identity, logo

A new company, doing consulting in aviation, in need of a company profile, web, logo. I enjoyed this project, mainly because the client wanted an abstract logo. People often say that, but they do not really mean it, when you get down to it. The logo, I know, breaks pretty much all logo rules and sensibilities, but I am really pleased with it. It gives me assosiations to aviation instruments, radar, sunrises from below, aeroeverything, space, and in some versions, to propellers. For obvious reasons, the logo being so complex, it comes in a few different versions depending on use. What makes me happy is that I can slice the logo, I can use only a part of it, and the recognition should not be a problem.

web

The client wanted different images on different pages of the website. I am not really a fan of background images for two reasons: it can take forever to load, and it is a hassle to scale. Responsive design is a relatively new way of dealing with a plethora of screen sizes, so the “standards” to deal with it is not exactly set in stone.

IA

IA, or information architecture, is not as trivial as many seems to think. This is where clients often gets confused and I am considering building a little “beginners guide to IA” to make it easier for me, cheaper and more understandable for the client. Much time can be basically wasted because of structural uncertainties.

misc

I like testing out the grapics I make on different things. It gives an idea of how it might work in the real world, and problems arrive that needs to be solved for the logo to do the job. A logo like this is not easy to place on letterpapers, envelopes, businesscards, cars etc. Basically, it cannot be in just one version for all these uses. FedEx can, Quality Flight Solutions needs sophisticated solutions.

The devil is in the details. Favicons! Everyone should have one.

Graphic design is a part of system design. Confusing to people that word. Design. It conjures up images of lovey-dovey hippies splashing with purple and orange, or all-in-black guys with hip glasses. Endless austere portfolios in swiss graphics, squares, black, white, red, Helvetica.

Structures, architecture, flexibility in backend and responsive frontend. HTML5, I think, is my new best friend. And the feeling that are going around these days, that we will simply not give a fiddlers fart about Internet-Bloody-Exporer 6 anymore is a huge relief.

I see, we all do, a lot of not quite optimal sites around. Almost-but-not-quite-getting-there. Flash, I have previously mentioned, is now pet-hate number one, after IE6 has been thrown in the rubbish tip of technological shite. Often, I think, they simply lacked someone saying “no”.

Sites with a squillion photos but you can’t share them by copying the URL.
Restaurant menus you cannot download or copy into an email.
Addresses that are images.
Directions you cannot print or forward.

That sort of thing.

Someone should have said no. “Dear client, all your wishes can come true, we can make it blink, dance, shine, jump, slide, glide, bump, sparkle and sing. But you will loose these things…” There is a crack in everything.

I think I know how it happens, and I am sure a lot of well-meaning people are involved. We have too many possibilities and ways of doing things. We want to please. “can you do this?” “of course we can”. We are technological wizards. We will twist the backend into a knot and hack it to make it so. We will squeeze blood from a stone, force the limitations of our technologies to squeal for mercy.

I care about things that works, I will say no.

melbourne, australia

(by Lars)

Soon, I will have finished my bachelor in digital media production. At this point, in the last semester, I am working on information architecture, information design, interaction design. Important stuff, absolutely. Very interesting. But after these three years, I feel restless and unfulfilled. Yes, you need to know the rules to be able to break them intelligently, but I was hoping for more play. More silliness in the name of education.

Myself and two guys are at the moment working on our bachelor thesis. The amount of project-controlling tools are distracting. There is a forest of tools and requirements, supposedly helpful, to get us to where we want to go. But the process of administrating these tools, setting them up, using them regularly, recording time sheets, short term goals, long term goals, documentation, deadlines, tracking documents, personal diaries, group diary, exchanging ideas, recording ideas, classifying ideas, meta, meta, meta…
This is supposedly the world of sensible engineers and how they work. But it is not. Out there in the real world, things work in mysterious, accidental and random ways. Sometimes dictated by company history and culture, sometimes dictated by what would be the most efficient here and now. Sometimes it is dictated by one wacky individual.

