Milton Glaser

If you were to ask me "Who is Milton Glaser" in the beginning of this semester I would say "I have no clue". If you were to show me four different pictures of Milton Glaser and ask me to pick one out I would say the same thing. Even though I have seen his work plenty of times, I would not know who he is. To be honest with you the "I love NY" seems so simple that I thought some hobo off the streets of NYC came up with and it just caught on with everyone! Even with his Dylan poster I never knew that Glaser was the one that was responsible for that and I consider myself a big Bob Dylan fan!



One thing that I find really fascinating with Glaser is that when he was approached to fix NY and make an iconic poster he was not given tons of money. (From what I understand from the documentary that we watched on him in class) I could of heard wrong? In the short film we were able to see inside his building and how he works. It amazes me that after all the work he has done and I'm assuming all the money he has made from his work that he is still in the same building working closely with others not thinking he is some hot shot!

Another thing that I like about Glaser is his little sign that says who is in the building.

It is very sleek and looks like a sky scraper with the letters representing windows!


Now every time I see one of Milton Glaser work and I am with friends I also act like I know everything about graphic designs asking them if they know who designed that poster and what other famous posters he has came up with!



My favorite would obviously be the Bob Dylan poster. With the black as the background for the face and the his hair being so colorful!! And the block letters he used for Dylan as well works very well as a whole! Like I said earlier with the "I love NY" design, it looks so simple that a drifter in the streets of NY came up with. The idea is not complicated and it seems like something that a elementary kid would come up with. Maybe that's why it is so catchy and popular!!

Project 4: Critiquing

I was really impressed with every ones projects. Even though none of us are professional graphic designers or get paid for the work we do, I definitely think that the posters were professionally done. I think everyone bought a different aspect of what we have learned so far through out the class. The ideas that were made I could tell reflected some of my classmates personality's.

During our critiques as a class, I am very surprised to hear so many of my class mates speak up and give their opinions whether it be good or bad or just saying that they like it. Some of the opinions I do agree with and very few that I don't agree with. It is going to be very interesting to see what people say about my brochure since it has to do with tattoos and what not.

Like I said in my earlier post about my project that I was not very pleased with it. I had a chance to ask a couple of my class mates what they thought and they said they liked it a lot. I'm not sure if they were being honest or being nice, but whatever reason it was it made me feel better about my poster. While I was up there I didn't get much criticism which could be a good or bad thing. I will take it as a positive thing!!

All in all I think the class as a whole did an outstanding job on their posters. I am sure if they had a little more time and a little more experience there design can be seen by their peers and the whole world.

I am actually pretty excited to see what my class mates have for our final project. I want to see how everyone used what we learned all year to incorporate into our brochure. Every time we go into a critique I expect to see some above average projects but there has always been two or three that really grabbed my attention and say wow, good job. I may not say it verbally but I am thinking it and I hope I am able to see some cool designs for the brochures.

Saul Bass

Saul Bass is arguably one of the most famous graphic designer in US history. Even though he might not be a house hold name such as movie stars or famous athletes, but Bass has left his mark in history. We see his work day in and day out, whether it is riding the bus, buying groceries or waiting in the airport. Bass was many of things in his lifetime, a graphic designer, title designer and a film director.

In Bass early life, he graduated from James Monroe high school in the Bronx and studied part time at the Art Students League in Manhattan. Bass began in his time in Hollywood in the early 1940's doing print work for film ads.

Throughout Bass film industry he has worked on many movies. Bass first movie he had done some kind of part is in 1954 film Cameron Jones to his last in 1995 with Casino. In total of 49 different films. Probably his most famous is Vertigo and Psycho. Bass worked with some of the biggest filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. And besides the posters, which would be the first thing that you would think of as a graphic designer’s job, he was also in charge of the title sequence and the credits and he for each project he was able to create something extraordinary with these most simple means like I said earlier.

Saul Bass is an American graphic designer and a academy award winning filmmaker. Bass was born May 8, 1920 in New York City and passed April 25, 1996 in Los Angeles. During his 40 year career Bass has worked on many Hollywood movies and title. Not only did he work in the film industry and making titles and poster but he also had his hand dipped in major markets in the retail industry. He has worked on many logos through out the US. Just to name some a few, General Foods, United airways Quaker oats and Dixie.





Bass has also showed us how versatile graphic designer can be.

News Gothic

News Gothic is probably most famous for appearing in the opening and closing credits of Star Wars!! I actually stumbled upon this when I was googling what to write about.

News Gothic is a realist sans serif typeface designed by Morris Fuller Benton and released by American type founders (ATF) in 1908.

   


There are a few distinctive characteristics of News Gothic that stick outs from other type  face. There are the two story lowercase a and the g. Also unique are the blunt terminus at the apex of the lowercase t and the location of the tail of the uppercase Q completely outside the bowl.




Some of the places that you do see News Gothic or other versions of News Gothic is the Brooklyn Academy of Music which was designed by Michael Beirut. The font is also found on Otil Elevator push buttons which was manufactured from the 1920s through the 1960's. News Gothic is also used in Nature Magazine, art work by Lady Gaga which is called "The Fame Monster". who would of thought Lady Gaga would use a font named News Gothic! And of course the most famous that News Gothic was used is the opening credits for Star Wars!!

There is a enhanced version of News Gothic which is called News Gothic No. 2. This face type differs from News Gothic by adds more weights. Some other variants from News goth is Benton Sans which is an expanded font family from the Font Bureau. Linotype Gothic, which was based on Heidelber Gothic is a variant with italic type glyphs. A Cyrillic version was developed for Para Type in 2005 by Kmitry Kirsanov, based on Bitstream's version of News Gothic.

