Our websites are due today! I wrapped up a few small changes on my Alphaville website this morning and I feel pretty happy with it now. The actual coding of the website wasn't very challenging, but I spent a lot of time coming up with the artistic design of the site.

Rajah Coffee: New Typography Style!

This is a poster redesign I did for History of Modern Design. I had to redesign Livemont's Art Nouveau "Rajah Coffee" poster in the style of Jan Tschichold's New Typography movement.

Alphaville website

I've started preliminary design and coding on my Alphaville website and I think I'm pretty happy with it so far. I've been using Photoshop and Dreamweaver to put it all together. There are still whole pages to finish and quite a bit more coding, as well as a script to add, but it's getting close to done! Here's what it looks like right now:

Roman Cieslewicz!

Two of Roman's posters: 1979 and 1962, respectively.

I recently came upon the work of Polish graphic designer Roman Cieslewicz and have become pretty obsessed with his poster design. His use of color and photo-montage is incredibly striking to me and his influence on my work in the future seems kind of inevitable...

Here's a very brief bio from polish-poster.com:

Roman Cieslewicz (1930-1996) In 1949-54 studied at Cracow Academy of Fine Arts. He specialized in poster and display designing. Worked as book and magazine designer. Since 1962 he lived in France where he worked as an art director of "Vogue", "Elle" and "Mafia" - advertising agency. He was the artistic creator of "Opus International" and "Kitsch". Member of AGI [International Graphic Association].

You can view several pieces of his work in THIS flickr set.

Communications Exercise 2

Last class we had another exercise on communicating clearly. The task was to partner up draw a schematic of our bedrooms. Then, only using words, we were to instruct our partner how our room was arranged so they could draw it as well. the results were then – mostly laughably – compared. Below is the my bedroom drawn by me. Below that is my drawing of my partner's bedroom. I did a pretty terrible job at rendering her bedroom the way it actually should have looked. A lesson learned, I suppose. Communicating your ideas, thoughts, instructions – anything – clearly is a very important thing.

A New Header!

I recently designed a new header for my music blog Skatterbrain. I used the Affair typeface (available from Veer) in (almost) all caps, with some open-type alterations and heavy baseline and kerning adjustments. I think it came out pretty nice and hopefully not TOO busy.

Assignment One: Poster Re-Design

I chose Jay Ryan as my designer to "rip off" for this assignment. You should DEFINITELY check him out if you never have before. My poster design is below. Please note that it's not yet finished, but close!