 02

Wertberger, MW

a sign is a stimulus pattern that has a meaning

 

Index- Defined by some sensory feature, A, (directly visible, audible, smellable, etc) that correlates with and thus implies or `points to' B, something of interest to an animal.

 

symbols are easily removable from their context, and are closely associated with large sets of other words. BIRD-is a symbol for bird

series- a group or a number of related or similar things, events, etc., arranged or occurring in temporal, spatial, or other order or succession; sequence

a set of successive volumes or issues of a periodical published in like form with similarity of subject or purpose.

Sequence-

 1.

the following of one thing after another; succession.

2.

order of succession: a list of books in alphabetical sequence.

A really good book cover has to work regardless of what it’s about, on a visceral and emotional level. Chi p Kidd

   

 

 

My three books-

fahrenheit 451- Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, on August 22, 1920. By the time he was eleven, he had already begun writing his own stories on butcher paper. His family moved fairly frequently, and he graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. He had no further formal education, but he studied on his own at the library and continued to write. For several years, he earned money by selling newspapers on street corners. His first published story was “Hollerbochen's Dilemma,” which appeared in 1938 in Imagination!, a magazine for amateur writers. In 1942 he was published in Weird Tales, the legendary pulp science-fiction magazine that fostered such luminaries of the genre as H. P. Lovecraft. Bradbury honed his sci-fi sensibility writing for popular television shows, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. He also ventured into screenplay writing (he wrote the screenplay for John Huston's 1953 film Moby Dick). His book The Martian Chronicles, published in 1950, established his reputation as a leading American writer of science fiction.

 

 

In the spring of 1950, while living with his family in a humble home in Venice, California, Bradbury began writing what was to become Fahrenheit 451 on pay-by-the-hour typewriters in the University of California at Los Angeles library basement. He finished the first draft, a shorter version called The Fireman, in just nine days. Following in the futuristic-dustpan tradition of George Orwell's 1984, Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953 and became Bradbury's most popular and widely read work of fiction. He produced a stage version of the novel at the Studio Theatre Playhouse in Los Angeles. The seminal French New Wave director François Truffaut also made a critically acclaimed film adaptation in 1967.

 

Bradbury has received many awards for his writing and has been honored in numerous ways. Most notably, Apollo astronauts named the Dandelion Crater on the moon after his novel Dandelion Wine. In addition to his novels, screenplays, and scripts for television, Bradbury has written two musicals, co-written two “space-age cantatas,” collaborated on an Academy Award–nominated animation short called Icarus Montgolfier Wright, and started his own television series, The Ray Bradbury Theatre. Bradbury, who still lives in California, continues to write and is acknowledged as one of the masters of the science-fiction genre. Although he is recognized primarily for his ideas and sometimes denigrated for his writing style (which some find alternately dry and maudlin), Bradbury nonetheless retains his place among important literary science-fiction talents and visionaries like Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, George Orwell, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick.

Brave New World- Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley was born in Surrey, England on July 26, 1894 to an illustrious family deeply rooted in England's literary and scientific tradition. Huxley's father, Leonard Huxley, was the son of Thomas Henry Huxley, a well-known biologist who gained the nickname “Darwin's bulldog” for championing Charles Darwin's evolutionary ideas. His mother, Julia Arnold, was related to the important nineteenth-century poet and essayist Matthew Arnold.

 

 

Raised in this family of scientists, writers, and teachers (his father was a writer and teacher, and his mother a schoolmistress), Huxley received an excellent education, first at home, then at Eton, providing him with access to numerous fields of knowledge. Huxley was an avid student, and during his lifetime he was renowned as a generalist, an intellectual who had mastered the use of the English language but was also informed about cutting-edge developments in science and other fields. Although much of his scientific understanding was superficial—he was easily convinced of findings that remained somewhat on the fringe of mainstream science—his education at the intersection of science and literature allowed him to integrate current scientific findings into his novels and essays in a way that few other writers of his time were able to do.

 

Aside from his education, another major influence on Huxley's life and writing was an eye disease contracted in his teenage years that left him almost blind. As a teenager Huxley had dreamed about becoming a doctor, but the degeneration of his eyesight prevented him from pursuing his chosen career. It also severely restricted the activities he could pursue. Because of his near blindness, he depended heavily on his first wife, Maria, to take care of him. Blindness and vision are motifs that permeate much of Huxley's writing.

 

After graduating from Oxford in 1916, Huxley began to make a name for himself writing satirical pieces about the British upper class. Though these writings were skillful and gained Huxley an audience and literary name, they were generally considered to offer little depth beyond their lightweight criticisms of social manners. Huxley continued to write prolifically, working as an essayist and journalist, and publishing four volumes of poetry before beginning to work on novels. Without giving up his other writing, beginning in 1921, Huxley produced a series of novels at an astonishing rate: Crome Yellow was published in 1921, followed by Antic Hay in 1923, Those Barren Leaves in 1925, and Point Counter Point in 1928. During these years, Huxley left his early satires behind and became more interested in writing about subjects with deeper philosophical and ethical significance. Much of his work deals with the conflict between the interests of the individual and society, often focusing on the problem of self-realization within the context of social responsibility. These themes reached their zenith in Huxley's Brave New World, published in 1932. His most enduring work imagined a fictional future in which free will and individuality have been sacrificed in deference to complete social stability.

