A happy easter

Well, I transferred my process book layouts over to an appropriate lulu/blurb size today, and then just now went through and tweaked it, adding paragraph styles, etc. Most importantly, I ditched a really ugly font that was really tying it down, and I do feel better now. I have this guilty feeling that I should only be using Mexican-designed fonts, but it's not like they're widely available and certainly not free, so I'm just relying on old-style fonts such as Garamond and Eames, with a fun twist in Lavanderia:

I probably really should take a look at book layouts in the early twentieth century if I want a design resource for this stupid process book, but I'm not quite sure where to look. Will have to ask Natalia tomorrow.

On the docket tomorrow:

• email Marina a thank you for 11th week reviews, plus a recap of her comments to confirm
• email Tai from internship a thank you for my gifts :)
• keep plugging away at process book
• make (known) edits to posters
• talk to Natalia about old book design, and the scale idea
• print out current version of process book to see how type looks/reads
• uuuuh figure out posters 4 & 5.. quickly!

Hopefully I'm not forgetting anything. I'd like to keep working at the pace I have been, which is a fast one, because I like feeling like I'm getting stuff done, and I like getting stuff done because then I feel less stressed about it all!

Oh yes... will have to look into cobalt blue paint. That will be a bitch to paint over again.

A look back at my process book

Well, Nancy freaked me out enough that I've decided to dig up the process book I made at the end of last semester and determine what needs to get done to complete it.

I'm not... entirely pleased with the style of it, but I'm really not feeling like I want to change it all that much. I went through and found some places to publish it... lulu, blurb, mypublisher... All of those will have to be rush shipments, I won't be finishing my posters by next week, eek.

I had originally planned to get it printed somewhere local, however, I haven't looked into that at all.

I think making a process book is slightly silly--no one's going to sit there and read it during the BFA show. Sigh. I don't feel like it is showcasing any of my design talent, in fact, I feel like it kind of looks like crap, but not sure how to fix it.

So I guess I'll just get in the content in there, as much as I can, and leave it at that. I have posters to work on, after all.

A relaxing weekend in my sights

Well, thank god that's over. It went really well, and left me feeling full of hope and excited for the BFA show, which was a much better feeling than the kind of dejected feeling I had after 5th week reviews.

Here's the notes I jotted down afterwards:

First poster—good

Second poster—integrate type better

Third poster—redo border, make it more nouveau-y, ink illustration, add color, no all caps, fix the typography

Fourth poster—poem as text, add political themes, fix sentence--it was not about hand-done, but expressionism/poor-man's illustration

Fifth poster—art deco as Mexican, add music? Or architecture—Europe + America (Chicago) reinterpreted by Mexico with Mexican themes

Sixth poster—my own, what I have learned?

I thought it was immensely interesting that Ricky was the one that suggested the sixth poster of my own work, rather than copied from others, since it was him that said there was too much of me in my first posters from the 5th week review. Yay! Made me very excited.

Marina was there, and on time, and skyped, and was very supportive and helpful and totally hit it off with Natalia (I think their shared love for design history helped connect them). So that was fantastic, since that's the thing I worried about the most. And her English was quite good. :)

Here I am, beginning my presentation, with Natalia and Ricky, Marina via skype behind Natalia,
and Tiffany out of frame to the left.

I had a table full of resources, and two tables full of papers for each poster (inspirations and sketches) and then put up my three posters that I finished, tile-printed, plus the inspiration boards for all five posters.

Here's my third poster that you haven't seen yet!

I think it looks pretty awesome, although admittedly the secondary type still needs work.

A time for bed

In bed before 11 the night before my review.. Yay! Sleep is good.

I didn't get quite as far as I would have liked, but it is what it is. Hopefully my panel likes it.

I haven't heard from Marina confirming our skype date for tomorrow... so I'm just gonna have to pray.

Now let's see if I can quiet down all these loud thoughts in my head so that I can fall asleep!

A wednesday morning before the review

I didn't get much more work done yesterday after finishing my Posada poster, except for a little work on the art nouveau one. I found a Mucha girl that I liked, which I then turned into a skeleton. Lovely. So the main bulk of that illustration is done (if I keep it line work, which I could), I just need to put in a very simple background (in case I want to color it). Then I need to hand-draw the title "Diseno Mexico" and add in the info text at the bottom.

I just suddenly had the revelation that it's a poster about hand-done type anddddd I wasn't planning on hand-doing the info text at the bottom. Hmm. I think it makes sense that just the headlines/larger copy would be hand-done, but larger chunks of text could be type-set. At least it makes sense to me, probably because it makes it easier for me. Will have to pick a font, though; I'm not sure my Century 725 Bold Condensed will apply here.

I hope to have a very-nearly finished art nouveau poster, and a rough draft of the Estridentista/Constructivist/TGP poster for Thursday morning. That means a lot of work needs to get done in the three hours that I'm at school today. I figure I can probably make my PDF presentation tonight at home, but I want to tile-print the posters I have in final stages (intro, Posada, art nouveau) and the cropping and taping together takes time.

Today is my last day at my internship; I am sad. Even though it took time out of my schedule, I've had fun working on design that turned into real-life items! And my boss generally seemed very happy with my work. Hopefully my first job will go as well as this internship.

A couple poster options for poster two

My headache has finally gone away after a lot of sleeping and drugs, etc. Thank goodness. Woke up in a good mood this morning, and have been able to get some work done, which is more than I can say for the last few days. Bleh.

Here's a couple versions of poster 2:

This is the poster influenced by Posada's work. I took heavily from his style, including the border, font types, and the illustration. The layout would be... unconventional at best, so we'll just have to see what Marina says at my review. I have to decide which one to tile print.. hm.. black and white would be cheapest! Probably the Don Quijote one, although the lady being carried off is quite hilarious.

I also still need to work in my scale. But as Marina is not a fan of the scale idea at all, I might just wait til post-review. I also might change the headline to filled in rather than outline, even though that's not how the font went... but it is so weak looking right now.

So that's two posters down, three to go. I'm hoping to have two more in at least final sketch stage for Thursday morning. That means a lot of work today and tomorrow! But I have found peace leading up to my review... it's not something I feel like I need to stress about. I've worked hard, even if it's mostly been research and not 'making', and I would think it would show in my work and my thinking.

A godsend

I've had some setbacks today, including being woken at 6:15 by my schnauzers, discovering that my headache from yesterday did not go away, taking my prescription pill for my headache, which made me pass out and lose a couple hours to a delicious nap...

But. I just had a-maz-ing success. I was looking for the font in the secondary headline text on this Posada broadside:

And used identifont to try to find it. At first it was trying to tell me it was Baskerville, which it obviously is not. So I tried it again and came up with a font called Century 725. Now I have Century but it was not the same, as the one I wanted was a bold condensed version. Now Century 725 had a bold condensed version that looked just about right, or about as close as I could hope to get. Myfonts.com wanted $25 for it, which I could have shelled over, as this posters are important enough to me to be willing to put in the extra moola.

But a simple search for the font came up with a link to a free download of the exact version I needed, Bold Condensed.

Someone up there is looking down on me! :D

I also came to the realization that since 11th week reviews are going on, I wil have both Monday and Wednesday's class time to work. Yay! I do work better at school, with an actual desk rather than a couch/kitchen table.

So today I will go out and get some double-sided tape so I can tile-print my posters on Wednesday, and on Wednesday I will put together my presentation PDF as well. Marina emailed me back this afternoon, I think I will just have to email back and clarify my position, but, well, that takes time and I have to work on posters!