On the topic of book covers...

Recently I browsed the AIGA 50 picks for best cover of 2013, at this link http://www.aiga.org/news-20140918/.  Though I enjoyed a some of them, a few of the covers were poor choices. 

I feel that No One is Here Except All of Us is a striking image.  It alludes to aspects of hiding, and not hiding, through both the meaning of the words and the ways the letters of the words are presented.  

Similarly, Indre Klimaite's On Continuous and Systematic Nutrition Improvement, feels like a cleaver cover design. By mimicking a flow chart, the cover has a simple cause and effect design.  I would think Klimaite would be establishing situations and giving recommendations within the book, reflecting the inspiration of the cover.

However, the cover for the Stephen King novel seems tired and uninspired to me. The dark, red hued, background is a woman, or simply a floating head (in a hat?), somewhat asleep, decapitated (alluring the viewer?), as smoke pours out of her lips to write out the books' name and author.  

Having a good familiarity with King's works I'm sure that the book has many mysteries that should not be explained in the cover. But the image does not feel creative enough to fit.  Who, what is the story about? Does the woman inhale smoke from doctor sleep, is she doctor sleep? What context is the story? Does it take place in a modern-urban context? Remote, country setting? There is so much imagery without context that a stark, black background would have been better than setting up an interesting image that has no relationship to any implied context to the story.

Research, Audience and Context

While in viscom class many aspects of the nature of the communication were discussed. Ultimately they can be summed up in three categories; research, audience and context.

These notes express a relationship between the image and the audience needs to specific. While thinking about these relationships I began thinking about two specific instances where visual communication failed, or at least misread.

One of the images was a movie poster for the awful, looking Michael Bay produced Ninja Turtles movie.  However it wasn't the ugly looking turtles that caused issues.  The poster showed the turtles jumping from a burning skyscraper and a release date of Sept. 11.  Because of the connections of the turtles with New York City, the movie was reflecting imagery of terrorist attacks.

The other example was a tweet from the British embassy, celebrating the end of the War of 1812.   What hurts the image is that the British did not understand who their audience.  They were making a joke about the time they burnt down the White House, one of, if not the, symbol of American political power.  

I figure both of these images can give a fuller example of the importance of understanding the relationships between images and the audiences they hope to reach.

A Question

When asked, "What do you love most about your major, and how can you incorporate it into 

a visual communication class?" I was stumped.

I love illustration because of the abstraction, how it is not confined by the real world. It is 

a entire world that I twist backwards and forwards with lines and shapes.

I do not know if my approach to abstracted reality can be applied to visual communication studies. Furthermore, I do not know if I want to.

I love working with pens, pencils, paint, ink and many other materials.  I do not know if simply using the tools I have experience with will expand my knowledge. 

I want be able to face any situation in whatever the best way may be.  By working with other

 tools, other mediums, I learn new ideas. I learn new actions and interactions between the 

tools at my disposal.  

Do I want to draw? 

Yes.

Will I draw?

Yes.

Can I do something else? 

Let's find out.

Visual Communication Studies

This post details a few answers for what visual communications means to me and how its applied.

I feel that visual communication is best 

described as anything viewed that causes someone to think. 

 It does not matter what the person thinks about, just as long as the idea was not directly at the front of the person's mind before seeing whatever it was that they saw.

This pencil drawing demonstrates how anything, represented by the infinity symbol, viewed through the eyes 

causes gears to move and ideas to occur.

 

 On a similar note, I argue anything that has been affected by humanity becomes some kind of visual communication.

Even if people chose to leave something unaltered, I feel that people are communicating that the unaltered thing should not be altered.

Like the image above, the infinity sign again represents any potential object.  The sign is being pulled and twisted, by human hands, into something different.

Recent Project

A recent project that was completed this week was focused on fish.  Attempting to show fish in unique ways without being overhanded with the depiction of a fish.

These are a few of my favorite results.

 I used India ink to render the swordfish and the angler fish.  A thick, chisel tip sharpie for

 the "Fish" fish.

The catfish coming out of swirling scales was created with a micron pen. Lastly the fish lips  designs were made with a thick sharpie and a micron pen.  I really enjoy how the image looks without the circle behind the lips, but I realized that they were so abstract that they were hard to recognize.  I feel that the circle helps unify the image to read better as "fish."

Recent Works

During the summer I continued working on model drawings. 

Though I did not have live models, I found a decent collection of photos on the internet to work from. These two are the best results.

I also took sometime to finally update the custom Beatles album cover that I made a few years ago.

I retained the same basic imagery of the original cover, I simply used better techniques for drawing and coloring it.

The first image is a starting scan of my new drawing, and the other images that follow are color experimentation before settling on a design.

The negative color contrast on the blue/yellow cover was too unique, too visually appealing, to me to forget about it entirely.  I think the colors recall the imagery used to promote the "Yellow Submarine" movie. Though I settled on the the yellowed, last image, it was a hard choice not to use the negative color image.  

Presentation of Visual Communication

While debating the medium of visualization communication I came to the conclusion that it was anything that could be viewed as altered by human means.

So I began to make a quick comparison chart, with flowers as an example.

Wildly growing flowers, not visual communication.

Bouquets of flowers, a garden full of flowers, new breeds of flowers, importing exotic 

flowers, watering flowers, even scattering seeds into the wind to see if they grow could 

be considered visual communication.

While debating the issue mentally, I began to think of the Flint Hills and where it may fall on being visual communication or not.  Initially, I felt no they were not visual communication, they were simply wild fields.  Wild fields that were purposely untouched.

That last statement made me realized that even the lack of human interaction was interaction, if the purpose of in-action was to preserve the object as it was.  Arguably the visual communication 

given by the Flint Hills was that it was worth protecting.  

Anything that has, or could have been, affected by humanity is some sort of visual communication.

As long as someone, anyone, made a decision to affect something, or not, they have 

communicated this intent to whoever views the outcome.

Maybe I should just come in wearing black sunglasses to demonstrate the only way not to be effected by visual communication.  But that might only work if everyone else was wearing them too?