Strange Air?

These past couple of days have been, well, different I suppose. On Monday morning I was given the tasks that I had to do for the day, they consisted of making Mind Maps for the CD I was given, collect logos of famous companies, listen to the CD twice and give a positive review on it, these tasks were very straight forward.

The music I obtained was a from the artist ‘Woob’, I could have never imagined what the music was going to be like, when I began listening to it I though to myself, how am I going to make a good review out of this, it was the strangest music I had ever heard.

The class was online all day and one of the questions that rose up was, who was going to have the ‘Animal music’, and unfortunately it was me. The first track was full of birds squawking, and the final track had Penguin noises in it.

As I researched more into the Artist I found out that the actual front cover of the CD had Penguins on it as you can see.

I stumbled upon some reviews that people had given abut the CD; I found it odd that it had a 5 star rating, and the selling price on Amazon was $74.

Mind Maps

The mind maps were basically a collection of emotions, sounds and places that I had interpreted form the music, and put into words, I did this for each track.

Review

I had to create a review of Woob's CD, this was not as difficult as I first thought, and all I did was explain how the music made me feel and where it took me.

Logos

I compiled a list of logos, all of which were from major corporate enterprises, I also annotated them, explained what I liked about them, what typefaces they used, ect...

Mood Boards

Today had similar tasks to yesterday, I was asked to create 2 mood boards, which I created in design, I placed images that I found online and put them into the documents, I created 3 Boards this was just to show apportion of what the music said to me.

In each Mood Board I have included images of the words I included in my mind maps, it’s a visual version of them, and I have placed one image of one of them below.

The logos I have collected were mainly taken form a directory site which I found here.

I can honestly say that I am kind of getting into the music, some of it is bad but as it goes on it begins to become interesting.

Woob - Em:T 1194 Review

Woobs music is an ambient take on the peace and tranquillity in the world. The Em:T 1194 album has 6 tracks:

1. On Earth - 32'13"
2. Odonna - 13'15"
3. Amoeba - 01'45"
4. Wuub - 09'29"
5. Strange Air - 10'32"
6. Emperor - 04'28"

On earth takes first takes us on a journey to Africa, people talking in the streets, like a busy market place, you can sense that it is a very mellow atmosphere. we can then here a woman, from the middle east singing, this is a change in the atmosphere, and it seems very serious.

We are then taken into orbit around the earth, its quiet and peaceful, it then brings us down into a jungle, you can here the birds singing, it leads us into a sort of village and the woman is singing again. This track helps us to block out all the war and suffering in the world and leaves us with peace.

Odonna, is begins with beating drums and long high tone cords, towards the 9 minute mark the chords become deeper giving a sense off loss, something missing or gone, very deep and meaningful music.

Amoeba begins with a sort of printing machine going off, it then leads into a harmonica and guitar melody, gives the image of romance, on a river, then leads to the sound of frogs and heavy foot steps. This is a very good track, it gives a good atmosphere.

Wuub starts off with a line from a film "Alex, you know there's only one way we're going to end all this...", this was taken from a classic horror move called ‘Night of Dark Shadows’, there is a female vocalist, again middle eastern, through out the track, it gives off an very eerie atmosphere.

Strange Air first gives the impression of tranquility, the there are sounds of some sort of aircraft I would presume, there are samples of films throughout this track, a horror film, similar to the samples in Wuub. It then goes into a deep chord session, it gives the feeling of fear and paranoia.

The final track is name Emperor, it’s named this because of the Emperor penguin calls that go on throughout this track, it begins with a very deep base line and then gradually gets smoother and becomes more tranquil and the sounds of the penguins begin to fade into nothingness.

Overall, Em:T 1194 isn’t an album, it’s a journey that takes you’re around the world and back, and all in the space of 70 minutes.

A6 Evaluation

The A6 assignment was split into two tasks, a presentation on a typographer, and several timed typography tasks.

Presentation

I was chosen to create a presentation on a typographer named Zuzana Licko, The first part of my research brought me to the Émigré website, from this site I learned quite a lot about her, it mainly spoke of her typographies that were published in the Émigré Magazine, and told that she and her husband were the co-founders of the company.

