End of my Typography Adventure

Hello everyone,

I meant to do this 3 weeks ago but have been delayed by a combination of busy-ness and laziness. Typography 1 is officially over and my final grade was a B+. I have no idea what I got on my animation project but I think I did a decent job. I still have no idea how to post it on here. It wasn't that mind blowing, so it's not like you missed out on an artistic goldmine.

The main reason I didn't get an A in the class was because I didn't study hard enough on an exam on text, which was literally an exam on shapes, so I guess I deserve my B+.

I have left Millersville University to support my girlfriend in North Carolina. She got a job teaching at a local elementary school, and when the cliche life decision of staying in a relationship or letting it fall apart from long distance came, I took the leap and moved to the South.

I enjoyed my time at Millersville and will think of it fondly. The campus was close to home, quiet, and cheap (not cheap in the bad way, MU had great facilities). There weren't any professors I didn't like and classes weren't that difficult. I will appreciate how the school helped me back on track to obtaining a degree. I hope to transfer to a college here in the fall to finish my higher education.

I got a B+ in my only other art class as well (Drawing 1) and could have gotten easily A's if I put in more effort. Working full time (at strange hours) and going to school full time was a bit rough, but I am sure lots of other students are doing the same thing so it's not much of an excuse. I also had a stupid group project in another class with a group of business majors that had to have their hands held through everything that ate up a bunch of potential art time. Hopefully I can learn a lot about time management from these experiences and make sure I don't repeat the same mistakes of putting my art work off til the last minute because it comes easier to me. I shouldn't be getting A's in my non art classes and B's in my actual major, I am doing it backwards. You are a dodo, Mike.

Professor Mata was pretty nice and class usually went smoothly. It was nice to dip my feet into Illustrator and other Adobe programs for the first time.

I will miss my classmates, but no one ever checks any of these blogs so I am sure no one will read this anyway. It made me a bit sad that my peers thought it was "creepy" that I was checking their blogs to see what work they were doing. I wanted to be good at this with what limited time I had so I tried to use what they were doing as inspiration. The only other student that really kept up with his blog was James, and he did maybe the best work in class so that was good to see. I enjoyed his short company and should have said goodbye to him properly. You can keep the Scott Pilgrim set James, I don't need it anymore. I hope a bright career in art is ahead of him.

These were my first real art classes on a college level and I think the thing I took most from them was how to interact with other artists. It seemed like no one wanted to hear how their work was bad which is an integral part of improvement. I wasn't perfect at reacting to criticisms from Professor Mata myself, but I felt like I was okay at coming to terms with that she doesn't want anyone to do bad and was only trying to help us. I personally think a lot of art is subjective and silly, but that doesn't mean I don't want to be good at it. I still have a lot of room for individual improvement and need to make sure I keep practicing and pushing myself to realize what potential I may have.

I will miss the rest of my back row pals (Gaby, Kylee, Andrew, James, and Shane), Jarren, Ty, Roy, Julie, Noah, and the tiny Australian girl. I wish them all the best in both their lives and artistic careers.

If anyone was following this blog from that blog robot thing here is my own art blog that I am going to try to resume updating once a week again.

http://michaelpfeffer.blogspot.com/

I will have actually been trying to put together a picture for a little art contest where I win nothing for fun, so lets see if I can keep up drawing daily.

Goodbye Typography blog, we had a good run.

Art 240: Week 15, Just more animation work, some inspiration

So yeah, I tried to post my animation here last week and failed. There is a way to get it posted via code, but I am just too dumb to do so. I am about 70 percent done right now and only have like 4 more sentences to go. The professor wanted some inspiration for the book and animation of said book, but all I really had was a look I was thinking of which was basically from the movies themselves...

Wes Anderson makes heavy use of Futura in all of his movies. Well why didn't you use Futura, Michael? I have to pay for that to use it at home, so I just chose a typeface that looked a lot like it in Rockwell.

For my animation Rockwell wasn't available, so I picked Argo which is a good look a like.

I really just wanted to keep my animation as close to my book as possible. There were somethings I decided to just chop out because it won't work animated (or it could work, but it would take a lot of time, which is at a premium for me right now). A lot of my book was taking the text into pieces and trying to use to make the pages look like art. I both failed and succeeded in places while doing this, but to do it with the animation would again, take a lot of time to do right.

So I decided that my first goal would to be to just finish the animation and make it as clear and readable as possible.

Here is an example of my work in progress. I'm not trying to make anything crazy right now. Lots of plain stuff, fade ins, fade outs, stuff moving in, moving out, just trying to get the animation finished.

I didn't do any thumbnails, I kinda just went in and winged it. For my final few slides I am just going to stick to the formula that's worked so far and KISS ( keep it simple stupid).

We only have one class this week, so now its time for Thanksgiving. Hurray! I will post more influence'y stuff up next week. We'll just be having two more work days so maybe I can fail at putting up the animation again.

Art 240, Week 14: Sharpening our Edge

This week we are learning how to use Adobe Edge CC to animate our monologue pages.
As a class we went over some basic tutorials to get ourselves started. Like many new things it seemed hard and unnecessary simply because it was new. But after a bit of time you learn the program is actually intuitive and fun to use. It just takes some trial and error to get the words to do what you want to do.

It's important to realize that you can't do some things you did when it was static, but there are all sorts of new things you can with the animations that you couldn't do with a still book.

We have to have about 85% of our project finished by Tuesday next week so I want to do a basic layout by then so I can learn what I have to add to the finished project.

I am trying not to complicate myself with a bunch of fancy blurs and what not because of time constraints. Hopefully with solid use of basic animation ideas I can make a good animation. Then with my remaining time I can gussy it up with fancy sparkles.