 

Brave New World marked a step in a new direction for Huxley, combining his skill for satire with his fascination with science to create a dystopian (anti-utopian) world in which a totalitarian government controlled society by the use of science and technology. Through its exploration of the pitfalls of linking science, technology, and politics, and its argument that such a link will likely reduce human individuality, Brave New World deals with similar themes as George Orwell's famous novel 1984. Orwell wrote his novel in 1949, after the dangers of totalitarian governments had been played out to tragic effect in World War II, and during the great struggle of the Cold War and the arms race which so powerfully underlined the role of technology in the modern world. Huxley anticipated all of these developments. Hitler came to power in Germany a year after the publication of Brave New World. World War II broke out six years after. The atomic bomb was dropped thirteen years after its publication, initiating the Cold War and what President Eisenhower referred to as a frightening buildup of the “military-industrial complex.” Huxley's novel seems, in many ways, to prophesize the major themes and struggles that dominated life and debate in the second half of the twentieth century, and continue to dominate it in the twenty-first.

 

After publishing Brave New World, Huxley continued to live in England, making frequent journeys to Italy. In 1937 Huxley moved to California. An ardent pacificist, he had become alarmed at the growing military buildup in Europe, and determined to remove himself from the possibility of war. Already famous as a writer of novels and essays, he tried to make a living as a screenwriter. He had little success. Huxley never seemed to grasp the requirements of the form, and his erudite literary style did not translate well to the screen.

 

 

In the late forties, Huxley started to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and mescaline. He also maintained an interest in occult phenomena, such as hypnotism, séances, and other activities occupying the border between science and mysticism. Huxley's experiments with drugs led him to write several books that had profound influences on the sixties counterculture. The book he wrote about his experiences with mescaline, The Doors of Perception, influenced a young man named Jim Morrison and his friends, and they named the band they formed The Doors. (The phrase, “the doors of perception” comes from a William Blake poem called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.) In his last major work, Island, published in 1962, Huxley describes a doomed utopia called Pala that serves as a contrast to his earlier vision of dystopia. A central aspect of Pala's ideal culture is the use of a hallucinogenic drug called “moksha,” which provides an interesting context in which to view soma, the drug in Brave New World that serves as one tool of the totalitarian state. Huxley died on November 22, 1963, in Los Angeles

Cat’s Craddle- Kurt Vonnegut- Fiction

Born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is the son of Kurt Vonnegut Sr., a wealthy architect, and Edith Sophia Vonnegut. Vonnegut's two older siblings, Alice and Bernard, attended private school, but the Depression's impact on the family's fortunes forced Vonnegut to attend Shortridge, a public high school. Vonnegut showed an early literary bent, working as an editor of Shortridge's daily newspaper. He later attended Cornell, where, at his father and brother's urging, he studied biochemistry. But, science held little appeal for Vonnegut. He found a great deal more enjoyment as a columnist and editor for the Cornell Daily Sun. While the university contemplated expelling him for his poor academic performance, Vonnegut enlisted in the U.S. Army.

 

 

Vonnegut's experiences as a soldier had a profound impact on his writing and philosophy. His mother, who had a long history of mental instability, committed suicide in 1944 while Vonnegut was away at war. Soon thereafter, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans forced Vonnegut, along with other POWs, to work in a factory in Dresden, a city that had no strategic value in the war. Nevertheless, on February 13, 1945, the Allied forces firebombed the city while Vonnegut and the other POWs took shelter in the meat locker of a slaughterhouse. The bombing of Dresden yielded a death toll of over a hundred thousand defenseless civilians in a matter of hours, greater than the initial death count of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The scene of senseless misery and mass destruction at Dresden played a key role in Vonnegut's development of pacifist views. It would be 20 years before Vonnegut could bring himself to write about the experience in Slaughterhouse-Five, published at the height of the Vietnam War.

 

When Vonnegut returned to the United States, he worked as a journalist and studied anthropology at the University of Chicago. After his master's thesis was rejected, he traveled to Schenectady, New York, where he took a job with General Electric, which provided inspiration for his novel Player Piano, a sobering examination of industrialization's effect on society. After he quit his job at General Electric, Vonnegut took a job teaching English in Rhode Island and continued writing novels that heavily influenced the 1960s counter-culture generation, Slaughterhouse-Five most particularly. Vonnegut gained a reputation as a science fiction writer; he was not pleased with the title because science fiction occupied a low status in the world of literature. After a failed suicide attempt in 1984, Vonnegut continues to publish novels that provide often hilarious, often macabre, and always sobering explorations of the dangers inherent in the combination of human folly and mankind's technological capacity for mass destruction.