The world – and the internet – is full of information. Pin-point information and accuracy. Minuscule details.
Maybe this is because computers works on 0 and 1; count, for each, or, this, and, else, if. Precision. Computers are not canvasses; there are no buckets of paint, no waking up to files stored randomly, no organic parts, no decay, no stacks of papers falling down, requiring re-sorting and re-thinking. Computers are stupid. They do as they are told. It is difficult to see with new eyes; especially if your brain is trained in programming. This, and, or, else, if.

Maybe we should stop taking it so seriously. We don’t really need all this accuracy, all this information that tells me exactly, precisely some tiny detail, that I do not have the knowledge or wisdom to put into context. Fragments that do not make up a whole, tiny pieces of information, numbers, simplistic headlines.

We should make web pages with less information. Content, yes. Intelligently, certainly.
Transient, changeable, nomadic. Spanning aeons, making up connections. Compare, discard, ditch. Deliberate misalignment. Play. Arse around.

I have grown to care less and less for the technology as such, and I yearn more for what would push my imagination, make my brain hurt from thinking. Design is where science and art break even. Of course it hurts.

“If you’re looking for a daily dose of anything, boblet’s wonderful blog isn’t for you.  This woman gives warning at the very top of her homepage: “If I have nothing to say, I won’t say it.”  And sometimes she doesn’t say anything, for weeks at a time.  But I check regularly to see if there might be something new, because the new invariably is quirky, fun, dense with meaning, and absolutely guaranteed to keep me thinking, until the next post.  She has written my single favorite blog entry of the last year, and when I get around to writing my response to her post, you’ll know which one it is.  In the meantime, where else can you find the adventures of Zapf Dingbats?”

Ah, Linda, the adventures of Zapf Dingbats and Comic Sans have been widely distributed – among the probably narrow bunch of font-freaks…

But she is right, I don’t write for the sake of hits, I write for… well. Myself, some people I wish read my stuff (maybe they do), and the few that I know do. This blog is a little like firing pottery: the end result will last for longer than I care to think about, and to publish should not be a race (nothing should be a race, come to think of it). There is no winning on the net. I like to think of the award as an award for silence. The rubbish I have not posted hopefully places the few things I have written in a better light.

Linda herself writes some of the best stuff I have come across; she writes beautiful prose, intelligently on anything you care to think of, and then some. Part of the award is to nominate another five blogs of outstanding quality, and I can only say it is a shame it would be bad form to give the award back to her. The world if full of so much rubbish, it is balm to find coherence, intelligence, sense and acute observation.

And that brings me over to the reason why it has taken me so long to publish this piece. I am not really a blogger, I am not a blog-reader, so to find five recipients was not such a simple task, yet one that deserved careful consideration. I have not been able to come up with five, so the magic number is three, and I shall count on being forgiven. Rather three excellent ones, than five not so. I shall maybe go a little outside the Arte Y Picos scope, but I will argue that writing is art, observation is true talent. To Linda, and to you three: thank you. Don’t stop.

Here you go – my three thinkers. In no particular order. I leave it to you to explore.

Drink design

Stonehead

Illusive joy

I haven’t touched a pencil or a brush in years. Not properly, not committedly. But in this situation of pressure, essays to write, video to edit, processes to define, compose, structure, books to read, technology to decipher, articles to consume – here, now, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a deep melancholy need to find out – do I still have it? Is it really part of me?
Once it is established that so-and-so is good at this-or-that, it is hard to rock those perceptions, and I was always defined as “good at drawing”. A blessing and a curse.
But drawing is about practice, a collaboration between hand, heart and head, it is about proportions, about light. It is about shapes and negative space and intuition, but most of all it is about shadows.

(“Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act falls the Shadow”).

Most books that teach drawing start out with sketches of The Whole. I have always started in one corner and worked my way around haphazardly. A dangerous strategy, as it might not add up, when you connect lines at the other end of the page. The secret lies in those tiny shadows and getting them right. Then it will add up, and I will have finished a drawing of a whole I haven’t really looked at until it is finished. It is a little magic, it is deep meditation, but I doubt it is art.
Tricky things to draw: glass, water, hands. I always come back to hands. They never look right, but sometimes they are. Look at your own, see the fingers foreshortened, twist a little, and you’ll realise that good old Michelangelo was not far off.

