09/13 | 4 h
Writing is always the hard part of the assignments. I wanted to figure out the exact context and content of my zine before I went too overboard with the design. After all if I haven’t a clue on what I’m writing about, I’ll have no way of knowing what goes where and how and why and AH!
So I did a simple question format for now detailing what I might include in each area/page which will help me figure out the layout as I progress forward.
09/11 | 3 h.
Every good concept starts with a spark, you know? A really good idea that hits you and won’t let go. It’s something that doesn’t always come on the spot, but when it does it just feels good and right. I had that moment when we were given the assignment during class, immediately, like someone lit the match and set that small candle in my brain aflame with little to no mercy. Dungeons and Dragons is one of those things that I myself have a huge passion for, but it is also something that I understand the steep learning curve of in an intimate way.
I wanted to create something that could make it easier for new players jumping into the game, as well as just… fun. Because at the end of the day, that’s what dungeons and dragons is. It’s supposed to be fun. It has serious moments, heartbreaking moments, moments when you feel like you’re on top of the world! It’s fun.
The ideation for my zine started by looking at some of the merchandise that I owned from the company Critical Role Productions and a few others (dice companies, and some friend-made objects that help in game play.) I also took some extra time to take another look at my moodboard. Let’s take another look!
When it comes to determining the shape of my zine, I decided that I would use the shape of my dice box and the container that a dice set is normally shipped in as inspiration. As well as the typical 6 sided dice that everyone knows so well. All of the images here are taken by me unless stated otherwise.
I also took inspiration from the shapes on my mood board, and the shapes on my dice box to create some designs for page furniture! Hopefully these will also be good line breaks if they’re needed.
For this first mini assignment tackling my personal likes and dislikes when it comes to design, I decided to focus on something that I personally go out of my way to view and consume on a regular basis. Film and film poster design!
Choose 02 designs that you like:
Parasite.
The first piece I would like to focus on is a poster done by Canadian artist Marie Bergeron for the Korean film Parasite. (2019) This particular poster was made to advertise the film to foreign French audiences and is the official artwork used for that release in both poster and box-set form. For me, this design is wonderful. The muted palette pairs beautifully with the bleak world that the film sets up for the protagonist. The illustrative method sets up a structure using the architecture of the film in a way that photographs or still images would not be able to convey, so I find that the choice to utilize drawn structures was a smart choice. Additionally, illustration parallels the commentary of a societally invented class structure that marginalizes and ostracizes those who live at the bottom, while the top rungs of society seem to always stay dry even when the rain hits them first.
Parabellum
The third film in the John Wick trilogy has what I would consider some of the most fun poster design I’ve seen in a long time when it comes to the retired imagery of a man standing in the centre of a frame facing right and looking directly at the audience. I have to give the designer Billy Bogiatzoglou props for his ability to reconstruct a tired idea and make it visually appealing. The use of central imagery in this poster is a wonderful play on religious imagery tied together with objects from the films run. These concepts work together to draw your eye throughout the entirety of the composition. What I think works the best in this poster would be how the designer takes the colours indicated in the film and pulls them into the poster itself. The use of swords and other weapons pointing towards the figure along with the imagery of angelic figures of death convey the central focus of the film. I really like the hierarchy, and the use of an actual frame inside of a frame! It’s visually interesting.
Choose 01 design that you dislike:
For this poster, I chose a design that, for me, simply misses the mark by a hair. There are a lot of moments when I look at posters for film and tv and I think: there is nothing redeemable about this. However, for me, this is not one of those designs. It would have been very easy to just go out and grab a design that is a standard movie poster ‘this is my face with text all over it’ and complain, but what may be an even more egregious offence is a poster that has a really cool concept, but the design around that concept just fell… flat.
