Cathie Bleck: artist | illustrator

Cathie Bleck’s “painting” titled Nature’s Myth (30 in. x 20 in., inks and clay on masonite) was commissioned for the U.S.A. Earth Day Poster 2007. This piece is also featured in Illustration Now! 3, which was published by Taschen last fall, 2009. Her work is found on pages 16-17 and 56-59.

A couple of weeks ago artist Cathie Bleck, kindly, posted a comment on our piece about Carl Regehr. Her comment referenced Milton Glaser while she reminisced fondly about Regehr as an exceptional teacher. Her blog is titled, The Artwork and inspirations of Artist Cathie Bleck. And in May 2009, she posted her interview with Milton Glaser for Communication Arts Magazine. The interview is very interesting and insightful.

Read More......

Tonya Harpenau: a follow-up

Still photography sequence is courtesy of Paul Hanaoka.

Graphic design entrepreneur Tonya Harpenau of Dezign Lines, which is based in Le Mars, Iowa, was the Dordt College AIGA student group’s first guest presenter of 2010. On Thursday evening, January 21, fifteen people came to Tonya’s presentation where her energy and enthusiasm for graphic design was very apparent.

Ms. Harpenau began by first "breaking the ice" with the group by handing out mini candy bars. And from there showed and passed around to the audience actual printed examples from her portfolio. It was absolutely delightful to see an early work sample of hand drawn “comps” and multi-layered mechanical boards with cut amberlith film for color separations. Tonya then proceeded to discuss transition into digital graphic design, art direction, and her personal vocational path. She was insightful when she conveyed what it's like to work for a variety of clients and being self-employed in Northwest Iowa.

Read More......

Did “Booster” foreshadow airport security scanners?

Robert Rauschenberg’s “Booster” from the “Booster and Seven Studies” – 1967, color lithograph and screenprint; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, (1970). Image is from the designhistory.org website. (In this fine website, the history of design is highlighted with seminal artifacts with explanatory captions.)

The U.S. Transportation Security Agency’s (TSA) has started using whole-body imaging technology. Did artist Rauschenberg’s life-size lithographic print, Booster, foreshadow the new airport security scanners? Did he have a prophetic eye?

Apparently, after the X-rays were taken, Rauschenberg’s doctor told him, “I hope you don't get sick from all this radiation”.

One of the most successful of Rauschenberg’s collaborations has been with the Gemini GEL print workshop – a printmaking partnership that permanently changed the terrain of American printmaking. The artist’s highly experimental approach to print processes comes to the fore in the colour lithograph and screenprint Booster, created in 1967. For Booster, Rauschenberg decided to use a life-sized X-ray portrait of himself combined with an astrological chart, magazine images of athletes, the image of a chair and the images of two power drills. Printer Kenneth Tyler was a masterful facilitator for Rauschenberg’s ambitious project and the collaboration radically altered the aesthetic possibilities of planographic printmaking. Rauschenberg and Tyler pushed beyond what had previously been done by combining lithography and screenprinting in a new type of ‘hybrid’ print. The rules governing the size of lithographic printmaking were also ignored, and at the time of its creation Booster stood as the largest and most technically sophisticated print ever produced. Today, Booster remains one of the most significant prints of the twentieth century, a watershed that catapulted printmaking into a new era of experimentation.

Text taken from the National Gallery of Australia website.

Read More......

Tonya Harpenau: guest designer

Tonya Harpenau, graphic designer, will be presenting her work this Thursday, 21 January at 7 pm. in room CL 1223. Tonya is owner of DeZign Lines in Le Mars, Iowa. Her clients include: AG Partners, Burgess Health Center, Plymouth Ice Cream Company, and others. All are invited to attend.


Burgess Health Center

Read More......

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within

For some time, I've appreciated the work and insights of Edward R. Tufte and one of his books is in my library entitled, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Dordt’s library has a copy… check it out. The book was required reading for one of my OEM clients in the 1990s.

