update #3: what happened to typography?

Some who know me well may remember that I've been overloading myself with studios since I came to grad school, and may have consequently noticed something missing from my fall work.

I'm not posting anything from my typography class fall quarter. I essentially treated it as a skills class, and have nothing from it that I'd care to show to anyone. You'll just have to be content to see my typography get better and better as you see the rest of my projects, culminating in my own typeface, which should be finished sometime in June. No, it won't be called 'Erin,' but will be named after ArcoSanti, the community on which it is based. So I'll leave you with the knowledge that during a portfolio review the other day, I was finally declared to be "a competent typographer," and one of the more formally inspirational photos of ArcoSanti:

those curves! those notches! They'll be letterforms someday, I swear it! I'm still debating sans-serif vs. slab-serif vs. wedge-serif, but that will be decided this weekend. And, I can always do ArcoSanti Slab now, with the knowledge that I can add ArcoSanti Sans later on to make it a happy little family of kooky Soleri inspired goodness.

I originally wanted to base the typeface off of the drastic differences between what Soleri had planned and what had actually been built, but soon came to the realization that those differences are rather depressing. I mean, what was I thinking, that I could just design 3% of the typeface (to reflect that the community is only 3% complete)? So, while I hope to present a slightly more realistic vision of ArcoSanti than Futura (their current typeface of choice) does, it will in general still be an optimistic outlook.

update #2: political posters, sans politicians

I've gotten tired of the glossy image presented by politicians. I don't care if you sweat under the stage lights during a debate. I don't care if you're not very attractive. I don't care if you're black. All I care about are your views and your plans. So here's my attempt to get you to care about that too, or to at least cater to the priorities of people like myself. Each is based on the candidate's own words, and gives a brief summary checklist of their stances on other major issues at the bottom.

These were made for each of the (at the time) leading candidates on both the Republican and Democratic sides of the fence. I'm too lazy to post them all.... but these two got some of the best reactions, primarily because people in Seattle are very concerned about the environment, and it seems that most people don't realize quite how ridiculous Fred Thompson is.

updates on my work, part 1

sooooo, since it's been about forever since I've posted, I've decided to do a series of posts of my work, to document and explain, and well, just get it on out there! Comments, questions, and critiques are all appreciated. I'll start with myfall work in information design.

As a class, we were given the topic of energy to explain through information graphics. We started by researching everything we could about energy- facts about coal, nuclear energy, solar power, wind power, hydroelectric power, and overall energy cons

umption were collected and poured over. Of course, the thing about energy that interested me the most was the part least talked about- the delivery of energy. Of course, I was in LA for rolling blackouts, so maybe that had something to do with it. Everyone was talking about how energy was produced, and how energy was used, and not thinking about what came in between. So the following was my attempt to explain that in-between stuff in the space of three magazine spreads...

So, there are some things about this that I'm happy with, and some that I'm not so happy with. And apparently, this is a consensus, as I was listed as a finalist in the Eyebeam Eco-Vis Challenge. 

Next up: political posters, without politicians.