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My webpage

This is just a screen capture of a part of my website alongside part of Jessica’s that allows you to see how I’ve used a similar style and layout to her in order to keep in with the theme of her work.

My webpage

Jessica’s webpage

To create the webpage, I wrote in Markdown in the first instance, so that I could focus on getting all of the content in without getting distracted by the design (as I always do...). Once I had all of my content structured properly, I converted the markdown to HTML and started working on adding CSS to style the page. I also made sure to submit the essay to Turnitin so that I could get a review of the originality - it came back at 10% which is a reasonable margin to be in. In order to accurately reference all of my sources I used the tool RefMe.com.

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Jessica Hische’s work - inspiration for webpage design

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Research for Deliverable 03 - Jessica Hische

For this assignment, we were to choose a designer from a list provided to us, and to write about them in an essay which was to be uploaded to a webpage and designed in a similar style to the designers own work (or whatever way we deemed fit). 

For this task, I chose Jessica Hische, as when I was looking at the different designers work, hers was the one I was most drawn to. Jessica produces beautiful type and lettering, and she is very successful in her career as a letterer. 

The main sources I used for my essay were her own website  and Wikipedia. I also got information from a number of different interviews she has done. I have referenced all of my sources in my essay which you can find here. 

Personal background

Born 1984 in  Charleston, South Carolina

Grew up in Pennsylvania, where she lived with her parents.

Attended Tyler School of Art

Graduated in 2006 with a BFA in Graphic and Interactive Design.

Now lives in San Francisco with web designer husband and their daughter.

Progression to the world of design

After graduating, worked at Headcase Design (owned by one of her professors from college)

After her hours got cut, she undertook personal project “12 Days of Christmas” - got her representation with Frank Sturges Reps & a job as a senior designer at Louise Fili Ltd.

Co-designed US Postal Service ‘Love’ stamp with Louise Fili - this was very successful, over 250 million copies sold.

After 2.5 years at Louise Fili, Jessica became a full time freelancer.

About her work

Has worked for  Wes Anderson, Penguin Books, Victoria’s Secret, Nike, Samsung, and Target (to name a few)

Has worked with Studiomates and Pencil Factory

Currently runs collaborative studio ‘Title Case’ with Erik Marinovich.

Worked with her husband on a few projects, including ‘Don’t Fear the Internet’ and their wedding invitations

Daily Drop Cap is her most famous project - created a drop cap every day and uploaded to her site. Gained a lot of recognition and increased her popularity hugely

Should I Work for Free flowchart - another popular piece of work. Humorous flowchart that helps people decide when its okay to ask for money and when they should work without pay.

She has completed a number of side projects:

Thousands Under 90 – a website that creates a certificate for people who ‘know they deserve an award’. A fun, creative and well-illustrated project.

Jess & Russ: Our Wedding Invitation – an interactive website that tells the story of Jessica and Russ’s lives and how they ended up together.

Don’t Fear the Internet – a collaboration between Jess & Russ, a site that teaches basic HTML and CSS to web design beginners.

Title Case – Jessica’s collaborative studio with Erik Marinovitch. They host workshops and events to teach others about lettering and type.

Should I Work For Free? – The flow chart that helps people decide when they should or shouldn’t accept free work.

Mom, This Is How Twitter Works – an explanation about how to use Twitter, created to stop her mom from making any common Twitter blunders.

Inker Linker – a tool that helps people to find the right printer for them, based on what they do best or what is important to them.

Quotes & Accents – a brief guide of how to quickly type smart quotes and accented characters on a Mac, complete with examples.

Daily Drop Cap – an illustrated letter was posted daily to the daily drop cap website. Perhaps Jessica’s most famous side project.

52x52 – a place where users can register to donate money to their preferred charity, every week for a year.

Recognition and notable interviews

‘Like Knows Like’ by Bas Berkhout and Marije Kuiper - a great insight into Jessica’s life, both professional and personal.

Awards -  She has been featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list twice, she was named as the Print New Visual Artist, the ADC Young Gun, and the GDUSA Person to Watch.

