Final Poster+

 The first image that you see here is the original poster that I was given. Al it has on it is an image of Louisiana flooding and then says Failure to Execute Minimal Assistance. A person would have zero idea what this means unless they were already involved in helping this cause. What I created was a set of things that help to explain the poster. The first piece I have is a map. It focuses mostly on how the government went from having an evacuation plan to not having one. Highways were a mess, they had to all cram into the super dome, which caused lack of resources for many people. The red dots show random facts and call outs that people are drawn to and immediately feel remorse for this cause. I picked a map, because it ties back to evacuation and relates to the original Louisiana image. I originally had it hand held size, but after the interviews I realized I needed to make it into something a more realistic form of a map so that people could get a sense of being in those victim's shoes and realizing what it's like to look at a map and see no escape at all. I made it full road map size and folds up. My second piece would go into the bathroom at the exhibit, again it relates back to the original poster, because of the colors and outline of Louisiana. It provides paper towels and changes from blue to black, so that when people pull down on the paper towels they can physically see themselves helping out Louisiana, and realize that it's easy to help those people by simply going to the website provided and even just donating $5. It shows empathy, because you can see the state drowning in front of your eyes, and no person would ever want that for their own state or country. Again I explained what FEMA is on the second piece, because many people don't really understand what it is. I think that if you saw these three pieces in the same building you would know that they are all relating back to each other.

Thinking Form

For this week's blog post we were directed to the blog "Thinking Form." It's a blog focused on inspirational forms of typography, books, art, architecture, design, grid systems, illustration and photography. They are an independent studio in Brooklyn. One of the men I read about on the site studied in Switzerland. His name is Pierre Neumann. His work caught my eye, because his poster designs are diverse and create a large combination of very simple, black and white to many colors and more complicated. He seems to never run out of ideas or concepts for new and exciting things. His works have been in various museums and galleries. 

Continuing with one concept

I decided to go with the direction of the Civil War and created three more chapter openings to see if my vision was what I thought it could be. These are the results of experimenting more with that.

Type Experimentation

The first part of the experimentation was finding ways to show paragraphs without always indenting. It varied from indent, extent, bolding the first word, letter, phrase or sentence. The list goes on. It's amazing what you can do to a paragraph and people will still recognize what you are trying to tell them or how to read it. The second part was finding 12 serifs and 12 sans serifs to figure out which I liked and how they compare to each other based on x-height and paragraph style.

Initial Type workbook concepts

 The first concepts I had were to make the book based on awesome pictures from the Civil War with funny or relevant quotes to go with it. The second was inspired by movement and dance. This would be the more serious one. The third concept would be light-hearted and filled with funny pictures of kids. The last I wanted to do it inspired by my study abroad trip to Cuba.

Design Theory Update: Hurricane Katrina

I think I got a lot out of this interview, because he helped me to see what I couldn't. I had been looking at these things so much that I couldn't tell what I liked and what I didn't like about them. The bottom line from my interviews with my room mates was that I needed to fully explain things on my annotation, instead of expecting people to know what FEMA meant or why it's one thing on the original poster, but that's actually not what it stands for. They also helped me realize that I should tie together all three more completely by color context and overall feel. I decided to go forward with the ones that all looked like Louisiana. They suggested I make the map bigger to make it actually seem like a real map and not just a brochure that you get.

TM Research Archive

The research type archive is very diverse and establishes simplicity throughout the posters as well. I especially liked the posters from the 60s and 70s. They didn't seem dated, more like a class feel. The first one I was drawn to was the 1978 Issue 4 by Gregory Vines. The image behind map create good hierarchy for the larger mountain part of the picture. The other six stick out to me, because they are so unique and powerful. They have a certain feeling and look they are trying to convey. The word that most comes to mind when looking at the issues is energy.