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.