Last semester, when we were implementing the Iowa e-Health Identity Project the design principals discussed whether or not to present to the IDPH panel with PowerPoint or with art mounted to large presentation boards. In the ensuing discussion about the pro and con of PowerPoint the decision was made to use the traditional black boards for the presentation (Madman style), which was a decision that turned out to be very beneficial. Anyway, I thought about Tufte’s, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.

Someone wrote this about the book:

“In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now “slideware” computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?”

For more about PowerPoint, here’s a sample from the essay:

PowerPoint Does Rocket Science—and Better Techniques for Technical Reports

Read More......

:OUTPUT AWARD

Dear David Marc Versluis,

I found your contact information through the Student Groups section on the AIGA website and I would like to tell you about a non-profit student competition. Please find enclosed a PDF (and a teaser-image) for the call for entries of :output - the competition for students in design and architecture.

I would be very happy if you could help us to spread the word and make this information accessible by forwarding the attached pdf to the student body at your school. Especially since this year we will once again be presenting the :output Grand Prix for the best project of the year with a scholarship of 3.000 Euro (about $4,300 dollars).

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. To find more information, please visit www.output-award.org.

With best regards and thanks for your help,

Erica Gibson

SHORT OUTLINE:

Works carried out by students usually disappear into
drawers after presentation to a relatively small college audience.
There the work remains invisible.

We want to change that.

:output is the biggest international competition for students in design and architecture.
The works selected by the jury will be published in the yearbook :output.

:output Grand Prix: 3.000 Euro

Deadline for submissions: February 15 2010

Jury:
> Juliette Bellocq (graphic design | USA)
> Elio Caccavale (product design | I/UK)
> Kate Moross (graphic design | UK)
> Florian Pfeffer (:output foundation | NL/GER)
> N.N. (architecture)

More information: www.output-award.org

Florian Pfeffer
:output

Read More......

delightful harmony

For many years, designer Rick Valicenti has observed that graphic design has become commoditized. Valicenti is referring to industry’s perceptions that the main purpose or value of graphic design is to help sell products and that raw materials should be bought and sold at the lowest price possible. The term commodity in this context, obviously, has negative connotations among designers who resist seeing the importance of their work and art devalued or reduced to mundane commercial products.

In contrast, as a Christian graphic designer, I posit the Reformed view—which we think of art and design as an act of transformation and God-glorifying stewardship. This means, among other things, that we begin to view the word commodity differently. The Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines commodity as “something (product or service) that people need and value and find useful” and, I would add, ecologically sustainable. Christian graphic design students, just like many other design school graduates, will very likely continue designing marketing materials used to sell products or services.

As they do so, Christian students, more than ever, need the ability to analyze how commodities (products or services) influence and shape graphic design—they need to develop a Christian perspective that sees how design and commodities can honor the compassionate rule of Jesus Christ. One way, to re-think commodity, according to architect Charlie Lazor of Blu Dot, is to value commodity as art and design that creates real human emotional responses such as delight and hospitality. Delight in this perspective could be thought of as delightful “harmony” and a normative design principle. In addition, other normative principles for graphic design include responsible technology and service, openness and communication, stewardship, justice, mutual caring, respect, community spirit, and trust. These principles should be our design brief, criterion, and incentives as Christian graphic designers.

What is the meaning of “harmony”?

“Harmony” is that spark found in a work of art or design, which makes it lively. In this case, harmony is not used in the technical sense, as in music. According to art historian, H.R. Rookmaaker, Dr. Herman Dooyeweerd said that harmony was at the heart of the aesthetic modality. In other words, “‘harmony’ is the very specific idea of the sense of beauty, ‘regulated’ by the aesthetic modality”. Rookmaaker further explains, “Every work of art can be analyzed, but, after everything has been said and seen, there is still left something that defies definition and it’s precisely that that makes it a work of art. It’s that “it” which seems to defy analysis… that “it” is what you may call the harmony”.

Blu Dot Real Good Experiment from Real Good Chair on Vimeo.

Read More......