October 19, 2004

Ways to Talk About Places

Since we're doing a mapping project in Typography, Kristin Hughes gave a lecture on ways to talk about places.

Some ways to talk about places:

All of this is related to what Ken Hiebert calls experience mapping. Experience Mapping has several key components:

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October 05, 2004

Reading Images

VCU professor Ben Day is here for the week with us as we work on our Unfamiliar Place poster. We're picking images to go with other text for our poster, so he gave a talk on how to read images today.

There are multiple readings of any image; its content is slippery and malleable. A rope can signify a rodeo, nautical references, a hangman, etc. You should look for what Ben calls sign indexes: what the images are pointing to. A windsock is a way of capturing the wind. A cake at a wedding isn't food, it's content signaling celebration.

Gather your images, then start labeling them. Put down the pointers: where it comes from, what could it signify, what were your assumptions when you collected it, what could it mean metaphorically. Are there any contradictions or oppositions of content? So much of good design has to do with juxtaposition, Ben told us. Find interesting juxtapositions of images: explicit vs. implicit, before and after, time and movement, linear and non-linear.

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September 18, 2004

Counterform

I must be a slow learner because after three weeks of graduate typography it's finally started to sink in: the space between the letters is just as important as the letters themselves. The shape that's formed between letters and words can be a thing itself and can make or break the whole composition.

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September 07, 2004

Obeying the Rules

My graduate typography class, taught by Kristin Hughes, began with a review of the basic rules of typography, very much like Karen Moyer's lecture on What's Normal.

The rules to generally obey are the following:

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