Form & Communication III Sketchbook

We had a sketchbook due for our class at the end of the semester, so naturally I didn't do anything until the last week of school. Luckily, the teacher said he only wanted 5-6 scans from it, not the whole, actual book. So, naturally, I only did 6 sketches. Here they are. The theme is cute animals being creepy/vulgar.

Follow up on Proverb Typography

After freaking out about not being able to refilm the ants & honey sequence, I scrambled to get something together with what I had, without using video. I made this greeting card. It's a little corny, but it's cute, and it's gotten a pretty good response on tumblr, with several people saying they would buy it.

However, my teacher convinced me that I could and should move forward with the video that I had. I reworked my stop motion, and here is the final result.

Some process work

Our final project in Type III is to pick a proverb, and basically do anything with it. They pushed us towards video, since that's what they've been teaching us lately, but we could really take it this project in any direction we saw fit. I did try to work with video. These some of my results.

The proverb I chose was as follows:

(long version)
"A drop of honey attracts more flies than a hog's head of vinegar."

...which basically means, "Honey (which is sweet) attracts more insects than vinegar."

I sought to create physical type inspired by Stefan Sagmeister.

This was probably the 3rd video of vinegar (and baking soda) that I shot:


My teacher didn't like that the vinegar was splashing sporadically onto the scene, and he wanted to be able to read the "vinegar" from the very beginning, all the way through.

So I reshot several times, and eventually started playing with washable marker to get a bleeding effect:



This was the best result I got with the ants and honey part of the proverb.

I've done this about 5 times. I wanted to address some issues, one of them being that the video is in still frame animation, and I wanted it in video.  When I went back to reshoot I wasn't able to find any ants. I did some research, and found that ants go into hibernation in the winter.  Due to this setback, I've had to rethink my concept. I have an idea, and will post that when I'm finished.

Lots of STUFF

I realize that I don't use this blog a lot anymore. The truth is that tumblr is much easier to use and I get a lot more out of it, from other people.  Regardless, I'm gonna catch up on this one, and just post a bunch of stuff that I have been working on recently.

From Typography III

This is a logo I created, based on two randomly assigned initials.  The assignment was to take the two letters, make up a clothing company, and a logotype to go with it, and then use it as a pattern to create a wallpaper for the store.

The store I created was called "Jr." and is a clothing company in Upper east side Manhattan that sells private school uniforms on one side, and casual wear on the other side of the store. One-stop shopping. The target market is boys in grades k-6.  For my concept, I created two wallpapers: one for the casual side of the store (left), and one for the uniform side (right).

 

There's one project I haven't received back yet, and I haven't documented it. It involved hand-lettering.

The next project was a kinetic type video. We had to choose a song, and animate the lyrics in flash. The best way to view it is at www.adammendala.com/indestructible

In Form & Communication III,

One project was to "package the intangible".

The initial concept I was working on was packaging "The Next Big Thing", i.e. big ideas like The Internet, Beanie Babies, Pokemon, Facebook, etc...but as a package containing the next big thing, whatever it may be. This is as far as I got before I decided that I just didn't know what to do with it:

While I was working on this, my friend Amy came into the studio, and said "isn't weird how oranges have such big pores?". This sparked an idea in my head, because it reminded me of an annoying girl complaining about her look or something. I decided to illustrate several fruit complaining about their bodies:

This was originally just a personal project, but then I realized I could make it work for my packaging project, by packaging "insecurity".  I developed them into juice boxes that contain 0% of certain vitamins/chemicals that are usually present in these juices. The absence of them affects your mood/self esteem negatively.

The next project was Book Covers. We were to pick an author who has done at least 3 novels/books, and then create a cover for each one.  I chose Margaret Atwood, who I like and have read 3 of her novels. I would like to print these out and photograph them actually covering the books, but here are the digital files. All of the photography is my own.

As a personal project and a favor for a friend, I redesigned the website for Students for the Environment at UD. I also modified a project in my Interactive Media class to use this for that class as well.

This is their current website

Here is what I did for them.

It will hopefully go live by the end of this year.

The project after book covers in F&C III was a social cause poster. I decided to keep the ball rolling with S4E and use them for my social cause. They were working on an oil spill fundraiser at the time, so I used that as a starting point. I referenced 60s Psychadelic type posters. The concept is the oil dirtying the pristine environment.  I screen-printed an edition of 25 and I'm selling them for $10 each with all of the proceeds going to The Solar Electric Light Fund to sustainably rebuild Haiti. I spent $70 of my own money on paper for this, and put a lot of hours into it, so I hope they all sell. So far it's going very well and I expect to be sold out by years end.

