The regret is only temporary, down to the milliseconds. What I have gained is something far more important than my body of work: thinking like a designer, which I believe manifests itself in both my portfolio and my process to solving communication problems. I didn’t learn this skill in college directly, but through a series of decisions and exposures past what was required of me. During my sophomore year I branched out and began trying to find client work. I utterly failed at branding myself and it wasn’t until a year later that I began to have a constant flow of work. As my portfolio grew and I became happier and happier with my solutions, I still felt incomplete as if there was a potential in me that wasn’t being realized. I have always had a difficult time roping in graphic design and traditional arts, comparing and contrasting the two to oblivion. I wanted so bad to be an artist, but felt conflicted thinking I could call myself that as a graphic designer. The two seemed like different worlds. Its a normal trend for designers to feel like tools of a commercial world. In fact, many of my classmates have felt this way one time or another, or they will begin to feel it as they step out into the industry.

Reading, writing, and thinking about design were scarishly not present in my education. I’m curious if this is the norm in design schools as educators battle to educate the next generation of creative thinkers, especially of the visual kind. I began reading the works of Ellen Lupton and William Drenttel, curious to examine graphic design as a contemporary and autonomous form of academic discourse. What I came to find is a library of documents that trace the evolution of society in respects to design trends, similar to how art informs a present audience to the life and challenges of contemporaneous peoples as seen through the study of art in art history. I stepped back and began to look at a bigger picture. Its not what we create, what fonts we choose, or the palette. Its about the communication and how we as visual thinkers respond to the visual needs of the audience. What do our methods say about our audience? Can we predict their response? Is it  our job to progress societal communication norms? Isn’t that commercial suicide?

Design thinking in my own terms and experiences is nothing more than a constant critical engagement with the world around me, as it pertains to the visual arts. It’s a competitive world out there. I’ve seen that in my job search. But one thing that nobody can copy of yours is your thoughts, opinions, and your courage to participate in the next wave of creatives who progress the visual literacy of the world. I’m not angry that this wasn’t explicitly taught to me, because the independent journey has lead me to a place where I am satisfied with my endeavors. Designers cannot brand their work, nor can they solely rely on their portfolio. But their thinking is what sets them apart.

Moral of the story: Thinking makes an artist. Tools, method, intent and content are only sub-particles that set out to define and separate the two. We need money to survive. An artist wants to sell their work. So what’s the big difference? Prestige, which gets you nowhere.

What set me on this journey? This article.

I somehow had neglected revisiting Flickr 9000′s photostream, even after bookmarking it years ago. This anonymous person’s work is ripe with satire, dark comedy, and a twang of social commentary. The works are refreshing with many pieces revisiting a mid-century vintage style.

Check them out. You won’t regret it.

He jumped out at me for a few very different reasons. My contemporaries would classify me as a heavily Swiss influenced designer. That is just one side of the spectrum. Works like We Are America and Trouble at the Pump are some excellent examples that quantifies the polar opposites my design aesthetic takes sometimes.

Victore’s work stuck out at me because of the personal utility of his design. His work is reflective of strong opinions coupled with highly controversial imagery, one of the large inspirations for the We Are America poster. After all, political posters should stir discomfort in the viewer in order to maintain an effective communication. This is one of the main reasons propaganda works, due in part to the successfulness of sensation.

But this brings about an interesting point when discussing the viability of sensationalism in design. I remember in my fine art training being warned about the plague of sensation, more specifically the over indulgence many artists sometimes fall into. Examples can be portraits of children, images of death, etc… Typically these images contain a sensation unique to the artist, though arguably social context gets dragged in alongside it. When boiled down to the bare minimum, you don’t want to give your viewer image porn.

Sensationalism in the graphic arts is another story as this term was never used in the classroom. James Victore’s work would be an excellent example of sensationalism in design, visa vie my two projects linked above. The fascinating dichotomy of design is the tension of art vs. commercial utility. Victore’s work is the embodiment of sensation and opinion, delivered to viewers in the medium of print using the traditional methods of a commercial designer.

I might be on to something here as I try and rationalize my education to real world experiences. I’ve come to find that some of the most popular design is based largely on sensation, which is the direct opposite to the fine arts.

When the movie posters and trailers began to emerge for Where the Wild Things Are, I remember being taken aback by the type. In fact, it was one of the main reasons I was excited to go and see the movie.

Geoff Mcfetridge is the mastermind behind the hand-drawn child-like type of the movie. There is something really beautiful about type inspired by the scribblings of children. The marks are fresh and unconscious, rendered seaming-less.

It might seem simple to recreate a typeface such as this, but in reality, its the coupling of the concept that drives it home for me. A beautiful juvenile font, massive puppets, the tainting of a child on an untouched rabble of simple creatures; all of these variables make the type more believable, more credible. Geoff’s work falls on this aesthetic of wonky reminiscent doodles of childhood. Definitely a designer to watch.

I kept this in mind as I developed the new website, built off the WordPress Software I always encourage. After a month, Wall Construction began to receive Google search engine hits. Today, it rests at #7, as opposed to the #52 it was when I began.

