Katachi Heroine Issue 1 Video Reflection

This video is absolutely awesome. Not going to lie, seeing this video definitely stressed me out about how little I know about his program and how detailed every action in the video was. However, it also made me excited about all the possibilities. InDesign is becoming a even more amazing program and I would love to be able to do the types of graphics like the ones displayed in the video. Being able to unfold an origami note or walk through a room just by the touch of a finger, is pretty stinkin' amazing. I don't care who you are, you know that's cool. I've never considered doing interactive things. Mostly just print, magazine, etc. This has changed my whole opinion with the new idea of designing applications. It brings back a passion for graphic design that I thought I had lost.

David Carson Video Summary

Considered a "grunge photographer," in this video David Carson shows images of his work talking about his process. His humor makes the video fun to watch. The lightheartedness of his personality is nice considering his presentation. His outlook on the design world and the different forms of art is refreshing. An important point he made that stood out to me in the video was even though things are legible doesn't mean they always communicate. More importantly, it doesn't mean it communicates the right message. So the question is how do we as graphic designers make sure that the message we are trying to communicate is put into the material we are creating. In other words, what is it's purpose? How can we achieve it?

Magazine Questions for Type

What are the advantages of a multiple column grid?

While single-column grids work well for simple documents, multicolumn grids provide flexible formats for publications that have a complex hierarchy or that integrate text and illustrations. The more columns you create, the more flexible your grid becomes. You can use the grid to articulate the hierarchy of the publication by creating zones for different kinds of content.

How many characters is optimal for a line length? words per line?

Anything from 55-100 characters per line (CPL).

Why is the baseline grid used in design?

Every time you open a new document in a page layout program, you are prompted to create a grid. The simplest grid consists of a single column of text surounded by margins. By asking for page dimensions and margin widths from the outset, layout programs encourage you to design your page from the outside in.

What are reasons to set type justified? ragged (unjustified)?

_{Justified: Not only is the block of text perfectly justified, but paragraph symbols are used in place of indents and line breaks to preserve the solidity of the page.}

Ragged: Can draw it closer to the information it is identified with or identify what type of text it is. For example, poetry is often centered text.

What is a typographic river?

gaps in bodies of text that create "rivers" of space throughout the block of text.

What does clothesline, hangline or flow line mean?

The smaller numbers to make text balanced like when using a fraction, for example.

What is type color/texture mean?

the color of the text and whether or not there is a texture to it or if it is solid.

How does x-height effect type color? 

Reducing the standard distance creates a denser typographic color, while risking collisions between ascenders and descenders.

What are some ways to indicate a new paragraph. Are there any rules?
linebreak, indent, outdent, extra space, symbol

Craig McDean: Key Image

My chosen key image to represent Craig McDean is this Kristen Stewart portrait for Interview Magazine.

Craig McDean Video

Also a director, Craig McDean shot this for Vogue. Amber Valletta, one of his favorite women to photograph, appears in the video. It is a very interesting take on all the different outfits, positions, roles, and personalities that go into a photo shoot.

Craig McDean Compound Words

strikingly unforgettable
seductively engaging
beautifully unrestrained
refreshingly shocking
wildly alive
indelibly popular

6 Words Defined: Craig McDean

Seductive: tempting and attractive; enticing.
Lush: very rich and providing great sensory pleasure.
Futuristic: Being ahead of the times; innovative or revolutionary. OR having or involving very modern technology or design.
Engaging: occupy, attract, or involve (someone's interest or attention). Reserving.
Unrestrained: Free of constraint; spontaneous and natural
Promising: assure someone that one will definitely do, give, or arrange something; undertake or declare that something will happen. Showing signs of future success.

50 Words Describing Craig McDean's Photography

Additional McDean Photography

Mediums from Film, Music, & Fashion

1500 words on Craig McDean

Growing up, Craig McDean wanted to be a motocross pro. Fortunately for Vogue, he wasn’t good enough. McDean had already begun taking photographs of local rockers by the time he went off to university in the North of England, at the age of 20.


At Blackpool and The Fylde College, McDean enrolled in a photography class, but because he “seemed to fall out with every lecturer”[1]—as he told Creative Review, a British monthly, in 1997—he dropped out and headed to London. His mission? To track down the photographer Nick Knight, whom he greatly admired and wanted to work for. At first he just tagged along on shoots, not getting paid, but after a while he was hired as Knight’s official assistant. “I took him in because of the way he looked,” Knight said. “He was more like David Bowie than Bowie. Magenta hair. But he turned out to be one of the best assistants I ever had. It was like having Superman on the team. He used to run everywhere; his black belt training”—in jiujitsu—“showed. I had no doubt he would succeed when he left.”[2]

Knight helped his protégé flesh out his portfolio by passing on to him commissions that he, as the picture editor of i-D magazine, did not want. McDean stayed with Knight for more than two years, after which he briefly worked on album covers. Then he traveled to Japan, where—with the help of a Japanese girlfriend who worked for the government—he spent months shooting 4,000 rolls of film on the world of sumo wrestling. A few images were published in The Face, but the vast majority stayed in a drawer until September 2011, when they were showcased in an exhibit and limited-edition book, Sumo.

