I had the pleasure of participating in a workshop lead by Keetra Dean Dixon this weekend at CCA. It was 12 hours of pure fun. Tools used were marshmallows, food coloring, Illustrator, scripts from JK Keller, and Photoshop.
Does legibility matter?
When dealing with fluidity in temporal typography, legibility is continually in flux. This means that legibility is a process that occurs (in various measure) as long as the form is mutating. Legibility assumes the viewer of the type is attempting to read, however, temporal type is less focused on readership and more focused on viewership.
Factors of viewership include perception and perspective. Perception is a constant fluctuation of past, present, and future form, requiring a continual rationalization about what is being seen. The perspective or viewpoint determines the angle at which the form is being seen. Due to the transitory nature of temporal typography, the perception and perspective of these forms may also be fluid.
So. The question of the week is whether legibility and readability are contributing factors or simply limitations of temporal typography?
Public Interactives: Smell-O-Media
Smell has the ability to immediately evoke emotional reaction that no other sense can. And many times, particular smells are connected to a personal memory.
Smell-O-Media is an olfactory riff on Twitter that I created for my Public Interactives studio class at CCA.
In this interactive experience, I invited people to select one (or more) of six boxes to smell. Then, using a simple Twitter-like mobile-friendly website I'd created, participants were asked to document their name, where they are from, what the smell makes them think of, and any personal story connected to that smell in 140 characters or less.
After submitting their olfactory tweet, participants got to see what others thought the smell could be. While not everyone had a personal memory connected to each scent, participants who did were rewarded by having their story appear on a large monitor for others to enjoy.
Curious what people had to say about these these 6 scents? Check out Smell-O-Media for yourself!
The first child
As part of my Design Writing class, we were to write a paragraph for 3 images in which we discuss, analyze, or imagine what the subjects are thinking, doing or saying. Below is my narrative on the image above.
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Every time he sees her, he is overwhelmed with love. She is just over a year old but he already has a hard time remembering what is was like before her; not to say those 12 months were easy. There was the obvious adjustment of adding another person to their tiny family, but there were also a considerable number of late nights, wondering if she would ever stop crying. There were early mornings, bottle feedings and, of course, there were dirty diapers.
But as he looks at her now — a toothy grin on her chubby face, tugging on the leg of his jeans and slowly attempting to pull herself up to stand — he is struck by the symbolic nature of their actions and physical relation to each other in this moment. She trusts him, looks up to him, wants to be close to him. He is her father. He is all she knows. He feels a tingling sensation starting in his heart and then slowly spreading throughout his body. An unavoidable smile tugs at the corners of his mouth and in one swift motion, he reaches down and swoops her up to his level. Her grin turns to an infectious giggle as he attempts to plant a kiss on her open mouth.
And now for something a little lighter
If there are any regular bfrancesi blog readers out there, you may incorrectly assume the only thing I'm doing in grad school is Design Research. That's partly true, but I'm also doing an incredible amount of other work too, like product packaging for my 3D Formal Investigations class. Essentially it's a standard packaging project, but it's been a fun alternative to some of the other coursework I'm doing at the moment. My goal was to design a package for pastries that was easy to carry, easy for employees to pack, stylish, and didn't require customers to transfer the pastries to a separate platter for presentation purposes (i.e. no ugly boxes). And just to up the cuteness factor? The tote is designed carry mini pastries.
Enjoy. And go have a mini pastry. Thanks to my studio mate Jackie for modeling.
Guarantee vs. Possibility
One week of grad school is…
48 line, value & interval studies1 paper describing an object without using descriptive language Lots of reading 63 form studies 1 book review event 1 workshop + 2 posters 1 research presentation providing a solution for the retail pharmacy experience 3 blog posts 10 hours of B'stro work 1 happy, slightly delirious, exhausted, crazy-eyed 1st year student