The poster for Penny Dreadful, an American tv show was conceptualized and realized by Spanish poster art designer Pablo Matilla. The centre subject is a person who, because of their pose and the angle of the photo taken, looks to be a skull. For a show that highlights death, this concept is one that is pretty incredible. However, the design of the poster itself falls short for me. Cool imagery is only half of what makes poster design work. The typeface used feels lacklustre against the black background, and the placement of the names on the side, along with the size and shape of the typography overall is hard to read. Because of the composition including the logos, the image feels like it is out of centre in a way that doesn’t feel intentional. Though I think a portion of this problem can be attributed to where Matilla has chosen to put the weight in the image. By having the bright red draw your eye almost away from image, making the title, along with the logo the focus instead of the primary image itself.
My first post details the reasons for choosing to use a written approach, however I want to reiterate the point here that the intention behind the use of written words for the shape of the bee, in contrast with the crisp font is to showcase the differences of the natural and human made quality of a garden, and a bee.
The decision to use yellow feels like it could be obvious, but there are many reasons behind it. As I have been known to say before, yellow reminds me of sunshine and warmth; a summer day filled with the nondescript buzzing of bees and power lines. Perhaps the odd cricket. There is another reason I choose it, however, and that reason is danger. When we see a specific shade of yellow, our minds seem to skew to the side of anxiety–a notion that is almost primordial. Bees are an insect that people tend to be afraid of, I speak from personal experience when I say this. Not because I am afraid of them but because, and if you’ll excuse the anecdote;
When I think about growing up I am reminded of my mother who beyond anything absolutely abhorred and detested bees. Even now I cannot tell you if this was an inherent fear of wasps and hornets or other insects that she had misconstrued as bees, but nevertheless they would all fall within this “umbrella term” of Bees. It got so bad that she forbade me from wearing my favourite yellow dress, a gift, because I would “draw the attention of the bees, they’ll think you’re a flower, you’ll get stung and hurt and I won’t be able to help you.” (There was more than one occasion where my mother had taken my sister and I for a walk in my pram, and she would see a bee and run away, leaving both me, in the pram, and my older sister to take care of me alone.) Fear of bees can be.. alarming for some, though I find it to be a strange fear–unless you are of course allergic then by all means, please, run!
All that is to say that the colour yellow can correspond with danger as much as it can with the warmth of summer. Another example is construction signs! My point is that there are always dangers to face. As humans, we can be more dangerous to a bee than a bee is to us. Even in a garden, there is danger for our fuzzy friends.
There was also a conscious decision to lengthen the bees wings, as this is wildly inaccurate to how big their wings are. It fills the space, though I would like to do a version where they are smaller, as well. I’m still uncertain if I like them so large or not!
Below are some more progress shots.
The grid breakdown is a mostly standard grid built up of 4 inch squares, with two 2×4 inch double margins and the corner break down of 4 2×2 inch squares. While the text stretches beyond this point for emphasis, nothing else crosses beyond the first set of margins. This allows for breathing room on the sides to be heavier, after this point, however, I went back into it to bring bring the lower portion of the text down; allowing for a heavier margin on the bottom as well. I think this gave an opportunity for a grounding effect, making the poster a bit more legible in terms of placement.
And with that, I felt content with the outcome of my project. While it did not go fully as intended, I am happy with the outcome, and glad that I decided to switch gears in the end.
Thank you all for sticking with me, I know this is a long read, but the journey was a fun one! It’s been a fantastic semester, and I’m happy to hear back from you, as well as see you all again when we have the chance.
Thank you for being my classmates, peers, professors, and friends.
Mell Davison.
Additional sources outside of my personal knowledge include;
https://davidsuzuki.org/queen-of-green/create-pollinator-friendly-garden-birds-bees-butterflies/
https://davidsuzuki.org/queen-of-green/how-to-grow-a-wild-bee-sanctuary/
https://flexitariannutrition.com/how-to-create-a-bee-friendly-garden/
https://www.compoundchem.com/2015/04/14/neonicotinoids/
Like I said in my previous post, this is going to be a smidge backwards!