Personal Favourite

My personal favourite is the series of Starbucks ads she did the typography for. Reasons: aesthetically pleasing, works well with the imagery, look delicious

Favourite quote

“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.” – Jessica Hische

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Deliverable 03 - Research

I looked into the work of each of the designers we were able to choose from in order to decide which one I wanted to write my essay about. Below is a list showing each of the artists work.

Jan Tschichold

Paul Rand

Saul Bass

Massimo Vignelli

Josef Müller Brockmann

Neville Brody

Paula Scher

Wolfgang Weingart

Stefan Sagmeister

Erik Spiekermann

Marian Bantjes

Jessica Hische

The designer that I chose for my essay was Jessica Hische. I’ll explain more about why I chose her in my next post.

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Week 12 - Future User Interfaces and Beyond

This is it. The final week of the semester. This week’s lecture we looked at the cutting edge of interaction design and possible future applications.

“The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.”

-William Gibson, Speculative Fiction Novelist

The Designers Republic were heavily influenced by Gibson and many of his predictions have become a reality.

Microsoft’s Future Vision & Corning Inc. A Day Made of Glass

These videos looks at a number of different ways that technology might develop in the future. It is exciting but also quite scary to think just how much we can incorporate artificial intelligence into every aspect of our lives. While watching the videos the very first thing that came to mind was how much it reminded me of the Netflix series ‘Black Mirror’. I’m not sure if that is so much of a good thing… (If you have seen Black Mirror you will understand!)

Some of these technologies are available to us now, such as the Google Glass or Snapchat Spectacles (sunglasses that allow you to take pictures and record videos via a camera on the frame, and upload them to your Snapchat feed).

Snapchat Spectacles

Google Glass

Other technologies we looked at were the LeapMotion, smart watches, FitBit, Nest and Amazon Echo.

Virtual Reality is still a relatively new technology and while it is amazing and awesome and has the ability to enhance many aspects of life, it is something I find pretty terrifying! VR headsets are probably the most popular use for the technology at the moment. They allow you to enter a world and engage multiple senses to make it feel more like reality – for example, a simulation of a rollercoaster ride.

To sum up the lecture, we looked back at the most important things to remember about design:

Principles that stand the test of time and technology

Hierarchy – The Golden Ratio and Fibonacci sequence are still relevant today. Getting the balance right is vital in delivering information on smaller screens Balance, scale, space, line and shape.

Typography – The need to understand good typographic choices, what’s appropriate for a particular task has always been a standard from the Illuminated scripts to letting you know if your flight is on time.

Colour – Bauhaus teaching of colour theory by Kandinsky, Klee, and Albers is still very valid today.

Branding and Icon Design – Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz Isotype became the standard to icon creation. The creation of easily read icons is more important now that it has ever been.

I have really enjoyed this module as it provided a breather from the nitty gritty of the coding we were stuck with in our other modules. I have learnt so much about the past and present of the art and design world and, if anything, it has just made me want to learn even more. I hope you’ve enjoyed looking through my work as much as I have enjoyed creating it! 

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Week 11 - The Here and Now

This week’s lecture began with a look at Stefan Sagmeister and his Ted talk “The Power of Time Off”. In this talk, he spoke about how every 7 years, he closes his studio for one year to take a sabbatical. This helps him to rejuvenate and refresh his creative outlook and gain world knowledge that he can inject into his work.

However, the main focus of the lecture was how we deal with designing for today’s proliferation of devices. Digital content is consumed in so many different ways, through so many different devices and platforms that responsive design is a very important and necessary aspect of digital media nowadays. Things to consider:

Proportions

Considering the relationships between elements lies at the heart of designing for the fluid web. Inspiration can be drawn from architecture. Sir Christopher Wren (one of the most highly acclaimed English architects in history) used harmonic ratios such as the Golden Section and the Rule of Thirds in the creation of his masterpieces.

The Golden Ratio

The Rule of Thirds

Hierarchy

Hierarchy is applied at the markup layer. Wim Crouwel is renowned for his information driven approach to design and his ground-breaking typeface New Alphabet – one of the earliest fully digital fonts. The organisation of elements on a screen and their relationships to each other need to be considered

Typography

Long gone are the days of having to stick to Arial, Verdana, Georgia and Times New Roman. Nowadays, with the opportunity to use rich web typography, we have a wealth of typefaces to choose from and CSS3 has provided us with even more ways to control type.

