Round Two

Alright, so I spent a considerable amount of time not posting anything here, and now that the spring semester has kicked off, I need to pick things back up where I left off. I'm certainly challenging myself this semester by taking Intermediate Graphic Design and Typography at the same time, the very semester that I have to apply to the program and get a portfolio together. The stress has already been piling on, of course, but I'm trying to retain some sort of organization and better manage my time this semester. I'm not sure how it's working out so far.

I was immediately thrown back in the deep end the first day I walked into Intermediate with a poster project, commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr. for the (then) coming holiday. We had a 48-hour turn around on this project, but I think I used my time pretty effectively. The College of Arts & Sciences ended up sharing my poster along with three others. I didn't want to paint MLK as some sort of statue-figure that's dead-and-gone and we should just "honor him" by remembering him. Instead, we should be involved in our city and community and protest against injustice, which there is plenty of still going on. I've personally been attending the Moral Monday protests for medicaid expansion in Georgia. I suggest you check it out and try to get involved. The more people, the better. Georgians in poverty need medicaid coverage and stingy, political motives shouldn't be getting in the way of that. Healthcare is a human right, not a right for only the rich. Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked, here's my poster:

If you're just now seeing my blog, feel free to backtrack through some of my posts from last semester and try to get to know me. I'm, also taking Jazz History and Existentialism this semester, which should hopefully find its influence leaking into my design soon enough.

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.