I'll never be a neat and tidy drawer of lines. I'll never put ink to page and send out that perfect ray, or make the circle come perfectly back to it's starting point. I'll never be constructivist or cubist, I'll never know the simple joy of breaking the world down to simple shapes and colours, of the de stijl. I'll never know that pure irreversible realization that everything is made up of the same stuff as everything else. I'll never know the math of life and colour and everything beautiful, not like those neat and tidy people will. I'll say the absurd, and I'll draw it too. I'll pick the type off my page, smush it around in my hands and scatter it back on the page. I'll distort it, and I'll probably use it to sell vanilla flavoured coffee. I'll stay within my bounds, for now, but I'll never know it the same way they will. I guess I'll know it, come to think of it, I guess I do know it. But not the same way. I know it in the strange way that my eyes decide I should learn it. I know shapes as the things they are, and not the other way around. I'll observe an object from all sides at once and I'll paint it on the same piece of canvas. Or at least, I would if I could keep my bloody hands still. I run my pencil across the page, and every beat of blood that comes through my veins tells the line to change it's course for just a second. I can't move fast enough and it's my head's fault. Unfortunately my head is all the way up there just minding it's own business, too busy with anxieties and fears to be bothered anyhow.
No, I'm not a neat and tidy person, I just colour inside the lines.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Lines
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Electric Feel
Random thoughts time.
Taekwondo in ... 5 hours! I am so glad I am doing that again, I missed routinely hurting myself each week. It's great. Hopefully they get my belt in this week so I can get my old rank back.
I am putting off so much work, even though I need to do it all by next Thursday night.
It's the fifth of November!
I'm going to be 20 in 10 days. Weird. Very very weird. Is it weird that I never thought I'd not be a teenager?
Everyone reading this post right now is automatically required to send me a birthday present. I'm looking at you, Salem.
I downloaded a series called "Paranoia Agent" or something. I don't think anyone's told me about it, but I have a feeling Zack did at some point. I don't know if it's any good but meh.
I am almost caught up to Mad Men and Glee both. Awesome.
Going to see Paranormal activity on Friday. It looks pretty terrifying, I am glad I probably won't have to be alone that night seeing as I am a little girl about scary movies.
I am seriously psyched for Ownicon House. Coming 2010, the worst parties, absolutely no vacuum cleaner. The life, I tells ya.
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Ownicon House
After briefly speaking to Chris and Zack, I think some plans are in motion to get the 3 of us living in the same place as soon as September of 2010 (maybe sooner?)
This has long been something that I've wanted to do but have never had a justification for doing. I go to school in North York, which is too far from Chris' school which is downtown. Zack could live comfortably at home and there was no real push to make him leave anytime soon.
Well given recent developments on the Zack front, and the fact that I wanted to move down to the Annex area downtown next year regardless of the commute to school, I think it makes sense now. We know we can live with each other, that's a given, and if we can find a place in the annex we'd be close to everything we need, cheap shopping for food and we'd all be happy.
Anyway, the Ownicon house must be a reality. It must, and we shall make it happen, oh yes.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
It is beautiful ... then gone
In my typography class last week our prof mentioned a book by a designer that was called "It is beautiful ... then gone" and I am just now getting to thinking about it.
I think the book was about found objects and was a collection of the designer's work, but after thinking about it, the title just sums up so much of what we as designers do, exactly what our role is. If you think about it, we're creating images to make a huge impact, in a relatively small amount of time. Glancing from a car window at a billboard, looking at a poster on the walls of a subway station as your train pulls out. Nobody ever spends a lot of time looking at it, it's just there for a moment, and then it's gone. It needs to be as beautiful and as incredible as it can in that moment, or it is lost entirely. We'll spend hours, days, weeks staring at every letterform, making sure that everything lines up, that it is interesting, it has balance and rhythm and adheres to a certain tone. We are composing little symphonies of type and image, persuading, informing, and hopefully pleasing you. And we've got seconds to do it in.
We work on a canvas that exists not only in depth, height and width, but in time as well, in a very specific and small amount of time. It is beautiful then gone.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
This is Earth to Astroknot
Can't sleep for some reason. It happens, I suppose. Oh well, I will be a tad tired at work tomorrow.
I noticed something in class a few days ago that weirded me out a little bit, so I'll bring it up here (where I am sure none of my classmates read, so I won't feel like I am being mean).
In my Communication Design class, we had to pick an issue of some social importance (mine was high tuition fees) and create a magazine insert based on that topic for a fictional or real company/organization etc. Anyway, during critiques I started to think to myself "wow, what exactly is it that I do here?" I sort of started to realize that it wasn't just this project that was steeped in the concept of persuasion, it is the entire field. If you want someone to buy something, you need to persuade them to buy it, tell them that they want it, that they need it, that they are incomplete without it. Designers do that with images, type, colour, form, all of the elements of visual communication. If you aren't selling something, you are selling an idea, or a concept of some kind, and the same rules apply (maybe without the capitalist vocabulary).
That's when it hit me - I am a magician! I make people do things, not through a physical means, but using art to evoke certain emotions and to target a certain part of a person's sense of want or need ...
No, wait, magician isn't right. Crap, uhh ... propaganda officer? No not quite ...
Then I looked around the class and my previous realization was forgotten as another epiphany slammed into the back of my skull. Not a single person in the room really cared about the cause they were advertising. The hours of breaking down the words into abstract forms, adjusting them, composing harmonies within the visual elements, the pure formal qualities of the piece, focusing on this had taken the humanity out of our approach. We were barely aware of the significance of the issues, we just needed to convince other people that they were, in fact, significant.
I'm more like ... an atheist priest?
Monday, October 26, 2009
Paint By Number
Saturday was pretty awesome, I went to my friend Emma's Zombie Party and drank many a cider, then I rode a scooter down a hallway, and I think later I broke my diet pretty hardcore and ate a lot of pizza. Sorry metabolism. I went with Alicia (read:awesome girl of awesomeness) and the next day we got up and went to the Apple store so that I could max out my credit card on this beautiful motherfucker:
This is the biggest thing in the world. It is like having four monitors and it will greatly improve the way I do my design work, no more layering twenty different application windows over top of each other, or working on large documents zoomed out to 10%! No, no.
I am also hoping to install XP on it soon to get some games being played (Bioshock, anyone?) and that is going to likely require the use of a USB mouse and keyboard to go the installation seeing as the magic mouse, while a thing of pure wonder, doesn't work so well in Windows.
Anyway, back to work, and to the homework machine later.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Down
The Apple store is down, I am in the market for a new iMac, I have been waiting for this moment on edge for well over a month now.
This is the best snapshot of modern life that I can imagine. I am all but pressing my face against the gates of a store trying to be the first person to spend too much money on something.