Now that I’ve detailed my progress for the finalized idea, it’s time to go BACK in time and talk about how I got there. This ended up being a famous case of too much all at one time; the idea that I had initially come up with, though I loved it, as I mentioned earlier was a little harder to chew. On my first day, I knew exactly what I wanted to accomplish, but the how was a consistent point of contention during my process. I had two main ideas. The first was to do with bees. Bees are my favourite living creature on this planet, well, aside from bunny rabbits, my cat Rohan, and sharks of course. The second idea was to choose a constellation and have a poster where connecting the dots would give more information about the mythologies behind it. I really liked this idea, and had I not come up with a fun solution to my unbeelievable problem, then I would have happily changed course. However, we’ll get there. With that in mind, let’s talk about the process, my favourite part.
The first concept was called “Pollinators Almanac” and was to be a six-ish page book where all pages were cut into the shapes of gardens and assembled. Each page would have content regarding what to do to make your pollinator friendly garden the best it could be. The front cover would be illustrated, and the pages would have splashes of colour at the tops to define what flowers were in the garden. The more I worked on these pages, the more I realized even as I was thumbing them out that I was running into the problem of my work being too illustrative.
Normally this wouldn’t be a bad thing, let alone a severe problem, however in a typography course where the idea is to illustrate with letters, it was become exceedingly harder to accept that this was the path I should be taking.
In the first image, I tried to break down the idea into a more visual narrative by creating spaces where the words would fill squares. These squares would be taking on the form of “flower pots” or “plots of ground” where you could “sew the seeds” of your garden. Likely, this would have been the path I would have taken, if I hadn’t had problems with my software (which I have fixed! Hooray!)
The second image shows the more illustrated version of the book; where the shapes like the triangle would be where the text would fill. Other than it becoming too illustrated and not close enough to typography, I found the shapes I was drawing did not connect to the idea of a garden, let alone a bee. It did not feel right in the slightest.
A treat while creating this was recording my screen as I painted the illustration for the cover; something I would like to share now. As a video it is only around four minutes long.
The next blog post will be the finalized version of the project so stick around!
This post will, unfortunately, end up reading backwards. Though I realize as I write this that I can simply delete it later and put them in order, can’t I? I wonder, however, if that would defeat the purpose of process. With everything going on right now, it would be a lie to tell you that I haven’t been thinking completely backwards anyway. Everything is upside down, from not being able to attend classes to forgetting to email my professors as much as possible. It’s easy for forget and lose track in times like these.
I feel that I’ve lost track entirely, actually.
Never the less, I’ve been putting work into all of my classes when I can. If my brain decides that it wants to function long enough to process an idea, then I know I’m having a good day. Today is one of those days. But I’ll start from the sort of beginning — at least the beginning of this iteration of my typographic design.
Ever since the shut down, I’ve been having an endless slough of issues with small things that pile up. Internet connectivity issues. My phone won’t send images through text. I accidentally added my art history professor on regular Skype because I didn’t realize that business Skype and Skype were two different things. And, of course, I can’t get illustrator or indesign to work properly on my desktop computer. Which is entirely a shame as it’s what I need to make this project run as smoothly as possible.
No skin off my nose though, not in the long run.
It was back to the basics for Bee city.
How could I make this as powerful as I wanted to without botching it completely? Well, the almanac was out of the question if I couldn’t properly form a book. But! I could do a poster! With that I took out my single led pencil and got to work on concepts;
From here I was able to translate these concepts to my computer using a program called Clip Studio Paint. I often use CSP when creating illustrations or sketching for fun. Primarily a drawing program, CSP allows for the creation of raster images, I planned to use this for hand lettering. I believe it will be my saviour in the end.
