Closing Remarks

Welp, I've wrapped up my first semester at Georgia State and I'm happy to say it went very successfully. This all just makes me so excited for next semester and applying to the BFA program. I'll be keeping this blog as a personal art/design blog for a while. It's not ideal, but Blogger has been a pretty good medium to allow me to post and talk about my work. Speaking of which, here's my final packaging project:

(if you see them, just ignore the typos please, I was in a rush to finish this thing and typing blocks of text was honestly the last thing I was worried about. I'll be creating a new version of this for my portfolio soon)

Packaging

Pack-aging, it's what wolves do, right? They age, in packs? It couldn't possibly be anything graphic design related considering I've had over a week already to work on this project and I've come up empty-handed. I haven't even posted anything here, either. Unfortunately I've spent the majority of this week working, which is good considering for the past month or two, I haven't been getting hours at my job and I'm getting smaller and smaller paychecks. It's bad, however, because I don't have any time to work on what's important. In my free time this past week I've been mostly working on a side project for a student at my old university who is starting her own business. I haven't been able to dedicate enough time to my final project for Intro, so this week is going to be extremely trying (and tiring) for me.

I'm redesigning the packaging for Rotosound's roundwound bass guitar strings (pictured above), some I recently purchased and have been extremely satisfied with. Their design leaves much to be desired, however, relying on generic textures and an outdated logo. After much consideration and trial, I've decided to abandon the hope of creatively using the "old reliable" square-shaped guitar string packaging and I am instead going to be trying something extremely different, a unique hexagonal-shaped packaging. I am redesigning their logo as well.

Oh, and I'm listening to Event of Your Leaving, by Raum to try to keep from panicking about all of this.

ATTENTION!!!

VERY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT!!!

There are now tiny fish at the bottom of my blog that will follow your cursor around and you can feed them by clicking to drop food.

(Also I turned my logo into a banner cool)

That is all.

ACO

Hey whoops I forgot to post this SO here's my layout for A Clockwork Orange. You can see it wrapped around the book itself in my previous post.

My project brief:

A Clockwork Orange is an unsettling entanglement between sex and extreme violence, which both fight their way “in and out” of Alex DeLarge, a teenager causing a lot of trouble in Burgess’s dystopian setting.
            The color orange in my cover design is an obvious choice to reference the title, but also creates a bold and violent vibrancy spattering against a pale, innocent blue. The blue becomes overtaken by the orange by the back cover, alluding to Alex succumbing to his over-sexualized violent tendencies. The image on the back of a glass of milk spilling (as well as using the color white in the type elements) is a reference to the Korova Milk Bar introduced early on in the book. It’s a pretty prominent symbol in the book, but for whatever reason, I decided not to use it or any other image on the front cover. I felt whatever image I could create on the front cover might detract from the feel of it, and I would end up relying on clichés that have already been rehashed in other cover designs, or end up referencing the Kubrick film, which was not my intention. The title itself was done by hand and brought into illustrator, to give a chaotic, violent, and uneasy sort of representation of the title, something I think directly references the nature of the narrative itself.

Just Checking Out The Latest Edition of A Clockwork Orange

...and listening to the new Death Grips album that apparently dropped out of nowhere today for no apparent reason. A very fitting soundtrack to fit such a chaotic theme of this book. This album is their weirdest yet I think, which is saying a lot for a duo that's been extremely experimental and unpredictable. But I'm just kidding about the title of this post, some random Goodwill book is inside the cover. COINCIDENTALLY, the name of the book I picked up from Goodwill is named "Billy's Boy." The name of a character in the book, the leader of a rival gang that fights Alex's in the book, is BILLY BOY! A complete accident and awesome coincidence.

I need to post here more often. I'm too busy and it's stupid. #turnup



edit: I'll post the book cover file tomorrow morning or something, I just wanted this to be a quick preview. Maybe I'll post some of my sketches for once to show my progress. Whoop.

November

This is working up to be a huge month for me. I've got loads of things going on between school work, actual work, and side projects both in music and design. Not to mention I've gotten registered for all of the classes I wanted for next semester, so things are really shaping up nicely. Now I just have to be wise about time management.