Tricks of the trade!

Using powerful, intuitive software provided by Issuu.com, coterie magazine’s issues can be browsed in a simple flash interface.

AFTD’s 2009 Annual Report is hot off the press.

The Theare is Dead. is a book made for the final assignment in Typography class. The bulk of the inspiration came from the DaDa movement, where anti-art was the ultimate goal: to render the accepted definition of art as meaningless.

Check it out →

The architecture and site design are gorgeous. A snippet from the website:

Welcome to 204 Beech: A blog that aims at documentmenting the design and construction of our future accessible home.

I was always skeptical as I started out in the graphic arts field when it came to the design process. I always asserted that one can begin a project knowing exactly what was going to be the finished product. These past couple of semesters, primarily in my photography studies, I have come to see that is true of the best work.

I was confronted with the task of creating a problem for myself to solve for my senior thesis work. I knew from the get-go that I wanted to steer clear of commercial work, as I have the rest of my career to pursue that form of design. With my recent exploits into more conceptual forms of graphic design, I was enlightened to a whole new world of design essays, theories, and experimental recipes that were used to understand the world around us.

I was pretty unsure at first as to what I wanted to do. It wasn’t until the new year that I hit a snag and begin to unwind a project that would take five months to complete. I was fascinated with the timelines that began to crop up in January of 2010. Usually these timelines were flash-based, which consisted of events that were marked as “monumental,” “influential,” and “important” events that form a collective global identity. I was curious as to how creators of these timelines gauged the “importance” of events. Were they huddled in a conference room trying to figure out the influence each event had on individuals? What kind of cultural biases went into these graphs? Why were most of the events influential to only America? These were my questions.

I didn’t hit upon the idea right away, as I sat upon it for a few days. What was born was The Unlikely Timeline.

The Unlikely Timeline

The title was a prototype. I began to toy with the idea of creating a new breed of timelines, one that embraced the mundane individualistic influences that exist in our lives. What exactly does that mean? It was centered around a premise, that as an individual, I could relate more to learning to drive or falling in love for the first time, as opposed to listing 9/11 as a highly influential event. This timeline was a disconnect between the commercial American timelines that I was seeing more and more of. Typically, it is safe to say that others care little to none about this subjective experiences. I was curious with that idea of “junk data,” information others would find useless. Surely reports of the human condition could never be useless. Quite contrary.

I begin my ideation phases by looking at lots of information graphics.

Inspiration

Most of my inspirations came from Swiss information graphics form the middle to late 20th century. These were hallmarks of design in that they had structure, ordered information that was readily accessible to any user. I decided that by using an objective style, such as the International Typographic Style, I would be able to make a contrast between the dense subjective material, and clean consistent design. It was important that this graphic be usable.

I was particularly enthralled with Edward Tufte, a Stanford educated statistician gone designer. His aim was to remove the extraneous information that sometimes pollute corporate information graphics. This is necessary to create the most compelling, simple, and efficient design possible.

Another point of departure was the work of Mark Feltron. His love for information and the display of information are evident in his Annual Reports, where he rationalizes his encounters with individuals. His work bordered more on the realm of individual understanding, in that he approached this problem by using himself as a starting point. I can’t quite say the same, though I was always aware of my biases regrading the interpretation of my submissions. I wanted to focus more on the bigger picture: these weren’t people I knew. I could identify a few of my friends here and there, but the anonymity created a veil. The country data ranged from Vietnam to South America, locales where I have no acquaintances. The Unlikely Timeline became a project where the users came from unknown origins. The project was not directly linked from any website, making the users a sampling of my website’s demographic. In short, my thesis became an existentialist quest to understand the lives of fifty of my site’s visitors.

The Importance of Events vs. the Importance of the Individual

Jumping back to the process, I had a difficult time finding a way to predict what to expect. I did snag a peek at a few e-mails here and there, but for the most part I wanted to remain neutral to the 50 random selections. I began my ideation by focusing on the events, separating the individual experiences from the individual. The graphic above shows a proof that was created early on. This was the advent of the categories. Each colored line represented a category: social, political, economic, etc…

My approach was purely theoretical in that I was only guessing the type of information. Individual events would be plotted and I began by being interested in the lines  and how they interacted with one another. It wasn’t long after I found my data that I realized this approach does not work. It revolved around a breakthrough during Spring Break. Burning the midnight oil, which was common during my senior year, I had an idea that changes this entire project: INDIVIDUALS.

Removing the individuality from the events contradicts my idea of the individual. What unfolded was a series of decisions that are reflected in the final piece.

From The Unlikely Timeline to The Categorical Decade

The final step of the process was to reconsider the timeline’s title. “Unlikely” proved to be a word  that suggested negativity. The Categorical Decade is a title that represents the final output.

Final Thoughts

I am incredibly pleased with the results of my thesis work. I have only just scraped the surface in regards to my exposure to information graphics. I plan to continue my explorations in this fascinating field of visualizing data.