My personal favourite go-to site for typefaces is Google Fonts. My all-time personal favourite font is Raleway! Services such as Google Fonts and Typekit provide us with a much wider selection of fonts than the ‘web-safe’ choices designers would have been restricted to in the past.

Composition

Understanding composition and how relationships between elements work in design can be applied in both paper and fluid web design.

Josef Muller-Brockmann emphasises in his work the underlying grid systems and carefully chosen colour and type palettes, which are both minimal and rich.

Systems

Thorough design is key. Designing a system that can have multiple outputs based on different, sometimes unpredictable, input scenarios lies at the heart of a fluid approach. Erik Spiekermann is a hugely talented typographer from whom we can learn a great deal. His approach to design is systemic – it considers elements as part of a wider system, at every scale, from a business card to a billboard.

Narrative

At the heart of design is storytelling. We should consider narratives, stories and transitions and how they can be used in our increasingly dynamic web environment.

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Week 10 - The Rise of The Machines

The launch of the Apple Macintosh in 1984 saw the true beginning of the computer revolution, especially where designers were concerned.

Ed Fella

After spending 30 years working as a commercial artist, Ed Fella entered the MFA program at Cranbrook Academy of Art at the age of 47. This saw Fella become recognised as a pioneer of postmodern graphic design.

Meanwhile, the Apple Mac was beginning to make an impact on the design industry. The computers success was mainly down to its intuitive interface. Apples GUI made it very easy for those not familiar with computers or command line to interact with the system and its software.

At the same time of the Apple Mac launch, design duo Zuzana Licko and Rudy Vanderlans launched Emigre to challenge the limitations the new computer possessed.

Emigre is a magazine that focuses on contemporary poets, writers, journalists, graphic designers, architects, photographers and artists.

As the system became more sophisticated, software developments followed suit. Working with this new-found freedom, Neville Brody and Jon Wozencroft created Fuse, a quarterly publication that explored the new world of digital type design.

In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee set the wheels in motion on a new medium that would change the way we communicate forever – the Internet. In the beginning, Adobe Flash was used to create complex web designs which often needed to be viewed on specific browsers or at particular resolutions. Sites became overladen with images, videos and other superfluous code which slowed the delivery of content way down. Something had to change...

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Week 9 - Postmodernism

Postmodernism was a broad movement that developed in the mid-20th century. It was a reaction against modernism. Postmodernism pretty much went against everything that modernism stood for, and created a new sense of freedom with the sense that “anything goes”. It was both controversial and confrontational, intentionally provocative and often outrageous.

Wolfgang Weingart

Wolfgang Weingart was a Dutch designer who was recognised for his experimental and expressive approach to typography. He studied under Emil Ruder and Armin Hofmann at the Basel School of Design. He soon got tired of the restrictive Swiss typographic style, and began experimenting with type, pushing the boundaries of what could be done with it. One particular aspect that Wolfgang enjoyed experimenting with was letterspacing. He was fascinated by the effect it could have, and often stretched words until they became almost unintelligible.

Two of Weingart’s students, April Greiman and Dan Friedman carried on the postmodern movement in the US.

April Greiman

Dan Friedman

Other artists we looked at in today’s lecture:

Barney Bubbles

Recognised as a “founding father” of album cover art, who created “hundreds of record sleeves that have sold in their millions across the world”.

Paula Scher

An American graphic designer, painter and art educator in design, and the first female principal at Pentagram (design studio), which she joined in 1991.

Jamie Reed

Best known for his work for the Sex Pistols, Reed developed an anti-design approach to his work for the anarchic punk group.

Vaughan Oliver

Vaughan worked primarily for 4AD Records from 1982 to 1998, where he formed a close relationship with the musicians, ensuring the visual aesthetic closely reflected the artist’s particular style.

Russell Mills

Russell Mills got a lot of influence from the punk movement and the work of Kurt Schwitters. He has been heavily involved in design for the music and publishing industry since graduating from the Royal College of Art in the late 1970s.