So speaking of the musical aspect of this month, I'm in a band called Pallow and we're playing our second show on the 17th in an awesome little barn in Gainesville, and anyone and everyone should come out if they can. It's only five dollars, but even if you don't have that and make the effort to drive up there, it'd be no problem to let you in for free or whatever you've got to offer. The money isn't for a venue owner or any of us, it's for the bands that are touring and need food and gas money, so anything you can offer is very appreciated. I'll be selling large prints of the flyer I made for the show at a pay-what-you-want rate for anyone that wants to give any extra money for the touring bands. I hope we can get as many people as we can to come, it's going to be a really cool show.

If you have Facebook, click here for the event page and more information. If not, then all I can say is if you like any kind of post-rock, noise, (90s-era) screamo, post-hardcore, shoegaze, indie rock, then come on out. If you want to know what my band specifically sounds like, go look up some things like Low, Carissa's Wierd, Whirr, Slowdive, and Red House Painters to get sort of an idea of where our influences come from. It's gonna be a great show in a really great place with even better people. 

Thank you.

Moogvertisements

I sort of just realized I forgot to upload these ad designs from a couple of weeks ago. Whoops!

  

My intent was to create sort of a surreal collage using this bird book I had lying around and a collection of old restored Russian photography I found in the GSU library. The tagline is supposed to work on two levels: missing, as in "missing out" on, by of course not owning a Moog synthesizer, and missing, as in "longing for," referring to the nostalgic warmth of analog synths.

Teach Me How to Screen Print

Seriously, though. I took a printmaking class at the newly named University of North Georgia (previously Gainesville State) this past spring and it was absolutely amazing. Learning several printmaking processes has come to be the primary inspiration to any of my artwork. Although I did linocut, monotype, etching, and intaglio printing, I unfortunately never screen printed. Which brings me to my current project, the event poster design. Naturally, graphic design and printmaking go hand-in-hand. I found some beautiful screen printed posters by a Chicago couple that completely blew me away. I've never seen graphic design approached in this manner at all. Check them out.

Here's a poster they made for one of my favorite bands, The Antlers. I hope to approach this project with a similar sense of abstraction and boundary-breaking as they have in their amazing designs.

Inspiration

Beth Hoeckel is a collage artist that has been particularly inspiring my work during this project, go check her stuff out.

Side note: unfortunately I missed my class this morning. I woke up around 9:45 or so to find my power had gone out and my alarm clock was reset. My backup alarm on my phone never went off, either. It really sucks because I was up until about 2 am finishing my ad-designs. So I apologize to my classmates, if you guys are reading this, that I wasn't there for our progress critique. I really wanted to see everyone's work so far. I'll most likely post mine here, but I don't like to post my work usually until I think it's finished. Sorry I wasn't there and see you all Tuesday. (:

Meow

I've been wrestling with a few taglines and throwing out some initial ideas but I think I've got some general layouts and images ready to assemble into these things. I'm designing advertisements for Moog's synthesizers. I'm thinking a lot about cats and birds.

p.s. I can't seem to post on this thing regularly enough. whoops.

The Whole is Other than the Sum of its Parts

I absolutely haven't been posting here as frequently as I probably should be. With school and work, things get sort of demanding and this blogging thing can easily slip the mind. Which leads to my psychology class. Abnormal psychology, that is. I've been studying all night for an exam I have tomorrow so I hope I'll be prepared for that. Part of the Humanistic approach to treatment of mental disorders is Gestalt Theory, which has to do with the brain's self-organizing and structuring tendencies of completing things that otherwise aren't whole. We see whole objects before we see the parts that make up the object itself. The Gestalt Principle is carried over into graphic design quite a bit, more specifically targeting our sense of sight and how we create lines and shapes out of negative space. I'd like to think I achieved this effect in my illustrative-based logo design. The typographic alternative is at the bottom of the image. I'll leave it at that.

Hesitation Marks

Tonight is the final night for me to try to wrap up my test comps for my initial logo design. I decided to go ahead and get the new Nine Inch Nails album to provide me with some background for my work. I was very hesitant (no pun intended) to listen to it, honestly. Considering this is somewhat of a comeback album from one of my favorite music projects of all time, I suppose it has a lot of expectations to live up to for me? I'm about halfway through it at this point and I can't say I'm particularly impressed. It's a little all over the place and forgettable, but I didn't raise the bar too high for it, so it's alright. The point of this post, however, is to reference the artwork. I actually downloaded a PDF along with the album of the lyric/artwork booklet. Rob Sheridan and Russell Mills put together some great photography and design which seems to call back to some of the earlier design techniques of the band's releases. It's both refreshing and nostalgic to look at this artwork. Their artwork is actually some of what catalyzed my interest in graphic design. I've always particularly loved the NIN logo and it's simplicity, along with the themes running through the artwork through Nine Inch Nails' releases.