Art 240, Week 13: Julie Press Monologue Book Critique

So we were assigned a classmates Monologue book to critique on our blog. I traded books with Ms. Julie Press because she tries hard and makes me want to be not cynical. She gave my book a nice critique and was right on a lot of points (some of my text wasn't clear as it could have been, I broke a rule or two, and some of my color choices could have been better). I think she thinks I am mad at her, nope, not mad at you Julie. You did a fine job.

Julie wanted a hard hitting critique because she wants to get better at Typography, and I like that, but I don't know how hard hitting I can be. One of the biggest problems I have with critiquing like this is that aside from just pointing out general design terms (stuff being balanced, clarity, general craftsmanship, basic ascetic things really ) there really isn't any concrete advice I can give her that's not just me saying "Well I would do it like this." I tried to make my book pop with lots of color and a bunch of activity, and while I succeeded in some ways I failed in others. Maybe my particular style choices won't mesh well with what Julie could be going for. Ultimately to get a good grade we just have to do what the professor wants, but sometimes I'm not really sure exactly what that is. With that being mentioned, lets just get to critiquing her work. 

Julie's book was well made and I thought her new color scheme (originally it was blue and white) fit a beach theme well. She basically chose the colors of Argentina, but I don't think she did that on purpose. If she did do that on purpose and was being clever, I appreciate that. Julie followed all the project rules to a T. All the assigned aspects were included in a satisfactory manner.

Storytelling wise the text moves in a general direction and doesn't really get confusing at any point. Everything is easily readable and there aren't really any confusing points aside from where the two "NEVER"s are next to each other. The way your eye moves across the page it looks like it says "NEVER AND NEVER" for a second. That is the only real technical typography problem with the Julie's book I can find as everything else works just fine.

The only thing I would have done differently is spaced out that one big chunk of paragraph on the page that says "For mine, blah blah blah chunk on the right side." It's just a plain sentence that is centered on a blue background. I think Julie could have done something differently here, like maybe have used the whole spread page for the text chunk in a different way. Perhaps she could have curved them together so they resembled waves in the ocean /\/\/\/\/\/\ <===Like this maybe, but appropriately spaced out.

Overall Julie's book is successful and gets the job done, but may be a bit plain in some areas for my taste. This may not have much credo coming from someone who probably made his book too busy to its own detriment, but if Julie added a little bit of spice to some of her spreads she could have made her successful book that much better. She could have utilized more page space in some areas to offset some of the calmer spreads. Maybe Julie could have altered some of her text to to make it feel like the words on the page or put some of the sentences on a curve in some manner? I think despite differing on stylistic choices she did a fine job and should get at the very least a B for her work. Good job Julie, I hope the professor gives you an A.

Art 240, Week 13 My Monologue Book

So here is my finished Monologue book, hurray. I couldn't spend as much time on it as I would have wanted to so I made some mistakes. Lets list the mistakes in list form!

1. I didn't have enough time to shape the text into Texas so I just made a Texas shape and put the text into it. This is something we weren't allowed to do. Good job dummie

2. When I tried to make a crowd out of the words in spreads 3 and 4 why didn't I just make the beginning of each word orange instead of just making random words orange? Duh.

3. I could have made an actual crosshair out of an O and two T's instead of a big X. WHOOPS.

4. The backbone could have been made bigger and centered int he rectangle better.

5. I separated RUSHMORE into RUSH MORE for the cover for balance, but I think I could have just made it one word and it would have still worked.

6. There were some printer problems and I had to tape my cover to cardstock and the backcover got a little messed up. I will probably lose points for that, oh well.

That's about it, mistakes aside I like how the final product came out. I think if  had more time (or used what little time I have better) I could have eventually corrected the mistakes and made a much nicer final product. Attached below is the video of the monologue I based my book on.

Art 240, Week 12: Crappy Monologue first draft

Here is the sorry monologue prototype I brought to class. People rightfully smirked at my garbage work. I was short on time due to life circumstances, but will be sure to complete a final copy.

Art 240, Week 11: Kinetic Typography + Home Sick

Ira Glass Video

Rumble in The Jungle

The professor was in a car crash (thankfully she is okay) and couldn't make it to class today. I also didn't make it to class today because I was sick, (and didn't want to be the guy that make everyone else sick) but I can do the assignment we were given via email from home easily.

We had to watch a bunch of Kinetic Typography movies and pick which two we liked best and why.

http://www.designyourway.net/blog/inspiration/some-of-the-best-kinetic-typography-examples/

I picked the videos with Ira Glass talking about story telling and Muhammad Ali talking about the Rumble in The Jungle. I've linked them at the top of the post. While most of the videos were good, I chose these two because they appealed the most to me visually and phonetically.

Ira Glass: This video was successful in keeping pace with Ira Glass' verbal tics. I enjoyed how it switched up the pace when the dialogue was slow or fast. The typeface was clear and lent itself to Ira's signature annunciation. The various transitions were entertaining and never got so complicated that they took away from what you were reading. The background gave off a bookish feel which went well with the overall "storytelling" theme. The message of the video, while audio in nature, is also something that creative people can learn a lot from.

Rumble in The Jungle: This video was short, but it synced quite well with Ali's legendary rhythmic style of speech. The images (even though in our monologue project we aren't allowed use of them) worked together with the speech to make it even more interesting. The wiggling of the typeface gave visual feeling to the skill Ali had with a microphone. He was quite verbose and the constant movement matches well with the verbal dancing he was famed for. The wiggly movement also conveyed a feeling of the words being beaten down and hitting the canvas of a boxing ring.

Some runners up were the video about Futura's history (it was in French I think) and the It's Gonna be all right video with the sentence morphing.