So overall News Gothic was some what popular when it first came out. It has had some stints in major retail company such as JC Penny advertisements and popular pop artist such as Lady Gaga using it in her art work. Movies and elevators also got on board with using this font.

Other then the information I was able to find on Wikipedia I was not able to find much more information.

Logos

I believe I wrote about this in the first blog about logos. below will be a serious of logos and we are going to see if people can spot what subliminal message or images they have in hidden in the logo!!

Good luck!!





The fedex logo was created in 1994 by Linden Leader and associates. If you look closely at the orange letters "E" and "x" there is a arrow pointing to the right. The arrow is suppose to signify precision and speed, some say it represent forward, moving forward. Whatever it means Linden and Leader and associates were very clever on creating the arrow with the two letters!!





Is there a number you see in Baskin Robbins logo? If not go back and look for a 3 and 1. Once you realize that there is a number in the logo it is pretty simple to pick it out. The number is 31, which represents the 31 different flavors they have.





This one might be a little more obvious. In the word Tour the R is tweaked into a man hunched over a yellow blob. See it now? Good job! I also think this was a clever design too. Even though most people know what Tour of France.


This one might be the hardest to see!! If you know anything from Toblerone chocolate, Toblerone is the name of the town that came up with the chocolate. And if you know anything else about Toblerone it is located in the mountains and the mountains are known for their bears... do you see it yet? Well if you look closely at the mountain at the white space you can see a dancing bear... pretty neat right? If not... I think so!





Last but not least is this logo. If you are not a baseball fan then you will not know this logo. The logo above is the Milwaukee Bucks. At first glance you may see a glove and a baseball but if you look a little closer you will see the initials of the ball club. The lower case b is the thumb and palm of the glove and the lower case m is the ringers!!


So the next time you are out and about make sure you spend that extra second or two looking at logo to see if you can find a subliminal image!!

Project 4

Project four was to design a tri-fold brochure. Coming into this project I had a few ideas how I wanted to design the brochure. I already had a solid topic that I wanted to do which evolves around Samoan tribal tattoos. The biggest obstacle with this project was finding pictures that are big enough to fit on the brochure. Most of the pictures that I saved on my flash drive at home were no were near the correct size that I needed. So I tweaked my search and searched for images on google images for images that were 4 MP or larger. That alone narrowed down my selection and none of the pictures that I originally sought to use were not on the list that were shown. After sifting through countless pictures I was able to find four to six solid images that I could use for the project.

The next hardest thing for me was the cover page. After several designs I was not able to come up with an appealing front page that would grab peoples attention. Finally after several trial and errors and some help from Amy, I was able to settle with an image that covered the whole front page. The image is of a individual sitting on the front of a small boat with his traditional lava lava looking out into the ocean. The person has his shirt off so you are able to see his traditional tattoo. The small title in white letters saying "Traditional Samoan Tattoo" on the back ground of the blue sky and then "The Pe'a" which is on the bottom of the page with white lettering on a black background which is the shadow underneath a compartment on the boat.

The brochure gives a quick back ground of what the "Pe'a" tattoo is. The Pe'a tattoo was a way to symbolize that you were no longer a boy and that you were now a man amongst the tribe. It was a right of passage into manhood. The tattoo would cover the lower torso for the men ranging from the hip to the back to the knees. This process was done in pairs and never by its self. The tattoo traditionally takes 10 days. 5 days of tattooing and 5 days of rest. During the 5 days of tattooing women would be chanting a song in the back ground while the elder was tattooing the person the old fashion way with sharp bone on an end of a stick and repeatedly hitting the stick into the skin. On the days that the boy wasn't being tattooed he would bathe in the ocean to heal up his wounds.

Overall I am very happy how the brochure turned out. I believe the pictures are nice and sharp and should grab everyone attention with the amount of tattooing that is done on the individual.

Project 3

Project three was pretty hectic. I started pretty late on the assignment so off the back time was against me. My original idea for this project was to do something that evolves around being fit, working out or something along those lines. But as I started to work on this theme for a class and a half I ran into a huge problem!! All my ideas were already taken from Nike and Gatorade ads. So I had to scratch that idea.

My next idea was going to be about Dooms day preppers. The poster was going to be set up with black background, and in bold letters say Dooms day preppers. Below that would say "Don't come running to me when the shit hits the fan" The phrase would be in bold letters that were stretched and made more bold. The reason I wanted it to be more bold was that the phrase and title would have a picture of a nuclear explosion going off in the type face. As you were reading "Dooms Day Preppers. Don't come running to me when the shit hits the fan" you were able to see the image on a larger scale. But that idea was shot down by Amy so I had one more class and the weekend to come up with a good idea.

I eventually settled on a topic that I have been following real close which involves North Korea and the United Nations. So for this I started with a black background and kind of used the idea of 1+1=2. So I started off with some kind of symbolic picture of North Korea, whether it be the flag or the face of Kim Jong-Un then I would have the plus symbol and some kind of picture of a nuclear device or the nuclear symbol. I ended up with a picture of a mobile long range missile launcher. After that I had the equal sign of a skull. At the bottom of the poster in white lettering it said "Stop North Korea from obtaining Nukes"

The message I was trying to get across was that if we do not put strict regulation against North Korea, they could possibly start another world war. It is a topic that I follow because my dad is in the military and also because I think most people do not take this topic very serious.



North Korea + Nuclear missiles = Death/Destruction