Minimal yet foreboding compositions. Typographic elements being subtracted and pulled away from ambiguous photographic imagery. These are some of the styles I hope to be able to bring out in some of my own design. I particularly love the treatment of the logo on the digital cover of the album, which I'll post below. Look up the original logo to see what it was deconstructed from.

Tomorrow is critique for the logo designs and all I can say is that I hope my intentions in my design were clear. I'm playing with some positive-negative space reversal and I really hope it turns out well.

Essentials

Here's my attempt at our first sort of introductory project for this class, a mood board comprised of samples of what will inspire imagery for our actual first project, designing a logo for our corporate identity. I'd like to think it came out pretty well, check it out:

I don't have a lot to say about it. It's inspired and features some samples from two of my recent favorite artists, Spencer Finch and Andy Gilmore. Look them up if you get the chance, they create some really amazing stuff. I'm also really inspired by biology and imagery found throughout the body. I feel like we all have this innate sort of sense to try to find connections between the patterns in our body and the patterns found elsewhere in nature, art, and architecture. I'm also really attracted to linework and I'm really big on balance within composition. I hope when working on my logo that I can incorporate some of the mix between organic and geometric, and create a strong and balanced image. But for now, this is sort of my mess of thoughts.

You're all lucky you didn't have to see my first attempt at this mood board. It was awful, and I mean awwwwwwfullll. I had the same sort of imagery but left a lot of the images in their rectangular forms, overlapping over each other with some terrible attempts at drop-shadowing them in a way that looked like they were stacked photos. After multiple attempts to get this right and even trying some weird transparency idea, I decided to scrap the whole thing and start over completely in a new direction, which I think paid off. This tends to be my work style, unfortunately: spending more time on something I throw away than I do on my final work. But alas, the very point of graphic design is meeting this goal where your initial idea has finally been communicated, and I hope that mine has and continues to do so.

Here Goes Nothing

Alright well, here's sort of an introductory post on this thing. This blog is primarily for updates about my work during my Introduction to Graphic Design Class at GSU this Fall, but I'm sure some awful personal things will work themselves in every now and then. I realize for whatever reason when I set it up it connected to my "google plus" account, which I think is funny considering I don't use google plus, so you can always visit that dead link if you want.

Anyway, a little about myself:

My name is Jason Combs, I am 20 years old and I just transferred to Georgia State this semester. I received my A.A. in art at the University of North Georgia (formerly Gainesville State College) just this past spring. Along with transferring, I moved from Gainesville down to the Chamblee-Doraville area, from where I commute to campus. Luckily it's a pretty easy drive, especially considering our class is at 8 am. I've taken plenty of studio classes, but none with digital work, so I'm excited to get into the grit of what I really want to be doing. I struggled to not only get into this class, but to get my transfer credits from UNG worked out, but thankfully everything is somewhat coming together, and I hope to apply to the B.F.A. program for Graphic Design in the Spring. I've been designing and creating for a while now and I've found a passion in it that I hope to carry over into a lifelong career. I am a musician as well, and I'm sure eventually some of that will leak its way into the blog somehow. I'm also really into printmaking thanks to a printmaking course I took recently, so expect a lot of print-related things, too. That is if I ever get around to posting on this thing more than once or twice a week. Along with going to school full time, I work at the deli at an Ingles in Norcross. It's no fun at all but it's a job and I'm sure I'll complain about it more than I need to.

If I think of anything else that needs to be known about me, I'm sure it will come out in my posts.

Also if any of you from GRD3000 use Twitter or Instagram or Facebook or whatever and want to get all up in my business, just let me know, I'll probably link to all of those sooner or later.

Thanks for reading. (:

(p.s. I only know like.. basic HTML so don't expect anything super fancy when it comes to this blog design. I'm a minimalist anyway)