Yuriko Yamaguchi

While looking for images of Martin Puryear’s work, I found a website showcasing one of his former students. Yuriko Yamaguchi’s work can be described as elegant and delicate.  Her style is very much like my own (and maybe why I like it so much). She uses wire, resin and wood to create delicate organic shapes that repeat themselves until they take a cloud like form. Another reason why I love her work is her use of lighting and how light and shadows are cast against the tangible forms of her sculpture.

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Martin Puryear

While rummaging through my school’s library, I found a catalogue on Martin Puryear’s work. This catalogue was based on an 2009 exhibition held at SFMOMA (which sadly I missed because I didn’t want to pay the entrance fee). I actually like his work a lot because of it’s understated minimalist design. Below are some of my favorites:

 

World’s Most Unique Places To Visit (so says Forbes)

I found this on Forbes the other day. I’m gonna have to add this to my list of places to go once I have a design job. Below are pictures from the article that I found particularly captivating.

Kingdom of Bhutan

Dragon Trees of Socotra

Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump

Salt Plains Salta Argentina

Graphic Design: Gestalt Letterforms

Here is the fourth assignment from Intro to Graphic Design. For this assignment, we had to demonstrate our understanding of gestalt principles of closure, figure goodness and figure ground through the distortion of letterforms. The challenge here was that we had to push our distortions to the limit and yet these letterforms must still be readable.

For closure, I distorted the word “panda” by omitting certain strokes. My rational here was that I had to keep the ascenders and descenders of the p and d since they were the defining characteristics of these letterforms. For the n, I had to keep the top portion of the shoulder since that was the n’s defining characteristics. Lastly, the a was the toughest. Honestly, I think I showed too much of the a and could have distorted it more. As a matter of fact, people saw panda right away which shows that I could have pushed it a bit more. Oh well maybe next time.

For figure goodness, I had to take my initials and literally distort the letterforms to the point that it no longer looks like the letter but yet, it has to be readable. I have to say, this one was the toughest simply because if it is readable, then I wasn’t distorting the letters enough. However, if it couldn’t be read, then I went to far with my distortion. So for my piece, I took my initials which is jl and distorted the l so that it looked like a lung. Then I created a mirror image of that l and it then represented the j. I thought I had a pretty good idea but sadly no one got it except for Glen our mentor. So I redid it a bit by flattening the bottom and reducing the curve within the stems of the letterform.

For figure ground, we had to take two letters and combine them through a figure ground relationship. Honestly, I thought this one was going to be the hardest one to do but as it turns out, it was pretty easy. So for my piece, I kept it simple. I combined the uppercase H with the lowercase i. I have to say, of the three pieces I had to make for this assignment, this one is my favorite since it demonstrates the figure ground relationship so well (is it an H or is it an i in a black square).

Graphic Design: Line Assignment

So here is the 2nd assignment from my Intro to Graphic Design class. The assignment was to communicate a kid’s personality through the composition and design of his/her notebook. The challenge was that we were only allowed to use the visual elements of the notebook page and these elements could not look representational.

As you can see, with my piece, I decided to use color to articulate my kid’s personality/attribute. Can you guess what it is?

H (helvetica) – Destroyed

I found a video of a guy smashing the H from Helvetica on Youtube. Me thinks this performance artist has anger management issues.

Corey Holms

So I stumbled on a website that talked featured Corey Holms’ work. He’s the guy who worked on the logos for a lot of those big name Hollywood films. My favorite is the one he did for Lost in Translation and Where the Wild Things Are.

Logo Project: Ebisu Roughs

So lately, I’ve been a bad design student. Being sick with the flu, I’ve been doing nothing but lying in bed and watching reruns of Total Drama Action. Hence, I”m somewhat behind all my work and have been playing catch up since then.

One of my assignments that I have been neglecting is a logo that I have to crank out in the next couple of weeks. The logo I have to create is for the Japanese Restaurant Ebisu. So for the past couple of days, I”ve sketched 100 thumbnails, and sadly, 98 of those sketches were utter crap. Thus leaves me with only 3 ideas to work with. So now I”m in the process of turning those thumbnails into roughs and I’m starting to feel better about the project since I feel that I have some direction.

So this is my favorite rough so far. The idea here is that I wanted to give the logo a more contemporary appeal. Hence, I chose a calligraphic script called Harabara Hand which has an elegant yet casual feel. Also, the flow of the letterforms and the thick/thins of the strokes has a small semblance to East Asian calligraphy. In the eye of the letter e, I stuck a dot in there, hoping that people would see the eye as an abstract fish. I’m not 100% sure if it works. Maybe  I need to look for another e?

Helvetica vs. Arial (the quiz)

So you think you can tell these two typefaces apart. I got 19/20 right (damn you Mattel).

Stuff Christians Like: Papyrus

I found a hilarious website on things that Christians like.  One of them is the Papyrus typeface. According to the blogger of the site: “Papyrus runs rampant amongst church websites, bulletin handouts, and most particularly with women’s ministries. Papyrus font is to women’s ministries what grunge fonts are to youth ministries.”

Updated: I found another hilarious site on how U.S. Churches have adopted this hideous typeface.