The truth is something you don't have to lie about

Another lady doodle from my little notepad. I drew it while watching the first episode of "The Hour," which I'm told is an excellent series and so far it is.

Simoriah

Another lady drawing from my little notepad. This one I managed I think to make not look like Steven Tyler. 

Doodle looks like a lady

Another doodle from my new little notepad. It was supposed to be a lady. Unfortunately, I think she looks a little like Steven Tyler. Oh well.

Menlo

I attended the 2014 Inspire Conference this week and they gave us notepads, in which I doodled one of the speakers, Richard Sheridan, head of Menlo Innovations. I also doodled a fish monster, a fat kid and some other weird stuff in it, but I thought I'd lead off with this.

As close as a star to the moon

More from ArtWorks and more from me doing examples to hash things out as far as figuring out timetable, potential challenges, fixes, ect, this time with the trifold mailer layout. 

It also gave me the opportunity to take elements we didn't go with as a group and see what they would have been like taken to conclusion.

In Brightest Day, In Darkest Night

Making examples for class fulfills a number of purposes. It let's me know how much time the project could take, it let's me know what sort of challenges students might run into and how to fix them, it let's me know if what I'm asking is even reasonable to expect, and it let's me get some of the urge to control the process and the results out of my system. I don't need for their work to be my work because I already did my work, so their creations can be different and with pleasant surprises.

One of those pleasant surprises was the background to this image.

One of the students wanted to make something resembling the 2012 ArtPrize lantern launch. I helped her put together some of the elements and I think she had a very creative idea which turned out pretty awesome. Unfortunately it wasn't the direction the rest of the group wanted to go, opting instead for a more painterly approach. I still really liked it and hated to see it become a dead end, so I used it as the starting point for my examples.

Below is a version formatted for mass e-mail using one of the example logos I whipped up.

The orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us

One of the more difficult aspects of doing a collaborative group project with students is ceding some control of the results and at times even the process to allow the students to learn, to make and correct their own mistakes and ultimately let what gets created be their work and not your own. You want to guide the work, not dictate it. And that's really hard.

An area in our project I where I found this exceedingly difficult was in the lightbulb logo.

Partly it was because I didn't feel we had spent enough time on logo design, text and font design, or the overall importance of logos to branding and marketing. It felt as though the most important, iconic aspect of the work was being sidelined and we were proceeding into the final with a rough placeholder. Partly also it was that I felt going with the rough first draft as the final is fine, but only if it's after you've already tried and exhausted a bunch of other options and decided that the first was the best. 

To that end I wanted to present an alternative, not only to show that there were other options to consider and kickstart them to making some of their own, but also to show what could very easily be accomplished in Illustrator with vectors rather than trying to paint something in Photoshop.

Ultimately the students still wanted the rougher original, which was fine, but at least with these mock ups they could see some options. 

What they drew at work today

Typically this blog is what I drew at work today (hence the name), but today, it's what they drew at work today. My students that is. Or former students I should say as they received their completion certificates today. 

Today was the last day of the ArtWorks Program at UICA and this is the final product they created.

It's a trifold pamphlet for The Green Light Project, an awareness campaign for youth homelessness and runaways. 

We had a real client who chose to participate with a bunch of high school students rather than going with their usual design firm. We went through multiple pitches, multiple critiques, numerous variations, and a slew of final tweaks until we arrived at a final product the students and the client were pleased with. 

Not all the creative choices were ones I would have made, but that's kind of the point and I couldn't be prouder of the group or the work they did.

So instead of my work, here's theirs.

The Zed Word

Another doodle at Art Works. He's next to a face a student drew that creepily looks sort of like my brother circa 1996. I have cropped it out to concentrate on the  zombie which looks a bit less creepy.

Not the MOMA

At the summer arts program I'm doing at UICA in Grand Rapids the mural group put down butcher paper on a bunch of work tables. My group, the graphic design group, was in the mural work space while they were off on site doing their installation so we doodled on their doodle covered tables. I drew a dinosaur. And a zombie, but more on him later.