Portfolio site up

I finally have a decent online portfolio. Please feel free to check it out at dallasreedy.com and give me some feedback.

Thanks, party people.
Dallas

slightly copied…

I needed to create a postcard mailer for our senior portfolio presentation that will be happening at the end of this quarter. Everyone in our portfolio class was required to design a postcard and then we'd show them all, vote on one, and that's the one that would go out to all the people of the world (so to speak). It was really late and I didn't want to stay up all night coming up with a concept and designing it and tweaking it and fixing it until it looked perfect, so I went to my local source of inspiration, Communication Arts, and began thumbing through until I found something I liked. Then I flattered it with the most outright imitation. Now I feel guilty. Like I don't want to put it in my portfolio, guilty. I don't want people to know I did it, guilty. I'm afraid the original designer will find it, hunt me down, and sue me, guilty. Oh well. Life goes on…right? Right?

a treasure in our humble library

Typographic Variations: on themes in contemporary book design and typography in 78 book- and title-pages
With prefaces written by Paul Standard, New York, G. K. Schauer, Frankfurt, and Charles Peignot, Paris, together with commentary notes and specifications.
Designed by Hermann Zapf
Published 1964 by Museum Books, New York

This book is amazing. It is so simple and so elegant in its design. Each "page" is actually an entire spread, of which only the right-hand side is used. All of the page numbers are embossed into the page. Each page's design has an embossed border around it so each and every page is about the design that is showcased on that page and NOTHING else. It is, in its entirety, elegant. It is completely simple. It is the epitome of timelessness and absolutely gorgeous design. Take this image of page number 25, for instance. I completely does the actual page no justice at all, but even as it is on the screen, it is seemingly way ahead of its time. The simple distress on the thick border, the ever-classic, sans serif typeface, and the excellent use of design rules-of-thumb (the positioning on the page, the contrast amongst colors and fonts, the continuity with the border pieces, etc.) all intermingle to present to the viewer an excerpt of what could easily have been a design masterpiece. While a lot of the book is in Zapf's native German tongue, there are some designs in the book that are in English, French and some that are in Latin (and probably some other languages that my feeble American brain just skips over).
I didn't manage to snap an image of it, but I just came across a page in the book (67) that has contemporary looking illustrations of a hawk with a turtle in its talons and then the words »Les Fables de Jean de la Fontaine« (the European style quotes [»«] are used throughout the book, so I thought I'd just pay them tribute here) and below that it has another illustration, this time of two roosters in a cock fight. Then below that it finishes off with the credits: »Illustrées par Fritz Kredel.« All-in-all, I consider this book an amazing source of inspiration from the past. The elegance, the simplicity, and the overall design is just so incredible that I have literally been sitting here for an hour just looking at pages 1—68. I still have 10 more pages to go. Whoever thought that such a simple book from the 60s could prove to be so powerful? Hermann Zapf, that's who!

By the way, I looked up this book on Amazon.com, and there's apparently only ONE on there for sale and it's currently going for $399.99, so...I really feel like I have a sacred, design treasure in my hands. If you ever get a chance to see this book, I would highly recommend at least a quick sit-down and flip-through. It's totally worth your time!

this looks like an interesting book...thing

So, another love of mine is typography. This book by Tara McLeod entitled, "Hot Acrobats Perform Cheese Fog Polka," looks like a real interesting view on old-school typography. Here is a synopsis of what the book is from the site where I found the picture:

With butcher paper, a swag of wooden type, and an 1832 Albion flat-bed press, Tara McLeod, owner-operator of The Pear Tree Press, printed 20 copies of Hot Acrobats. It was printed in sections on one continuous sheet and could well have been called: £63 NIGHT HAWK BAM! McLeod has some 25 publications to his credit over a period of ten years. He also prints limited edition books for the Holloway Press at the University of Auckland.

If somebody wants to buy it for me, that would be awesome...especially since he made only 20 prints of it.

current philosophy

Currently I am reading this book by Hillman Curtis entitled, "MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer." The first part of it, Process, has been some of the most rewarding and informative reading that I have done in a long time. I'm not even a new media major. I'm a graphic design major. While this affords me a bit different mediums, the ideas are all the same. Everything he talks about with the process that they go through at hillmancurtis, inc. I am finding to be the most helpful knowledge to ever know. While this book is for a class and is a required and forced reading (two things that generally turn me off from reading altogether), I am finding that I'm picking it up whenever I have a spare moment just to read a page or two, or to look at some of the images and quotes that he considers his own inspiration. I'm not going to say that the man is a genius, don't get me wrong, but he is quite in tune with how the whole design process works, and how it works best for him. Another thing about the book that absolutely thrills me is the inclusion of large images, and sometimes several consecutive pages of just images, and when there is text, it is in such an nonintrusive and unimposing form that I am almost delighted to read it and I find myself turning each page with anticipation. So far, one of my favorite quotes from this book is this:

WHAT'S IN A WORD So what is inspiration? The Merriam-Webster dictionary has several definitoins, but two in particular really stand out for me: The action or power of moving the intellect or emotions. (and) The act of drawing in, specifically the drawing of air into the lungs.… Ideas/inspiration are all around us and, like air, we share them—breathing them into our bodies and returning them, changed, into the creative atmosphere.