One of my main inspirations for the organization of this project was Paula Scher. I used some of her works for inspiration on hand lettering as I find that it works both in direct opposition and in perfect harmony with bees and the concept of a “bee friendly garden”. As far as bees and people go, bees are about as organized as any one creature can be, while the human brain, or at least our train of thought, tends to be scattered at best. The way that we organize thoughts, feelings and even files does not always make sense to us, least of all to a bee. A garden is a strictly human concept, one that is completely unnecessary when you think about why we have them. Bees don’t need “gardens”. But as people, we often find them to be necessary, even if it means further destroying the habitats of bees and other pollinators. Anyway, semi off on the ‘train of thought’, as I said. The reason that I find Paula Scher’s work and, more pointedly, hand lettering to be the best way to go about this is the notion that as we struggle to create something that will create a haven for pollinators, we work to undo that which we have worked so hard to do. The precise letter forms of typed, vectorized text being the garden we have cultivated to our own standards, versus the handwritten return to a more natural ‘garden space’ that accepts that our neat trimmings may be turning bees away.
So far I only have progress shots to share, however, I will update with more as I go further along.
To continue from my last post about gathering type, the completion of my assignment came from one of the samples that I had grabbed while at the Archives that fateful snowy Tuesday. My initial idea had been to take Marlene Czember’s handwriting and turn it into a beautiful typeface that really spoke to the people of Medicine Hat by using one of their own members to initiate a feeling of warmth. However I ran into quite a few problems trying to make the typeface work. I quickly realized that like my own handwriting, it was conditional on specific letters being next to each other to actually work.
When it came to Marlene, I started by dissecting her writing in detail.
I really enjoyed looking closely at her writing. After taking a photo, I traced over her words using procreate on my ipad, taking care to use a brush that would simulate the same gestures used when writing with a pencil or a pen. As you can see below, I got pretty far into it, creating every letter, and even symbols! I loved it so much.
Next I transferred the image to illustrator and used the auto trace tool to create vectors of the forms. From there I could add them to fontlabs and work on creating a typeface! Or, so I thought. Unfortunately, I realized that making handwriting work where every letter connects is not something that was easy for someone who is not only not trained on creating type to do, but also I feel like this would be difficult even for someone who was trained.
Perhaps with more time and practice, I would be able to get it right. Unfortunately, after spending the week trying to understand how to use fontlabs, as well as getting frustrated and shedding some serious tears over ascenders, I decided it would be better to start over. Thankfully, I had a backup! From day one, I knew that there was a chance I would not be adept enough to completely tackle handwriting. My backup had been to look at the writing found on the old maps. I found that it had just as much character as Marlene’s writing in some very strange ways. The N was the only letter that was a lot more straight than the rest, which were written on a slant. It was something that I genuinely enjoyed, and wanted to replicate in my work. At first, it felt strange as it didn’t look right next to the rest of the letters.
But the more I worked with it, the more I loved this little characteristic. It was charming, and added a focal point to the words that I hadn’t expected. I started with the same goals in mind, the steps I took followed the same motions as Marlene’s, though with time limited, I decided it would be best to cut out a lot of the extras. Just for now.
This one worked a lot more in my favour, with less problems when it came to determining how the forms would look and act next to each other. Of course, though, I had nothing but problems with the technology involved. Every attempt to save Medicine Map ended in torturous, agonizing hours spend trying to find out just why my apps kept crashing. I never did quite find out the reason…. However with help from Ian Richmond, type master, we were able to wrangle a slightly botched version of the final product. Agonizingly enough, the three to four hours I had spent kerning each letter went in vain in the end.
Forming my poster was fun, however.
I went with a very simple design, as I wanted to accentuate the importance of the type. I picked a beautiful golden yellow. This yellow, in my opinion, is one of the best colours in the entire world. Not only does it reflect the warmth of the sun that Medicine Hat is, apparently, known for, but it reflects a love that I have for the Medicine Hat College, whose colours are black and yellow. At first, I thought maybe it would be a good idea to make the text a deep blue, but the contrast between the yellow and the black warmed me. Too, I felt it appropriate that it would mimic the change from oil and natural gas, to sunshine. Both convey a certain warmth, as oil and gas has filled our hearth and homes for decades, however it is time to open a window and let a little bit of natural light in.