McDean’s uncompromising perfectionism eventually paid off, and in the mid-1990s, soon after his return from Tokyo, he started getting commissions from the big-time fashion glossies. By 1997, he was the man of the moment: Calvin Klein—still in recovery mode, after a series of 1995 ads were attacked widely in the media for showing what appeared to be teenagers in situations that were highly sexually charged—hired him to shoot all nine of its campaigns, with two of the hottest models of the day, Kate Moss and Angela Lindvall. “I felt Craig McDean had the vision, and he could stretch and could do everything from jeans to collection. I wanted there to be a thread,” the brand’s creative director said. “There’s a sweetness to his work, even though they’re sexy and provocative, it’s not off-putting.”[3]

Today, McDean is on continual assignment for Vogue, Italian Vogue, French Vogue, British Vogue, Vanity Fair, W, i-D, and Another Magazine. He has done advertising for Giorgio Armani, Christian Dior, Estée Lauder, Givenchy, Gucci, Jil Sander, Oscar de la Renta, and Yves Saint Laurent. He works in an ultrarealistic style that makes his models look sexual, but not crude, whether in the studio or on location. In Vogue beauty features, such as “Rapunzel Calling” (October 2005) or “Seeing Red” (January 2009), he has made his subjects’ lush yet touchable locks look extremely enviable.

McDean’s second love is architecture. So it isn’t surprising that when he and his wife, Tabitha Simmons—a former model who designs a chic line of shoes while working for Vogue as a contributing fashion editor—decided to put down roots, they bought a five-story town house in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York and began to gut it, blowing out the roof and back, to create something totally new and fresh. It is the family’s sanctuary. Except for two rooms, the walls of the home are entirely white, because, as Simmons explains, “Craig has difficulty with color in a room. He’s creating images on a constant basis. He wants his home to be a clean palette—as if he’s setting a refresh button.”[4]

1964: Craig McDean born in the market town of Middlewich, not far from Manchester, England. He shows an early interest in martial arts and motorcycles.

1984: After working for a time as a mechanic, enrolls at an art college in Blackpool, where he takes photography classes.

1989: Gets his start in London, assisting Nick Knight, who has become one of England’s coolest photographers with his 1982 book Skinhead and his work for i-D magazine and Japanese avant-garde designer Yohji Yamamoto.

Craig McDean, who has created some of the most indelible images in fashion over the past two decades (some of them for this magazine), started out shooting his rocker friends as a teenager in the north of England. His entrée into fashion photography, though, came with assisting Nick Knight (then the picture editor at i-D) in the late '80s and early '90s. McDean's first photographs for i-D and The Face led to a wildly prolific career, and along the way, he documented the auspicious beginnings of three of fashion's most idiosyncratic beauties: Amber Valletta, Guinevere van Seenus, and Kate Moss. His latest book, Amber, Guinevere & Kate Photographed by Craig McDean: 1993-2005 (Rizzoli), collects McDean's images of the three women over the span of more than a decade, as they've grown and changed and evolved. "Each of these young women held her own individual appeal to me. Amber was this all-American, classic beauty. Guinevere looked like something out of a Finnish painting. Kate was the waif from Croydon," McDean says. "Their looks, beauty, and gracefulness inspired me more than anyone else from that period." Designed and edited in collaboration with M/M (Paris), Amber, Guinevere & Kate also serves as a time capsule of McDean's analog film process before the ubiquity of digital photography, incorporating previously unpublished outtakes and contact sheets of editorials and campaigns, including those for Jil Sander, Calvin Klein, and Yohji Yamamoto. "Each of the girls could become a chameleon with each project," McDean says. "I built a bond and a rapport with the three of them. Just like a film director might use an actor over and over, I found myself working with these girls."

http://www.interviewmagazine.com/search/craig+mcdean#page5 Text from online Interview Magazine

links about Craig McDean

http://www.vogue.com/voguepedia/Craig_McDean
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_McDean
http://www.fashiongonerogue.com/photographer/craig-mcdean/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/22/craig-mcdean-s-fashion-muses-amber-valetta-kate-moss-and-more.html

Craig McDean: Contemporary Photographer

Craig McDean originally trained and worked as a car mechanic before studying photography at Mid Cheshire College (OND) and Blackpool & Fylde College of Further & Higher Education (PQE). McDean began his photographic career in London as a photographer's assistant to photographer Nick Knight. His early editorial work was featured in magazines such as i-Dand The Face, which led to advertising campaign work for clients such as Jil Sander and Calvin Klein, and editorial commissions with Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.

