Dada.

Dada. What can you say about Dada. I think I captured it very well in this brochure design. This was for my Typography class and we had to pick an art style and do a research paper on that style. Then we had to create a "brochure" using colors, type, and layout that reflected our style. I chose Dada which is also know as the anti-art. They did things like the picture in the center of my design. It is a 1919 alteration to Da Vinci's Mona Lisa by Marcel DuChamp.

In the second and third decades of the twentieth century, a new kind of artistic movement swept Europe and America. Its very name, "Dada"--two identical syllables without the obligatory "-ism"--distinguished it from the long line of avant-gardes which have determined the history of the arts in the last 200 years. Its proponents came from all parts of Europe and the United States at a time when their native countries were battling one another in the deadliest war ever known. They did not restrict themselves to being painters, writers, dancers, or musicians; most of them were involved in several art forms and in breaking down the boundaries which kept the arts distinct from one another. Indeed, the Dadaists were not content to make art. They wanted to affect all aspects of Western civilization, to take part in the revolutionary changes which were the inevitable result of the chaos of the First World War. They were not interested in writing books and painting pictures which a public would admire in an uninvolved manner; rather, they aimed to provoke the public into reacting to their activities: to the Dadaists, a violently negative reaction was better that a passive acceptance. The Dada movement was perhaps the most decisive single influence on the development of twentieth-century art, and its innovations are so pervasive as to be virtually taken for granted today.- an excerpt from an essay by Timothy Shipe

Full essay can be found here: http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/archive.html

Explorations in Typography!

Featuring: The 23rd letter of the Greek Alphabet.

PSI!

Okay, for this assignment we had to pick on of the letters from either the Greek or Phoenician Alphabets. I chose the Letter Psi. We were then given the task of writing a one paragraph about the origins of the letter as well as if it has any significance in modern society.  The following is what I wrote and is on all of the designs:

"Psi is the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet and it represents the sound /ps/ like the English lapse.Psi was adopted in the Runic alphabet , and also into Cyrillic alphabets. the letter Psi is also used in physics to represent a wave function in quantum mechanics. Psi has many different meanings depending on the topic. In Biochemistry, it represents a rare nucleotide called Pseudouridillic Acid. Yet when talking about Astronomy, Psi represents the planet Neptune. Psi is also used to denote paranormal phenomena and is now a premier term in Parapsychology."

I used the paranormal as a jumping point for my design and it is why in two of the designs the letter for Psi is feathered almost all the way out. For this design series we needed to also create a visual Hierarchy using our body copy, our letter form, and our letter's name. I believe that my second design is the most effective.

Global Awareness Poster #1

This design was made for Muskegon Community College's 2010 Global Awareness Festival Poster Contest. For this design, I was very heavily inspired by stained glass windows used in Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture.
Example:

I pared down the complexity of the window and gave the frame of the poster its basic geometry. Unfortunately, I did not win the contest, but I still got a really nice piece. I used the Pen tool to make the Countries and the trees. I set the trees to a 74% Opacity, to give the countries a neat, almost shaded effect. I chose to use only black, white and green in the color palette because the theme that year was "Living Green".  I used the Water Paper effect in the Sketch section of the Effects panel.