Talk about an activity! Going out on the town in Medicine Hat is never what I would consider a particularly exciting venture. Though I love this place with all of my heart and I fondly call it home, there are not many places here that I tend to go. Maybe it’s easy enough to chalk that up to being a student, but a good portion of that also comes from the inability to drive and the lack of motivation. So naturally, when I left my house and my campus to go on a long adventure in search of type, I had no idea where to look first.
What did I want? Who was I looking for? Where could I go? Those were all questions that I asked myself as a friend of mine drove me to the heart of downtown medicine hat on what was, hilariously enough, the first snowfall in weeks.
I was extremely under-prepared and unwilling to sit out in the snow for hours with no jacket. So as I pondered my predicament after telling them I would be fine and would head indoors as soon as I could, I stood in the blizzard for a few moments before it dawned on me.
Medicine Hat may not be known for its rich culture and heritage, but as someone who has spent years volunteering at the Medicine Hat Esplanade, I know there is so much more here than anyone gives it credit for.
On a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of February, you’ll often find the Esplanade rather empty save for the woman who always sits at the front desk in what I assume is the same place every single day. (I find myself wondering if she ever leaves, since I’ve never not seen her present) A few security guards mill about with their duties and of course, the kind man who waits inside the gallery doors to take your donations and greet you.
I believe his name is Tom.
I found out from Tom as he was discussing my plans with me that he used to work with my dad up in BATUS. He laughed and told me that we live in such a small world now.
It got me thinking.
My first stop was the museum. It’s a tiny thing, peppered with artifacts from long before settlers came to the area, when Indigenous people were the only ones. I stared longingly at objects out of reach behind glass and up high next to warning signs that reminded me I was not allowed to touch the displays.
Of course I wasn’t.
Why would I be?
But the fun thing about the museum here is the plaques that are make shift books laminated and slammed into podiums with three giant rings that refuse to budge. Now I wish I’d remembered to take photos while I was there. But these little binders are full of juicy nuggets.
I started by looking at newspaper headings from old papers that the museum had take photos of for display. It was here that I realized that Medicine Hat had a very very long and arduous love affair with gothic typefaces. Every single newspaper I saw was in gothic slab font and I think that’s just great. Cheesy offbeat and garish red block letters that read “LOOK FORWARD” had been placed haphazardly onto pages by older staff members who I imagine knew how to use ms paint to create collages. Mostly because I loathe to think that they had been placed there by a designer.
“THE TOP” was off kilter and completely awkward to look at, and while I was leaning on the podium to trace the words “Double Fronts” which, admittedly I only wanted to get because it made me laugh so hard, a leaned on a speaker button.
A man started talking above me, and I began to be grateful that the Esplanade was always empty on those cold Tuesday afternoons because I would have hated someone to watch as I fell over at the sudden (incredibly loud) audio that followed.
But the more I went around again and again in the same tiny circle of podiums in that tiny room, more of the texts that caught my eye reminded me of what Tom and I had talked about. The world is a small place, but we’re the ones living in it. I decided to switch gears and start focusing on the smaller things. Tiny scripts of text here and there that reminded me of the people that used to live here. Some of them I imagine are still alive, but on the older side. That’s what I like to think, anyway, that they lived long, happy and prosperous lives here.
I became very familiar with miss Marlene Czember by the end of the trail. According to the records, she was a youth in Medicine Hat in the 60s and participated in the cheer squad. (I didn’t even know that we used to have one of these!) Miss Czember was an active member of our city that was responsible for a large portion of Medicine Hat’s photo archives. Though I couldn’t quite find out if she is still alive or not today, I hope she was happy at the time. Ronnie Padista also got his hands on tickets to a football game.
I wonder if he ever did get to go.
I found it charming that these snippets of someones life were captured on the pages that were supposed to give you information about what you were looking at in the displays. One thing I hadn’t noticed before was just how much they tell you without needing to read them. The blurbs that “tell” you aren’t the real stories of Medicine Hat. But these? These were everything.