Neville Brody

Neville Brody is an English graphic designer, typographer and art director. He is known for his work on The Face Magazine, Arena Magazine, as well as designing record covers for artists such as Cabaret Voltaire, The Bongos, and Depeche Mode.

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Week 8 - WWII, HfG Ulm and Modernism in the US

World War II forced many of Europe’s most influential designers to flee to the US for safety, while the Ulm School of Design was left to pick up the pieces in Germany.

This week, we looked at Modernism in design and how the Modernist movement was defined. The ‘rules’ of modernism were as follows:

Reject traditional forms and decorative elements

Seek a solution that is simple and direct

Use systematic methods rather than intuitive ones

Think about relationships in form and content

Use geometric shapes: circle, triangle, square

Use primary colours

Use sans serif typefaces

Show contrast in typographical material

Use photographs and photomontage rather than drawings or illustrations

Use silhouetted photographs with white backgrounds

Use maps and diagrams

Use graphic symbols and icons

Use of asymmetric page layout

Use of grid or clearly delineated page-organising method

Apply a planned visual hierarchy

Examples of modernism in furniture.

Degenerate art was the name given to modernist, abstract art that Hitler and the Nazis hated. He persecuted modern artists, designers, musicians, and basically anyone who didn’t conform to his ideals. Artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Oskar Kokoschka had their work displayed at ‘The Degenerate Art Exhibition’, an exhibition held by the Nazis to ridicule modern, abstract, and non-representational art.

The Nazi persecution caused many artists to immigrate to the US where they were welcomed by the creative community with open arms. This move saw a cultural shift of creativity and intellect from Europe to the States.

Back home, the Ulm School of Design sought to redress the balance in Europe. The origins of the Ulm School of Design can be traced back to the Scholl Foundation. This was created in 1950 by Inge Scholl in memory of their siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl, who were executed by Nazis in 1943 for being members of the resistance group “White Rose”.

The Ulm School of Design was founded in 1953 by Inge, Otl Aicher, and Max Bill. It quickly gained a reputation as one of the finest design schools in the world, second only to the Bauhaus.

Key designers of the American Modernist movement included Alexey Brodovitch, Herbert Bayer, Herbert Matter, Paul Rand, Saul Bass, and Milton Glaser (to name a few!).

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Week 7 - The International Typographic Style

The International Typographic Style (also known as the International Style or The Swiss Style) originated in Switzerland in the 1950s, and remained a major movement in design for over 20 years. Still influencing designers today, the movement was refined at two design schools. In Basel, Switzerland, it was led by Armin Hofmann and Emil Ruder while the movement in Zurich was led by Josef Muller-Brockmann.  

An example of Swiss Style design.

Many of the principles found in the current trend for flat design can be found in International Style – it still has a major influence on contemporary art and design. One good example of flat design is the Windows 8 desktop design – this gets rid of ornamental elements and keeps the look clean, crisp and minimalist, to enhance user experience.

Olly Moss is one designer whose work is influenced by that of Josef Muller-Brockmann and others. Below is a few examples of his work, and Muller-Brockmann’s, so you can see the similarities within the work.

Olly Moss - Rolling Roadshow, 2010

Olly Moss - A Life Well Wasted 7

Josef Muller-Brockmann’s work

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I haven’t been able to attend classes for the past few weeks because of medical issues, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working! After creating my Postmodernism art history poster, I felt inspired to try and create some art of my own. I used Photoshop to edit this image - I wasn’t aiming for anything in particular with it, I just had fun trying out different features and tools. The main background image is sourced from Unsplash and the source for the pinup girl image is: http://weheartit.com/entry/group/950729 

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FINAL SUBMISSION - Art History Poster

After getting feedback from my lecturer, i made a few small changes that he recommended to my final poster. Instead of having magazine logos dotted about on the poster, I added an extra graphic (the middle finger). I also changed the name “Rick Poynor” to “Barney Bubbles”, as Poynor wrote more about graphic design whilst Bubbles practiced it. I changed the colour of the location and date text from red to white and moved it up to the top right hand corner on the blue background, where it is more visible. 

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Art History Poster - Pioneers of Postmodern Graphic Design

by Amy Long

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Concept 02 for Art History Poster.

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Concept 01 for Art History Poster.