Design Police

This website has some brilliant templates that should be printed out on sticker paper and brought to all design critiques. Or not, its a fairly passive aggressive thing to do. Still, it is a fairly humorous site...

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a worthy colleague

Past Go is a four-color lithograph, from stone, by Jacob Van Wyk (size: 22 in. x 29 in.). This print, from 1983, suggests a landscape (and black-top strip) that’s paradoxically presented in portrait format. It’s an important piece featured in a Van Wyk retrospective show at Dordt.

My colleague, Jake Van Wyk, who has been teaching at Dordt College for nearly twenty-years, has organized an impressive thirty-five-year retrospective exhibition. The show is on display at the Dordt Campus Center Art Gallery, and will continue until mid September. The show comprises a wide range of work—from drawings and prints to ceramics, as well as documenting the process of commissions. Van Wyk’s body of work is amazingly diverse with pieces that are representational, figurative, expressionistic, and abstract. With such a wide range it’s truly remarkable that each piece conveys a mastery of medium and technique especially evident in the multi-colored lithographs, printed from stone.

One similarity Jake and I have is we both have gone through the MFA program at Western Michigan University. As Jake was graduating from the program, I was just entering and actually moved into his old studio space on campus. We both studied under Mr. Curtis Rhodes, arguably one of the best multi-colored print lithographers in North America.

Artistically, Van Wyk explores traditional tools but he sees them in a new light, which presents exciting possibilities. According to a photocopied page (source unknown), that Jake gave me year's ago, entitled “Exploration of the Tool,” the author states, “tools may be considered more basically—not as ‘drawing’ or ‘painting’ tools, but as tools that make a mark of some kind when combined with some material.” This statement may be the essence for many of Jake’s pieces. He is very interested in action work, that is, as the piece continues to say, “the position of the hand, arm, or body, and how they are moved; the position of the tool and the portion of it that is grasped or used and the position of the material in relation to the tool enter into the exploration.”

I have great appreciation for Jake’s abstract work and one of my favorites in the show, a magnum opus, is his ambitious four-color lithograph titled “Past Go” from 1983. Jake works the space by dividing the layout with improvisational “marks” in gestured patterns, textures, and syncopated rhythms. With this work he emphasizes changes in direction through the marks, shapes, layering of subtle color, and slight fragmentation. Each mark, each stroke, of the lithographic crayon or the incredible richness of reticulated tusche made by a wide brush is expressively independent, autonomous, and yet coherent. This is a strangely beautiful piece that perhaps is best described the way Mikhail Baryshnikov described Merce Cunningham’s dance performances—as a “kind of organized chaos.”

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thoughtfully appealing design

This is a photograph of Tord Boontje’s Rough and Ready (DIY) chair design made from recycled and repurposed wood pallets that took me a weekend to make. According to Boontje, since 1998, 30,000 chair plans have been given away—this plan was from his website. By the way, the chair is amazingly comfortable and strong. Photograph by Doug Burg, copyright © 2009 David Versluis.

The work of product designer, Tord Boontje is unconventional but very thoughtfully appealing. Boontje is known for, among other things, his DIY aesthetic and humanizing Rough and Ready furniture collection made from scrap pieces of wood from the lumberyard. Zöe Ryan in her essay, Graphic Thought Facility: Resourceful Design, states that Boontje has summed up his approach as follows: “I find it hard to relate to the prevalent plastic slickness and preciousness. With this furniture I want to develop my ideas about objects we live with, ideas about a utilitarian approach towards the environment we live in.” Disconcerted, Boontje has said, “society has lost the ability to make things and all we do is consume.”

In response to the abnormal affects of consumption are current signs and trends that conscientious businesses, progressive organizations and designers are creating a culture of discernment, responsibility, and fairness. While some designers have produced products such as posters, t-shirts and other things to advocate a cause or convey a viewpoint, others are exploring and discussing the spirit and mind of design.

A compassionate heart is the biblical correlation of justice and shalom—the concern for a flourishing creation and a proper Christian cultural response. Let us think of design as an act of benevolence, stewardship, worship and its impact on God’s creation. Minneapolis architect Charlie Lazor suggests that we view commodity differently—as something (product or service) that people value and find useful and yet sustainable. For those, who may eventually be designing for the marketplace where commodity influences and shapes graphic design, we can think in a way that sees commodity leading to human emotional responses, such as caring, satisfaction, delight, or amusement. Whether it is a high-end ergonomic office chair or an improved sanitation system in an under-developed country let’s try to envision commodity, the product, as host to the person who uses it and to view the potential of design as if it were empathetically welcoming a guest.

Finally, graphic design is an area in need of transformation. Indeed, there are some signs pointing to transformation initiated by both Christian and non-Christian designers. Christian graphic designers can collaborate and be instrumental in this transformation by first cultivating the mind of Christ, being filled with compassion and working as creational stewards for shalom as it relates to the thriving of every creature, culture, and society. This can be our response to God as Christian designers.