WORD LIST

Dystopia, censorship, death, cold, primative, inhuman, empty, controlled, savage, barbaric, uncivilized, brainwashed, sci-fiction, technology, destruction, fantasy, future, satirical, apocolypse, propaganda, restraints, devastation, the end, devastate, desolation, bleakness, barren, ice, fire, drugs, devastated, horrible, dictator, authority, tryrannical, oppressed, rebel, secret, replicas, forced, same, ban, forbid, disallow, prevent, rise up, different, indistinguishable, identical, one in the same, heat, restraint, oppression, misery, deceit.

 

Dystopia- a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.

Devastate- to lay waste; render desolate: The invaders devastated the city.

Oppressed- To keep down by severe and unjust use of force or authority: a people who were oppressed by tyranny

Destruction- 1.

the act of destroying: wanton destruction of a town.

2.

the condition of being destroyed; demolition; annihilation.

3.

a cause or means of destroying.

Authority- the power to determine, adjudicate, or otherwise settle issues or disputes; jurisdiction; the right to control, command, or determine.

Inhuman- lacking qualities of sympathy, pity, warmth, compassion, or the like; cruel; brutal: an inhuman master.

Propaganda- information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc.

Deceit- the act or practice of deceiving; concealment or distortion of the truth for the purpose of misleading; duplicity; fraud; cheating: Once she exposed their deceit, no one ever trusted them again.

Satirical- of, pertaining to, containing, or characterized by satire: satirical novels.

Savage- 1.

fierce, ferocious, or cruel; untamed: savage beasts.

2.

uncivilized; barbarous: savage tribes.

3.

enraged or furiously angry, as a person.

4.

unpolished; rude: savage manners.

5.

wild or rugged, as country or scenery: savage wilderness.

6.

Archaic. uncultivated; growing wild.

–noun

7.

an uncivilized human being.

Control- to exercise restraint or direction over; dominate; command.

 

TONE: sci-fiction, satirical, dystopia, sad, horrible events,

 

To suggest a world that failed

To suggest an end

To suggest science fiction

To suggest dystopia

To suggest savage lifestyle

To suggest censorship

To suggest a different world than ours

To suggest desolation

To suggest dictatorships

 

QUOTES:

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe. 

- Johann von Goethe

 

I shall tell you a great secret my friend. Do not wait for the last judgement, it takes place every day.

- Albert Camus

 

Thank Heaven! the crisis --The danger, is past, and the lingering illness, is over at last --, and the fever called "Living" is conquered at last. 

- Edgar Allan Poe

 

once again you expect us to believe your lies but i've removed the blindfold you put across my eyes i can no longer sit back and watch your system destroy what's left of me everything that makes me is a lie no more of this not freedom we don't even question it these are your standards these are your ideas these are your morale but this is my life i'm taking back my life i won't let you make a living off my misery

- Chokehold

 

To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their
closet.
-Charles Caleb Colton

 

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces

After the frosty silence in the gardens

After the agony in stony places

The shouting and the crying

Prison and palace and reverberation

Of thunder of spring over distant mountains

He who was living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

With a little patience 

T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

 

"Ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you angry." — Aldous Huxley


2. Every one works for every one else. We can't do without any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn't do without Epsilons. Every one works for every one else. We can't do without any one. . . .

And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears—that's what soma is.

 

2. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the constitution says, but everyone made equal . . . A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind.

 

"Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?"

 

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." – George Orwell

 

"The things you own end up owning you" - Fight Club.

 

 

 

 

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Graphics: Reading two


  • While reading the section from understanding comics i learned about how a person, place, or thing can be broken down to a simple shape and read more personal, faster and even more interesting. In creating a mark or symbol where is the line drawn on simplicity vs. a realistic appearance?
  • One of the largest struggles is making a mark that wont become outdated. How do you design a symbol that will last? 
This section of reading opened up my eyes to simplicity. I never realized how often i view symbols that are broken down to shapes but read as something much more. In this way i feel as though a designer must have a lot of research before they go about trying to create a symbol.

Graphics - Reading One

  • In reading about marks and symbols, i realized that a designer must be aware of every element in which they use so as not to include unwanted meanings. How does a designer know that a symbol that they use will not offend a different demographic than its intended audience?
  • Because symbol's can carry different meanings, how does the designer assure that the meaning that he wants to convey is being conveyed?
  • How does a designer go about creating new similes?
In reaction to the reading, i found out more about the meaning of marks and logos. I thought to myself on what logos do for me. To me logos assure, they promise quality. If i go to the store and buy a mac then i expect mac quality, however if i go to the store and by an hp i don't expect to much from it. As with art, if i bought a famous piece of art, i would like it to have a mark to prove that it was made by a famous painter, promising quality.