But do I still have it?
I fumbled a little. It got better. I did a few hands, and the last ones had that familiar quality. Recognisably my hand, nicks and scars included; familiar handiwork. Drawing a beat-up transparent plastic bottle at an angle was a tad early, it seems a little practice will do it.
I am comforted; I am relieved. I am also hooked again.
It is not great art, but it is solid craft, decent draftsmanship.

Good enough for me.
_____________________

as a ps. A current work in progress. I’ll leave portraits for a bit, methinks.

.

.

The kiln fires the gooey, soft, sensual clay into stone; it is a non-reversible process, and the object dies a little for me – I tend to lose interest in the finished product. It is the clay part of the process, and firing kilns that attracts me. The transformation is total, the pot will never leave earth, it cannot be broken down to the original materials. Ages hence, my pottery shards will still be around. Longevity. Infinity. A mindblowing thought – and one that (should) keeps potters constantly reminded to not fire substandard pots in the first place. We won’t get rid of them.

The few pots that lives for me, have that magic all potters hunt for: that perfect, perfect balance of shape, texture and colour.

It sounds simple. It is impossible. It is chasing stars and fog. It is processes with so many uncontrollable variables you cannot do anything else but expect the unexpected. To make it really easy for myself, I fell in love with the microcrystalline glazes. The initiated will laugh at this. Microcrystallines will keep you pulling out your hair for the rest of your life. It will ruin the kiln shelves, it will stick, run, be too thin, too thick; the pot too high, thick, thin, small. The kiln fires too evenly, not evenly enough, there will be tiny variations in the core temperature, there will be a draught. When they work, they are gorgeous, though. From a full kiln, I’d be extraordinary happy to get one single pot that lives.

There is a virtue in it too, to control what you can, and then be able to leave yourself at the mercy of chance. Passing that point, imposing will is not so important anymore.

.
.
There is not a lot of photos from this period in my life. Fine electronics do not go well with clay, dust, glazes and blazing kilns.
But memories are good too.

microcrystalline green tea bowl

microcrystalline blue glaze – “purple perhaps”

.

newly thrown plates, before turning

the dead fish is my stamp, id and trademark

I was never big on moulding and modelling, but Gregory is always nearby

googly espresso mugs

I was never a fan of symmetry. Throwing wobbly pots is in fact incredibly difficult

bark

roof

wall

house

table

concrete

door

But back to school – I am now deeply in the clutches of the System, and it feels weird.
I have never been one for working in, or working well within large Systems. By systems I mean an organization, company or group consisting of more than ten people. That is when you begin to need serious administration, and that is when things gets bureaucratic, sticky and slow-moving. Creativity is lost, stifled or ignored by systems, and it is generally not an environment for spontaneity – the spice of life.
And larger systems seems to generate, spawn or hatch a certain type of system-person…

I did the mistake of volunteering for a job as a (computer) lab assistant for the new students. It has been four weeks of frustrations and thank god it’s over soon.
There are lots of reasons it is being frustrating of course, but I suspect that it is mainly for the system-generated-persons. I am a rebel at heart, and conforming to rules without reason doesn’t sit well with me. My instinct is to question why, and not given a satisfactory answer, I get frustrated and annoyed. I want reason. I want to know things are grounded on sensible thought processes. I don’t have to agree to the method, but I will not accept mindless conformity or faulty reasoning. The System Person is well fitted to the system, and have the ability to talk gibberish and accepting and repeating all sorts of nonsense without missing a beat.
The world is dumb enough as it is. Establishments of higher education should not add to it.

And then, curiously, I was asked by my previous professor to assist in his course, and I accepted. This is a diffrent thing alltoghether, and even though I probably shouldn’t have accepted, as I have a large pile of books to read and understand, I think it will be fun. At least it is guaranteed to be the opposite of those first weeks. So I am actually looking forward to it. It will be as system-free as anything can be in an institution like this.
And that is what I have been looking for from the start.