My Zine

For my Typography class, I was asked to design a short zine based on anything. My subject was based on procrastination. What I wanted to convey was a lack of urgency and motivation before a deadline hits, and the students' behaviour. The entire zine is a countdown with each number representing all the silly, but enjoyable things we do when we procrastinate.

Cool Info Graphic - visualizing music

This is not your boring music synching abstract visual from your iTunes or Windows Live Media. The French animator, Renaud Hallee has created a music video that is acting almost as if it is translating music in a visual form. The video showed various layers of music through different graphics. This is intriguing because it reminds me that information design could also be presented in motion, where things are constantly changing, such as population stats, temperature from a weather station, or ecological footprints. Perhaps all of these information could show a more dynamic and intriguing aspect when they are presented in motion, constantly recording, displaying, showing relationships to each data both in macro and micro forms.

Sonar from Renaud Hallée on Vimeo.

Week 4 Reading

Wonders Revealed: Design and Faux Science

.001 Real Science
Science influences everything we live in. It is pervasive and it has now used by graphic designers as a way to earn credibility due to lack of validation in graphic design itself. There are little attention paid to the scientific side of visual communication.

.002 Faux science
Images such as genetic DNA are being used as branding schemes. Enzymes, molecules, atom structure appear on packages to sell products.


- Science is a graphic placebo
- Lab Chic
- No substance, weightlessness

- science is the most essential phenomena of the mod age

- hygienic and objective, rational and finite, grounded in numerical certainclarit, physical density, gravitational pull

- new look and feel for GD

- easy to iminitate – fsystematic language of documentation, methodical alignment.

- Safe, counterfeit

False Authority
- Information design: instant credibility.
- Numbers, bullets, charts, graph
- We buy into the form unquestioningly
- Ahistorical
- Extreme modernism: form masquerading as content.

Panceas

Morphology – form and structure of organism with no consideration in function
- no true function
- celebrating form at the expense of content

Documenting
- too busy documenting

Cataloguing
- science analyze, design amass
- close cropping is artifice
- scientists migrate from observation to analysis to discovery
- designers make wordless books with pictures

The New Vernacular
- Design beyond reach