Catching Bullets

 Just a short entry.  Jessica returned our book reports on Art and Fear.  In mine she said she hoped that the book would provide an impetus for self-examination and reflection in my own work.  On reading that I realized that I don't want to do any of that.   I do this work to avoid thinking about anything.   This makes writing an artist's statement challenging.

 The one things I decided on with little analysis when this assignment was explained was I would use my Dulse Sheep Design branding from AAD I.  I really liked what I had produced for that assignment and hope to make it going concern at some level.  Details to be determined. I did a small update to my Behance profile at Christmas and was singularly uninspired by the experience, so even before Ian said that Behance shouldn't be used I had decided to switch.  But to what?  There were a lot of tools flying around, Canva, Wix, Wordpress, etc.  With the exception of Canva they all seemed pretty CSS, or site specific process, heavy.  I used Canva during the marketing course and it seemed like glorified powerpoint so that was out. I went to the source of all knowledge, Google, and searched for 'good portfolio site builder'.  Lots of returns, but the /r/portfolio subreddit threw up some interesting results.  There was a lot of illustrative, anime foc...

  9/12 After showing the video during the critique I took on board the points about the moving images and faded them in and out.  I also decided to modify the final message to leave it on the screen for a bit longer. 1 hour As a bit of background to understand my parent's life. My dad joined the army in 1940 and fought in Italy and Northwest Europe.  When he returned to Canada he mined uranium in Northern Ontario for a while and then became a police officer in Toronto.  He got married and had a son.  His first wife was killed in a car accident when my brother was less than two.  He changed careers and became a security officer for External Affaires, and set out the travel the world as a single dad in the 1950s.  His first posting was in London, then off to Moscow.  My mother was born in Orkney and after high school got a job as a clerk with British security and then a communicator (teletype operator) with the British foreign office....

   25/11  Scanning the photos were fairly straight forward.  Getting them out of the old photo albums after 50+ years was not, but I got it done without any full thickness tears.  I lost some material off the back of the older ones but no images were damaged.  I decided to colourize the parts of the photos where my parents were and included them as backgrounds in the text reveal.  The images are not directly associated with the letters, but show how they both traveled extensively, both separate and together. 5 hours 2/12 to  8/12 Once the letters and message were scanned, along with the photos I put them through Photoshop to colourize the photos and cut out the relevant parts of the letters.  Once I had those files organized I started up with the After Effects project (see image above).  I made the image full HD but in vertical because of the format of the letters.  The AE project involved a lot of masking, line by line for the lett...

27/11 Over the weekend I worked on the logo and variations.  I settled on a monogram (DSD) and a secondary or alternative one of a sheep formed from the DSD.  Here's my ideation from that weekend, it also includes some work on the concept that Ian gave me of tilting the Ds (this came in the next week). I also researched the typefaces.  I stuck with the two Royal Mail fonts (Banks & Miles Doubleline and Chevin), and selected ITC Kabel Book as body text.  Work was also done on the colour blindness considerations of my pictures. I also built the grid during this time. I wanted blocks of text and a asymmetric layout.  There are three  different column widths, and four large horizontal blocks.  This resulted in some discussion later, especially about my intolerance with people who will not read the guide. 5 hours Weekend of 29 Nov-1 Dec I wrote up a lot of the guide.  I added Tahoma as the accessible font for products.  I researched the colour...

 This took a long time to figure out. 18/11 My first idea was to do something about optimism. I thought about the how Berlin held out during the blockade and how the 50s and 60s had unlimited optimism about the space program. I considered how space research leads to a huge amount of Earth based benefits. Material sciences, climate research, etc. This seemed a bit blah, but the initial plan where I would incorporate video came from this. (red box) The next idea was to do something about my medical problems and how it has affected my personality. Nope. (blue box)   So I was sort of stuck. 4 hours 20/11 Finally I was going through an junk drawer and found a post card from my dad. This evolved into documenting a series of letters between my parents in the late 80s. My dad's correspondence is typed, my mother's written. I think this will be a nice contrast in typography. I've also scanned some photos to give the viewer some more insight into my parents. I started working on the ...