Back to Square One and a Half...

So much for me and my big fat ideas....

I went to my one on one with Nancy last week and lets just say its good that I didn't charge ahead with my concepts from last week. I had more holes poked in my ideas than there are in a wheel of the finest of swiss cheeses.

This wasn't bad though. It stressed me out and was the first time I've really had a concept fall apart in my "career". The feedback told me that I wasn't being honest to myself, and that feedback couldn't have been better for me.

I went back to the drawing board and have reassessed my approach. I spent the last few days racking my brain trying to find a new angle to approach. Today I felt I had another breakthrough and a possible new direction to approach.

I felt the whole concept of the swiss army knife was close to my personality and skills but still a little off of the mark. I pursued it a little further and tried developing the concept a bit further into a play off of a butterfly knife.

The biggest problem is that I fell in love with my own idea. After bouncing my ideas off of a couple people I might have become a little too married to the concept and chased it too far off of the mark.

Now I am beginning to get a little antsy... This is why I never make artwork for myself, I am too wishy washy to make concrete decisions, and this is one of my biggest character flaws. I am going to do some more brainstorming tomorrow and get up to the school to talk with Nancy a bit to get more feedback and see if I can twist this into a functioning project, somehow. I can practically hear the clock ticking...

Other progress has been made with my potential portfolio layout, I spent a couple hours working on my grid and trying to hash out how the interior of this thing is going to look. Attached you will see what I have so far as well as my brainstorming from the last few days.

Finally! The work begins!

So last week we finally started the wheels turning for the actual creative process for our identity work. We have been handed the reins to start working on our items we are using for our mail out "campaign".

We had to sign up for 2 meetings with Nancy that are to happen over the next 6 weeks. I threw myself under the bus for first week meetings and am due to visit with her again on March 19th. I will most likely attend next weeks class just to buy myself a little more feedback considering the tight schedule I put myself under for this first week.

So now that I have my first deadline in place I have to have some work ready for this weeks class.
So I spent my week drumming up thumbnails and researching places where I can possibly buy or order materials that will work with my concept.

I began by figuring out my "angle" as to exactly what I am trying to convey. I have been kicking around the concept of being a puzzle or problem solver since the beginning of term. I have courted ideas involving rubrics cubes, Japanese finger traps, and other puzzle concepts.

I have settled on the idea of producing a small 12 piece magnet backed puzzle with some sort of witty or silly comment along the lines of "I don't know what your problem is..." printed on the puzzle.

I will mail out 11 of the 12 pieces to the design firm I have targeted. A week later I will mail out the last piece.

This last piece will have a small cartoony drawing of me holding a qr code as some sort of sign or placard. Therefore, I help solve the problem. I can be the missing piece for the studio!

The qr code will direct to a short video slideshow or clip that will provide an introduction of myself to the company and provide them a brief glimpse of who I am as a person. From there, the video will provide a URL to my online portfolio and my contact information should the studio decide to contact me.

Once this idea is left to develop over the next couple of weeks I will also begin development on my leave behind.

I am now experiencing a confusing sensation of excitement to move forward and stress that these ideas have to develop alongside my monstrosity of a website project.

Or maybe it's just gas....

Getting Moody

"Do Not Even Take In Head To Offend Children" Viktor Safonkin

Our major homework assignment was to begin gathering images, typefaces, colour palettes and imagery that will allow us to start finding the voice for what our portfolios are going to look like.

Fortunately I am an internet hoarder. Over these years in school whenever I have been researching projects and looking for imagery that inspires me, I have collected images that I found to be clever and humorous.

I started by going through these images and narrowing images that represented my mindset and world outlook down to about 10 images. I need to know exactly what "feel" my portfolio is going to have.

I then went through another collection of images that I use for wallpapers on my laptop and culled out a handful of images that I found to really please me with their colour palettes, content and aesthetic.

I find that I am drawn to the Red, Black and Grey and White colour scheme constantly. Whoda thunk I'd wind up settling on De Stijl colours after four years? Surprises abound. Aside from this, I have also always been keen on cooler colours, especially purples and blues.

As I looked over these selected images for "mood" and colour palette I began coming to a horrifying conclusion. A conclusion rooted in something that has always creeped around in the corners of my mind... I am a very complicated person when it comes to taste and what I like.

I am not saying complicated as in refined. Complicated as in what I like aesthetically seems to be a confusing muddling of two extremely contrasting styles.

I am drawn to content rooted the dark; ugly, morbid, bleak, rusted, worn, and creepy visuals. It always seems to be countered with some sort of tongue in cheek, contrarian and silly subtext.

If I had to go back and find where this comes from, I have always found beauty in the horrific and dark. I listen to scary dark music, I watch my body weight in horror movies, and some of my favourite works of art are by Francis Bacon and HR Giger.

These things feed my soul. I find them beautiful, yet I have always been a "victim" of "normal" people telling me that the things I like aren't art. Why would anyone like these ugly and dark things, it's not... normal. So I believe that over the years I have learned not to take appreciating this stuff as seriously as I should. A perfect example of this is my taste in music. I have never been a slobbering stereotypical heavy metal fiend. I see the genre, its people and its traditions as having its tongue rooted firmly in cheek and it just being for fun. Honestly, how could all of this evilness be taken seriously.

I have also realized that if I can't take my own personal tastes and passions as deadly serious, you can sure as hell bet I'm going to approach you with the same type of cynicism. No offence intended.

The scary conclusion that I have come to is that I am going to have to find a way to come across as approachable, yet true to my creative voice and influences. I can design for myself, that I am sure of. What I am going to have to overcome in this project is how to design myself for others.... No sweat.