Day 3
In Design Fundamentals
Back from the break and a busy day in class today. The first critique went well and everyone had good feedback and helpful questions.
Lots of similar answers were up on the board, but some definitely worked better than others. Subtle changes ended seeming much larger from far away, an issue I haven’t dealt with for the better part of a year.
We continued on our journey through basic typographic hierarchy and began exercises utilizing two variables instead of one – leaving a lot more room for exploration and clarification.
In Software Boot Camp
The afternoon was spent working with quotes from Pulp Fiction. It’s amazing to see how everyone interprets things differently. I had forgotten how much fun school can be when everyone has good input and good work that shows genuine thought and problem solving.
I’m fairly happy with my revised layout. Though I think the original layout is much busier than most of my work which intrigues me.
July 5th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
I like the revised layout Kyle, but I can’t help but love the color scheme in the original. I suppose the consensus was that it wasn’t reasoned enough, but I couldn’t help but like it (even if that’s bad design thinking). Anyway, can’t wait to keep reading this blog. I may use it to study from later…
July 5th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
I feel like I’ve sent you this before, but thought I’d share, just in case:
Same project, in motion
My two cents: the original is better b/c it’s closer to capturing the pace of the scene.
July 5th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
Yeah, I showed the motion work to few people in class the motion project after we had done this. I think I first saw it on Design Observer a while ago.
Our exercise was meant more as a means of familiarizing people with InDesign than interpreting the message, but I agree that the first PDF has better pacing with regard to the movie’s pace and tone.
Something not apparent in PDFs is that the project was setup to be spreads as well, so it would fold in the middle which plays more of a role in the revised version.
July 5th, 2007 at 10:51 pm
One more observation: both the animation and your layout use similar color schemes: brown bg, a light warm tone for Jule’s text, and a cool tone for Brett’s text.
You could mark it up to co-incidence, or, if you’d seen it before, you straight copied the movie, or it was a subconscious influence, or that the scene invokes those colors. Now I know you didn’t straight copy it – that’s just not you. I’d like to think it’s the last option, b/c that’s the most interesting. Are you reviewing these in class, b/c I’d like to know if anyone else came up with similar schemes.
July 6th, 2007 at 8:05 am
Drew, I chalk the color similarities up to a couple of things:
- My personal color preferences.
- The tone of the movie.
The dark tone of the movie compelled me to have a dark background on the piece. My personal dark-background preference is almost always brown, and it works well here to invoke Samuel L. Jackson’s rich skin tones.
The pink for Brett seems like a natural choice that many people would tend towards – he’s a guy who is being stripped of his manhood by another man. Pink seems a natural response.
And then the light tan is there for contrast since the initial critique mentioned that the pink stood out more than the gold I used for Samuel L.’s lines.
The red again is a natural choice to invoke violence, blood, rage. Maybe predictable, but isn’t always bad.
Nobody else used a similar color scheme. Not sure if this is significant or not.