More recently, McDean has photographed fashion campaigns for clients including Gucci, Giorgio Armani, Emporio Armani, Oscar de la Renta, Yves Saint Laurent, Calvin Klein, and Estée Lauder.

His editorial spreads are regularly featured in magazines including Vogue (magazine), W, and Another Magazine. Although primarily a fashion photographer, McDean has photographed portraits of celebrities including Björk, Madonna, Natalie Portman, Justin Timberlake, Jennifer Aniston, Joaquin Phoenix, Hilary Swank, Uma Thurman, Gael García Bernal and Nicole Kidman.

Some of his work:

Bookman Oldstyle Questions

Define and give 3 font examples: Old Style, Transitional, Modern, Slab Serif and Sans Serif.
- Old Style: vertical stress, thick and thin stroke weight (higher contrast), brackets and wedges on the serifs. (Bookman, Garamond, Sabon) 1450
- Transitional: Higher contrast between thick and thin stroke, vertical stress, bracket serifs, tall x-height. (Baskerville, Century, Carlson, Perpetua) 1750
- Modern: Hairline serifs, vertical stress, highest contrast between thick and thin stroke, unbracketed serifs. (Mechanical, Didot, Walbaum, Bodoni) 1775
- Slab serif (Square/ Egyptian) Thick, square serifs, medium or less contrast (sometimes mono weight), unbracketed serifs (usually), very constructed/little geometric. (Memphis, Swift, Serifa, Rockwell) 1880
Define Proportions of the letterform: characterized by four main factors. Ratio of stroke width to the height of the character, contrast between the thickness and thinness of the stroke weight, the proportion of the x-height to the height of the capital letters, ascenders, and descenders, and influencing proportion is the width of the letterforms.
Define Stroke Weight is a straight or curved diagonal line and it's thickness.
Define Axis or Stress as it relates to font classification: upward stress can have taller letters or the thinnest stroke weight is at the top and bottom center of the inside of the letter "O."
- Axis: an imaginary line drawn from top to bottom of a glyph bisecting the upper and lower strokes.
Lining Figures, Non-aligning figures: Style of Arabic Numerals where the characters appear at different positions and heights as opposed to the modern style of all numerals at the same size and position
Ligatures: Two or more letters combined into one character make a ligature. In typography some ligatures represent specific sounds or words such as the AE or æ diphthong ligature
Define: Dashes: used singly in place of a colon, esp to indicate a sudden change of subject or grammatical anacoluthon, or in pairs to enclose a parenthetical remark
Define Appostrophes (smart quotes): a punctuation mark ( ’ ) used to indicate either possession (e.g., Harry's book ;boys' coats ) or the omission of letters or numbers (e.g., can't ; he's ; class of ’99).
Summerize optical relastionships within a font: The way they look together within a composition or text.
Summerize Type measurement: height determined by x-height and around the x-height.
Type Houses: Business that sells fonts.
Font Space
Chron
PS Print
Fast Code
FastCo Design
Adobe

Font Study Project

Link to Behance page: http://www.behance.net/gallery/Font-Study-Project/11896783

History of Typography Video Reflection

After watching the History of Typography video by Ben Barrett-Forrest I grew a better understanding of how type has evolved over time. Ben helps us to understand the characteristics of type by starting from the very beginning of history. Monks began creating actual type by scribing, which took large amounts of time. Typefaces evolved, after the very first type created by Gutenberg called "Blackletter." Yet you can see how the history and previous typefaces affected the newly created ones. More often than not, a new typeface was created to solve an issue that current typefaces presented. Such as too dense or too complex, or even not legible in big groups of text, etc. The video was well done and pretty fascinating to watch.

Fuse Designers Work Examples

Cornel

Barry

Gerard

Neville

Phil

Tobias

6 Fuse Designers

Fuse Designers

Gerard Unger

Born January 22 ,1942. A graphic and type designer. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam from 1963–67, and subsequently worked at Total Design, Prad and Joh. Enschedé. In 1975, he established himself as an independent developer. He lives and works in Bussum, North Holland. A large number of Unger's typefaces are available from Linotype and the Dutch Type Library. He has released new work on his own website since 1995. Unger has designed typefaces for the signage systems of both the Dutch highways (ANWB-fonts) and the Amsterdam metro. His newspaper face Gulliver (1993) is familiar to millions of readers, as it is the typeface used in both USA Today and several European newspapers, including the Stuttgarter Zeitung. His typeface Coranto is the typeface for The Scotsman and Brazilian newspaper Valor.

------ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Unger

Barry Deck

If you've spent a few moments with a Coca-Cola, visiting the MoMA, flipping through a Conde Nast magazine or glancing at MTV, you've probably already spent a moment or two with Barry. As designer of 20 typeface families, including Template Gothic (called "the typeface of the 90s" by Rick Poynor), Barry has been helping brands find their visual voice since he received his MFA in Visual Communications from the California Institute of the Arts back in 1989. Since then, he has spent nearly two decades pushing edges and leading creative teams in innovative branding initiatives for global consumer brands and extending visual languages across media and platforms from environments to interactive and TV.

----- http://www.emigre.com/Bios.php?d=19

Phil Bicker

Joined TIME in 2010, curates LightBox: The 10 Best Pictures of the Week for the iPad edition and contributes as a photo editor to TIME and TIME.com. Before working as a senior photo editor, Phil was an art director, starting at the Face magazine in London. He later art directed Creative Camera magazine and was creative director of Vogue Hommes International and the Fader. Prior to joining TIME, he was the creative director at Magnum Photos, New York.

------ http://lightbox.time.com/author/philbicker/

Cornel Windlin

After graduating from Schule für Gestaltung Luzern, Cornel Windlin moved to London in 1988 to work for Neville Brody and later became art editor for THE FACE magazine. In 1993 he returned to his native Switzerland and started his own design practice in Zurich. Cornel Windlin’s design work quickly won critical acclaim and has since been exhibited in museums and published in design books and all leading design publications. He has lectured in the US, England, Germany, Austria, Israel and Switzerland. He currently works as a designer/art director in both Zurich and London for a number of clients in both cultural and commercial fields. Cornel Windlin started creating typefaces primarily for use in his own work while still at art school. Together with Stephan Müller, he formed the digital font foundry LINETO to distribute his fonts and those of an illustruous circle of friends. Lineto.com has evolved into a network of designers between Switzerland, New York, London, Tokyo, Stockholm, Vienna and Berlin, creating a platform for shared attitudes and common interests. Windlin has created corporate typefaces for clients as diverse as Mitsubishi cars or the Herzefeld Memorial Trust, or custom fonts for projects at Kunsthaus Zurich, Tate museums as well as various editorial projects

------ https://www.fontfont.com/designers/cornel-windlin

Neville Brody

He was born  on 23^rd of April 1957 in London. He is an English graphic designer, typographer and art director. Neville Brody is an alumnus of the London College of Printing and Hornsey College of Art, and is known for his work on The Face magazine (1981–1986) and Arena magazine (1987–1990), as well as for designing record covers for artists such as Cabaret Voltaire and Depeche Mode. He created the company Research Studios in 1994 and is a founding member of Fontworks. He is the new Head of the Communication Art & Design department at the Royal College of Art. Neville Brody still also continues to work as a graphic designer and together with business partner Fwa Richards launched his own design practice, Research Studios, in London in 1994. Since then studios have been opened in Paris, Berlin and Barcelona. The company is best known for its ability to create new visual languages for a variety of applications ranging from publishing to film. It also creates innovative packaging and website design for clients such as Kenzo, corporate identity for clients such as Homechoice, and on-screen graphics for clients such as Paramount Studios, makers of the Mission Impossible films.

------ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Brody

Tobias Frere-Jones

He is an American type designer who works in New York City with fellow type designer Jonathan Hoefler at Hoefler & Frere-Jones, a type foundry in lower Manhattan. Frere-Jones teaches typeface design at the Yale School of Art MFA program, with type designer Matthew Carter. He has designed over seven hundred typefaces for retail publication, custom clients, and experimental purposes. His clients have included The Boston Globe, The New York Times, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, the Whitney Museum, The American Institute of Graphic Arts Journal, and Neville Brody. He has lectured at Rhode Island School of Design, Yale School of Art, Pratt Institute, Royal College of Art, and Universidad de las Americas[disambiguation needed]. His work has been featured in HOW, ID, Page, Print, Eye, and Graphis Inc., and is included in the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In 2006, Frere-Jones received the prestigious Gerrit Noordzij Prize, an award given by The Royal Academy of Art (The Hague) to honor innovations in type design.

------ http://www.typography.com/about/