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Classic

I think it’d be most accurate to say that the designers at Coca Cola “got it right” the first time through. Also, their team should be credited, through the years, for having made the decision to stick with the original design. It’s legible and perhaps a bit dated but (I hate to say it) unmistakably that cold, fizzy beverage for a hot summer day... we all turned 21 and drank beer instead, but that’s a different discussion. I remember the Pepsi logos from ’91 and on and feel like they’ve been getting worse with each new design. The 1905 Pepsi looks like a fun bike ride, which is great, but far more ‘old-timey’ than anything else on the chart, and they only kept it for a year before pandering to some cheap, mindless and grammatically incorrect gimmick. (“Drink Pepsi: Cola Delicious” Really?)

There aren’t many traces of when my dad was a student of graphic design — a few charcoal sketches of my oldest brother as a baby, the plans we draw out for home projects and some studies of the timeless Coca-Cola bottle (glass).

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Dordt Alumni in Design: David Ver Meer

Editor — This month we asked Dave Ver Meer to talk about his design work since graduating from Dordt in 2005. As you’ll see Ver Meer is a versatile designer. We want to thank Dave, who writes:

I work at Alpha Omega Publications (AOP), a company in Rock Rapids, Iowa that produces homeschool and Christian school curriculum for grades PreK–12 with paper-based and online-based options. While working at AOP I’ve been blessed to have all the opportunities I could ask for to work on different types of projects and grow as a designer. About a year ago, I was promoted to a senior designer position where I help manage and give art direction to our junior designers. The types of projects I’ve done include the following: product/dvd/multimedia packaging, tradeshow booths, book covers, catalogs, magazine ads, brand identities, brochures, postcards, and e-mails.

In the past few months, I’ve started transitioning from print into web design and in the future most of the work I do will be web design related. A typical week for me lately involves giving art direction to the other designers and designing websites. AOP’s marketing department functions similar to an in-house ad agency. We are staffed with project managers, copy writers, editors, designers, and developers within our group. Many of the projects we do are started internally within the marketing department, but we also do projects for and service all the different departments and divisions within AOP.

I’ve picked out a small sampling of the work I’ve done. A recent magazine ad I did was for AOP’s annual spring sale that they have every April and May. The goals of the ad were to promote awareness of the sale and, most importantly, to have the readers act on the ad by purchasing their homeschool curriculum early to get the best savings. To test the ad, we sent similar variations of the ad out to a group of beta testers we have and received over 400 responses. Overall, the responses was very positive, and it gave us insight into how our customers reacted to the ad design and concept.

The Daily Focus book is a compilation of devotionals for each day of the year. It’s for both homeschool mothers and fathers, but we wanted to appeal primarily to mothers. I choose cooler colors that serve to help draw attention to the warmer colored spots in the design and give a peaceful feel to the cover. I also added subtle floral elements into the design and used a picture on the cover that would draw readers into the design.

The branding identity for GPS AgSystems was a freelance project for a local Trimble dealer that sells and provides precision equipment to farmers. I wanted the logo to be organic in form and also communicate the precision and triangulation aspect of the technology that allows for global positioning. For supporting design elements I choose to use intersecting oval shapes with smaller circles on them to abstractly illustrate orbiting satellites. The brown shapes at the bottom of the business card and letterhead serve to both ground the design and symbolize the farmland.

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attn: Logo Contest

Queries and entries to Alvin Shim at lvnshm@gmail.com.

Subject line: “Logo.”

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design aficionados

Funny Face (50th anniversary edition DVD package design)

Today, 07.25.09, a regular feature by Eric Baker for Design Observer displayed a series of mid-twentieth century graphic-design for “Today’s” images. The very first image, of a cover, for Harper’s Bazaar reminded me of a post I had waiting-in-the-wings and now it seems timely.

Per my request, Dordt’s library ordered the Funny Face, DVD, a 1957 vintage musical/visual film made in VistaVision Technicolor, which results in a strikingly vibrant, and art directed movie. Leonard Gershe was the writer and Stanley Donen directed the film, which starred Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire. However, the main reason I thought it was important to have it in the library is because the lead character, a fashion photographer played by Astaire, is somewhat based on photographer Richard Avedon (1923–2004). The opening title sequence was composed, frame-by-frame, by Avedon who was a consultant for the film—he along with Bill Avery photographed all of the stills.

The film highlights Avedon’s affinity for photographing fashion models in action, full of energy, dexterity, movement, emotion, smiling, and laughing for the camera. A remarkable movie scene is when Hepburn’s character, a fashion model, descends an elegant staircase during a photo shoot. The scene seems to acknowledge, as homage, earlier artistic themes of painting the figure in motion of women descending a staircase. Perhaps this theme is best captured in twentieth-century cubist-futurist work of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), 1912. But, I was recently reminded of the theme again while at the Art Institute of Chicago—it reoccurs in Gerhard Richter’s painting, Woman Descending the Staircase (Frau die Treppe herabgehend), 1965.

The scene ends with a quick but insightful presentation of Avedon’s inventive color photography print process. Briefly working this sequence into the film is interesting.

Most Dordt art, design, and photo students are aware of Avedon’s very forthright black and white portraits photographed with a large-format 8x10 view camera on white backdrops (like those in the American West photo book). However, Avedon’s international acclaim came while working as chief photographer with Alexey Brodovitch, the art director for the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar in the late 1940s to early 60s.

This is a fun movie for photo/design aficionados.

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