I then stumbled upon an interview that Zuzana did in 2004, it included the most popular font, parts of her relationship with Rudy Vanderlans and parts of her past, I took notes of what I thought were key points, and what I could use in my presentation.

Once I had all the information I needed on Zuzana’s Background and her work, I developed a template for the presentation, all I included was a line on each page that the title went on and an image of Zuzana on the front page.

After the first practice presentation I realise that I had a lot of work to do on it, I dint include the Type Anatomy at that moment, I was still getting more information about the fonts, so I decided to do a font comparison of ‘Base Monospace’ and ‘Base Nine Twelve’, and another comparison of ‘Matrix II’ and ‘Matrix II Display’.

And I also decided to a page that just explained the anatomy of 3 typefaces. The content of the presentation was now complete.

Now had to find and image to put onto my presentation, one of the fellow class mates who were doing the same typographer as me unfortunately was ill so I had no idea of what image he had used, so really I could pick any at all.

I searched high and low for an image, I eventually found an image of her on a font site, originally the image had Rudy and Zuzana, I had to crop it down, but while I was at it I decided to attempt removing the background, I read the help files in Photoshop CS2 and found that the magic wand tool could do this. The process did take a while but eventually I got it done.

The handout was pretty straight forward to make, place the same image I use on the presentation into the page, make sentences out of the facts I had used on my presentation and add some useful links. I also place Zuzana’s two most famous fonts on the bottom of the page.

Once all the content was placed into the presentation, I felt liberated, but I still sensed that it wasn’t finished, I couldn’t understand it, I had everything placed with it, then it came to me, I needed to ad could to it, I looked too bland, I needed brightening up, I decided to change it to a cream colour, although, I had to carefully colour in the picture of Zuzana as well.

I was nervous on the day of my presentation, mind you, it would be strange if I wasn’t worried, I knew exactly what I was going to say, and how I was going to present it, but I was still nervous, even up to going to the door of Steve’s room I was nervous.

But I so over came this, as soon I started the panic just went away, and what’s even better is the presentation lasted exactly five minutes. The only thing I regret was not answering all the questions right, but I’m not worried about it, I can always get better.

Timed tasks

The second half of this unit consisted of Developing and creating a variety of Typographic pieces within a set time. These tasks came in a variety of forms, ranging form paint tubes, to news paper articles. Each task went through 4 stages, the first of which is planning; I used a single time sheet to plan out what tasks I was going to do, and how much time I would spend on each.

Hokai

The aim of this task was to create a paint tube skin; I had the choice of colour I could use on the tube. I was given the company logo, the barcode, and the first stage was to create sketches of it, and I drew two small designs and one final design. I was given the measurements for it and basically just had to colour it in, this is why I chose to not include this in my work, and there wasn’t much design work in the task.

Vodafone

The aim of this task was to produce a newspaper advertisement, the advertised a job position at Vodafone, and we were given the Vodafone logo and the text that was to be placed into the document. I had to design the layout of the document, deciding where to place the logo, what font the text should be and how it was to be presented.

Jonathan Gee

This task was based on creating a newspaper article for Jonathan Gee, a famous Jazz musician. I was given on image of him and the text that was to be placed in, I had to create the template and implement some typographic skills I had learned.

Grid & Story

This was one big task, but was split into two smaller tasks, the first of which was to basically create the template for the content; the trick was that I didn’t know how much content there was so I had to give myself adequate space that I could use to put it in. the banner that I created was very basic, I wanted to include an image but we were not allowed, it was disappointing.

After the grid was finished, I was given the second task, which was to add content to the grid; I had to firstly sketch two ideas of how I was going to layout the page content. I then chose the one I liked most and sketched it to a larger scale. Adding the text was easy, finding a font to use it was difficult but I managed in the end. I cropped the image and added a quotation onto the third column.

Overall I am happy with both my presentation and with the work I have created in the timed tasks, but o better my understanding of software I will learn more about in design, find out how to get more things working.