su blackwell: book-cut sculpture.

in light of my recent visit to an artists' book show in claremont and just plain-out being exposed to the book-making world in my artists books class, i came across su blackwell, an artist out of england. she has a wonderful way with paper. her work is phenomenal.

here are a few samples of cut-books, but i encourage anyone to check all of her work out ://here.









su blackwell

history of graphic design: essay two.

i turned in write-up number two (of six) from selected essays out of Looking Closer Five this week. "The Beauty Part," by Rick Poynor was vague, yet it provoked a lot of thought. ...maybe that was the point. i'm not sure beauty can be defined very well by academia-types because it is so much bigger than a definition, but i appreciate the observations he makes. i've seen his name a few times online and in eye magazine and have nothing but respect for his design-critiques. my reaction to his essay left me a bit blank and after re-reading it three times i sort of spewed out some prose. and i turned that in for my second write up. here it is:

also, you can grab the pdf //:here.

483A logo. round 2.

CHICAGO 2016. this is a continuation from the logo round 1 blog. i explored a few more techniques and popped out a few more concepts. this time was nowhere near (close to) a million thumbnails, but i feel i have some solid direction now. round 3 will be difficult narrowing the comps down, yet enlightening because i'll do color studies to give the logo a better sense of feeling rather than the current "rainbow" colors taken from the rings...

in round 2 i focused on 3 types of logos drawn from round 1: wind-related, torch flame/skyline, and architecture (millennium park's Jay Pritzker Pavilion, in particular). i experimented with deconstructivism for the first time and with watercolor and cut paper — a technique i never would have used for a logo, maybe only a background for a brochure or something, and i actually think they came out the best. mainly because the colors were soft and that made the marks feel more real.

in the end, i'm not sure watercolor will work as a vector that can be placed on everything from outdoor boards to coke cans. but i discovered some new concepts nonetheless:

448: artists' book show

instead of going to book class on friday, we visited the Williamson Gallery at Claremont Scripps for an artists' book show, "Performing the Book." It was pretty darn fantastic. check it out below:


in the front lobby, we watched a performance from susan joy share on an iMac... apparently she performed for the opening a week prior.






(H) here is the work of the famous johanna drucker.




susan joy share


susan joy share


susan joy share




sam winston


sam winston


sam winston


















and finally, some random dude on our walk to lunch...

483A logo. round 1.

(close to) a million thumbnails for the 2016 Olympics in Chicago Applicant City logo. after getting into different concepts and techniques for the logo, i found myself in a tornado of ideas with no more time. i didn't create as many thumbnails as i was supposed to due to time running away shamelessly, but the process opened up a lot of doors in which i plan on refining for round 2 (coming next week).

below is a gang of ideas that, quite frankly, did not derive from my indexical list (from my first blog post on this logo ://here.), but just evolved out of my thoughts about the subject. i plan on taking the good information from the indexical list and my musings from this round 1 and creating another (close to) million thumbs.

first, this is the existing logo. the one to beat.


other than sketching out pencil thumbnails, the techniques i used varied. from exploring scanned texture like denim, because i feel there is a working-class, factory-based history in chicago, to experimenting with ink — blots, spats, strokes, and tested different textures with "olympic-" color guaches. in round 1 i also show some researched architecture elements. my next round will include some destructivist design of the famous landmarks in milliennium park. for now, here is round 1:

















i told you there were close to a million...