Beatnick Party were two words I never thought I would see side by side, but apparently it was a very popular gathering in the 1950s in Medicine Hat. I loved how strange the text was, definitely hand written and wild. Hopefully the party was just as fun as the poster suggested.
I took a break from the museum for a little while to visit a friend in the archives. Not that she was my actual friend, but after spending some time there, I think that we could have become friends. I explained what I was doing, the nature of my reason for being there and I must have come off as excited, because before I knew it she had whisked me away into archives Map section. I’d never been back there before, but she showed me some of her favourites. After that, I think they were my favourites, too.
A map from Medicine Hat in 1910 that had been laminated and was easy to move around was the first thing the archivist showed to me. I fell in love immediately with the bizarre hand written letters. Funnily enough, it was the only one that I saw in that room that had anything like this. Someone decided in 1910 that this particular map needed these particular hand written letters in this particular style and that tickled me more than I can ever hope to explain.
I moved back into the open archive space after taking my time browsing some old files, mostly maps and declarations of fire insurance. I would have loved to have gotten some letters from these, but I was afraid to use them! I wasn’t even sure if I was supposed to be touching them, since they weren’t laminated, but she didn’t say anything–
I assumed it was okay after that. At least, to hold them.
In the general Archive space, she met with me again and gestured to the table I had been at earlier where she had opened a few pages of books for me to interesting phonebooks and ads that had been placed there by someone here many years before her. We discussed her favourites, and my favourites, and decided that the book that was made for “Alexander High School” (I think this is now the junior high school) was the most fun. Its eclectic selection of student photos mirrored by recent news from the then world war II and photos of recently deceased soldiers was by far the strangest thing I had seen all day.
There was something morbidly foretelling about seeing them together like that.
I had no idea that AHS student letters would hold news of that kind of thing. They must have had it hard back then, like that. I couldn’t imagine.
The next most exciting was definitely the old ads. Again it was some kind of directory book that was filled with ads from different cities in Canada. Insurance sales in a book that claimed to be the oldest insurance company in the world! I believe it said since the 1700’s on it and, wow. Here were a few of my favourites.
I said my farewells and thank you’s to the lovely staff of the Esplanade, but before I went home I couldn’t resist stopping at The Post, one of our local thrift stores. There wasn’t a lot of time before they were closing, so I browsed the store quickly and came across a few things that I thought were absolutely darling. For the life of me I could not tell you if this box was hand wrapped or manufactured to look this way, but I loved the strange plaque that proudly emblazoned that these were cards. I don’t know what kind of cards, and I don’t know why these cards, but I love it regardless. So much so that I left with it in tow. I also found a cassette tape of terrible (objectively) music from “Planet Pop 2001”. I hope whoever owned made this was proud of all of the effort they put into it.
Well.
It’s mine now.
Even if it does bite back. (I definitely bled for this.)
I’ve never seen a city so full of strange little treasures, but I know in my heart of hearts that Medicine Hat, just like any old city in a dustbowl anywhere else in the world, has a lot of heart to it and it’s own stories and values. But the core of what makes it beautiful is the people that reside there, past, present and future.
There is nothing I would love more than to know that in another thirty or so years, people are still writing about the little things in Medicine Hat, Alberta.
Photos!
So many photos was the next step. I needed to make sure I got some fun shots but also ones that represented some kind of letters somewhere along the line. Here’s some examples of the images that I ended up taking.
After editing the photos I chose, the grid was the next piece of the puzzle and after completing that, things just started to really fall into place! Things made sense on the page even when they didn’t completely conform to how I thought they would on the grid layout, because after I removed it, to me, it still looked good!!
Let’s look at a few examples of the pages with and without their grids.
When it came to finding the visuals behind my idea, I was limited to the three places that I was in the most often. Since I don’t drive and the weather was horrific for a few days, I decided that it was better this way if I wanted to push the concept of my personal struggles, hopes and shiny outlooks when I could only be in the school, the house or my friends home. A blessing!
But before I could get to the visuals, now that I had my poem, I wanted to do a rough draft of layouts.
Mellvetica 