I just thought that was such a powerful and profound statement. Ideas aren't (and cannot be) created. They exist, like oxygen, everywhere. They're already out there. We just have to open our eyes (lungs) to the possibilities and breathe them in and really take them into ourselves so that our lives are sustained by them. Then, when we exhale, we release the ideas back out into the world, slightly changed and altered, but with the same basic structure. Brilliant! The idea that imitation is the greatest form of flattery never rang more true.

MySpace suicide

It's been going around a lot these days. Not really, but both my friend Adam and I have decided that MySpace just isn't the place we want to call home on the Internet. In fact, I don't know that I really call any place "home" while I'm on the Internet, but that's hardly the point. The point is that Adam and I have moved from MySpace to facebook.com and I have totally overridden most of the code on my MySpace page so as to change my background, the visibility of mostly everything on my page, the placement of the navigation bar links, my picture, my display name, my One and Make Poverty History campaign banners (which now conveniently cover up some ugly links that followed my profile picture around), and I added in some promo text for facebook.com. I'm not sure why I'm suddenly so against MySpace, but...oh well. Whatever. I guess I picked a cause and now I'm just going to go balls-out with it. That's the news from Lake Woebegone where men are men and so are the women.

film fest

I'm designing posters for a guerilla film festival at my college. In fact, it will be the first ever such event on this campus. What it is, in case you don't know, is a festival of films that are all made in like a week or a weekend's time. Most of the films will be around 5 minutes. As an added piece to the fun puzzle, each team is given an "inspiration packet" which will contain lines, props, characters, etc., that must be used in the film. I am actually planning to participate in the festival with a team comprised of some good friends of mine who, like me, have taken Intro to Video and really loved it. But, along with the excited anticipation of this upcoming event, I get the privelage of designing the posters that will go up all over campus and foretell of its blessed arrival. The person in charge wants the posters to look like some old school, European postcards so that they will have that sort of soft, painterly look to them. She also was wanting them to look like an example she gave me (as seen here). She wanted there to be two people on the beach with a projector in between them that was projecting a movie onto a screen which they would be watching. Seems simple, but getting a bunch of photos together and Photoshopping them into the scene AND applying a bunch of filters to make the whole thing look painted could take quite a bit of time, energy, planning and creativity. I'm not saying I can't do it, I'm just saying that it's been over a month since she asked me to do the posters and they still aren't done. Patience is a virtue, but being on time is professional.

some photographs

Here are some photographs I took of my guitar. These were part of my final display project for my Intro to Photography class at Walla Walla College.










~enjoy

victorianism

First of all, is that a word? I don't know. Perhaps I made it up, perhaps not. If I did make it up, I think it should be a word. The Victorian era gave us so many examples of really awesome organic designs. Things that resemble parts of plants or vines, wallpaper that grows up the wall, fabrics with such intricate patterns that the eye dances with pleasure. I, for one, really enjoy the designs from this era in history. Personally I feel them coming back into style. A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a Victorian wallpaper site called Bradbury & Bradbury. This site has several samples of the wallpapers that they sell in various colors and styles. I totally love them. I downloaded as many of the samples as I could and I've been working on photoshopping (another made up term, perhaps?) them into useable Photoshop patterns for general use on posters, desktops and web site backgrounds. One such example is the background for my personal blog. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong in this, but I think these things are really trendy right now. I mentioned the site and the available samples to one of my professors who was about to assign a Victorian poster assignment in one of her classes and I had the word trendy in the e-mail that I sent her. She replied by saying, "They may not be trendy, but they sure are timely." Are they really not trendy? I love them. Am I out of the trend? (wouldn't be the first time!)

intrigued by ampersand

I don't know if you're like me at all (you probably aren't), but I really love unique ampersands. Adobe Garamond Pro Italic has one of the best ampersands of all time. It's so stylish, so classic, so beautiful. You may not get it, but that's okay. I'm not really in this business to please anybody or anything except my own need to create. Lately I've been finding myself doodling ampersand variations on all of my class notes. I've also started trying to use them more often in my daily hand-writing rather than using the backwards "3" with the lines coming out of the top and bottom or the generic "+." It's just so much more fun to make all kinds of swoops and curls and have it mean "and." Also, along with my sudden interest in the form of the ampersand came an interest in its history. For me this is a big deal. I hate history. Despise it. I can't stand it. Actually having an urge to know something from the past and researching it on my own time is a really big deal to me. I went to Adobe's site and looked it up. Apparently, the actual form of the ampersand as we know it dates back to like 79 A.D. as some Pompeiian graffiti. The ampersand character is derived from the ligature of et, which is the Latin word for "and". The word ampersand is a corruption of the phrase and per se and, which literally means "(the character) & is itself (the word) and." So, now you know; in case you go to a school like mine where they really don't teach you all that much in your typography class because it's a freshmen level class and is only one quarter long.