More photos and info can be found at www.adammendala.com

Another screen-print I did (I'm taking a screen-printing class) was this little guy. 

I was just brainstorming in class.

That pretty much catches you up with what I've been up to this semester that I hadn't previously posted.

WOAH!

First Screen print from my Screen printing class. IT’S NOT A GHOST! Sheesh, it’s just a guy with really long legs. It sucks enough for him without everyone thinking he is a ghost. Ghosts don’t even have legs; what are you thinking? 

I realized after I drew it that he bears a resemblance to Jake from Adventure Time. This was subconscious, not deliberate.

Lightning!

Yep, that's pretty much it.

Working With Themes

    Laziness                                                          Paranoia

    Humor                                                             Indifference

Series of 4 photographs taken with a theme in mind, displaying 4 different emotions that were chosen from a list.

I decided my theme would be about how the way you keep your home affects your emotions.

Dot Matrix Typeface

Type Specimen poster for my dot matrix typeface called EXPOSED.  It has two weights: Overexposed and Underexposed.  It's not a standard straightforward type specimen poster, because I wanted to focus more on the process of how it was made.

I have a lot to post so I'm not going to take a lot of time explaining everything, but the short version of the story, and believe me, I could talk about this process for a long time...but basically i took underexposed and overexposed photos, had the negatives processed, and arranged them in a contact sheet to make 26 letters of the alphabet and an ampersand (&).

Personal Identity Photo Series

The first Project of Form & Comm III (aka Photo Design Methods) was to create a series of 10 photographs about ourselves. We didn't have to physically be in the photographs, although I am. I chose to work with one theme for the whole series.  I think they are pretty self explanatory and say something about my personality and my aesthetic.

See the rest of the series here 

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Logo Design

A friend of mine asked me to design a logo for a new company/website he and a friend are starting. It's called Early Risers, a site for up and coming young politicians/campaigners/political junkies.  His editor had a few ideas of her own, which I played with, and then I also took my own take on things with the later designs.

Here is a link to his already very successful website, The Politicizer

Cover for Form/Comm Book

For the Form and Communication book, we each have to design a cover, and in class, we will decide on whose we actually want to use. I decided to look back to the iconography project for my inspiration for this, and I like to imagine that each one of these animals has its own voice.

Back Cover:

Final Spread for Form & Communication

For form and comm, we had to design 1 spread based on a statement of something we learned in any of our VC classes this year.

Yup.

Beatrice Type Specimen Book

Typeface Design

The final assignment in Type II is to design our own typeface. We will be making a short type specimen booklet for it as well.

I named mine Beatrice.

I was inspired by art deco tendencies as well as victorian architecture (which we are learning about in my art history class).  I created most letters using a circle of one size but there are a few other circles used as well. I also used a single weight line in every letter. I really like thin type.  I think I will expand it into a full typeface with caps and lowercase letters, but we are only required to have the letters used in the name itself.

Here are a few pictures I used for inspiration, but mostly I was going off ideas I had in my head.

35 Characters Posters

Some of us designed posters for the 35 Characters event that will be taking place on Wednesday. We hung them up around Newark on this hot afternoon. These are mine.

11" x 17"

FYI, 35 Characters is an event my type class will be putting together in which each one of us wears a lifesize cardboard letter that we each constructed and will be painted either Black, Cyan, Magenta, or Yellow (Printing ink colors) depending on what group we are in. Each group will be spelling a verb. We will then break up and scramble to form new words based on audience participation.

www.35characters.com

www.facebook.com/35characters

www.twitter.com/35characters

ACL Festival Companion Book

Now that we're finished creating posters for the ACL festival, we're moving on to creating a book for...

THE ACL FESTIVAL! YAYY

Haha, I enjoyed this the most of any project we've done this semester in type though. It is a companion book, sort of an info guide that you would receive at or prior to the festival. It had content that was provided and we just had to add one band of our choice, (obviously I chose Roisin Murphy) and think up a cool design. Oh, and the book had to employ a grid system, as all books should. Here it is:

The size of the book is 4" x 5".  As always, clicking on images allows you see them at full resolution.

The rest of the book can be seen after the jump

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