For the start of 2012, AIGA Houston is running a New Year’s Resolution contest! Submissions must be on a 720 x 720 composition and can feature illustration or design that represents one or all of your goals for the new year!
Contest ends January 31st. To file a submission please email jpegs to socialmedia@houston.aiga.o
Entries will be uploaded to the album as they are received. Whichever submissions gets the most “likes” will win the typographic pocket planner, “Today is the Day”, by Jessica Hische to help make your goals a reality!
To view the gallery on Facebook and vote on your favorite.
Photography in design is important. Even the prettiest box of Cracker Jacks, photographed without care, can be a mediocre sight. Slap up some white paper, throw in a light-things can still go wrong. The importance of composition in photography can not be neglected. For this reason, Iv’e chosen to roll out a few fundamental principles of pretty that deserve some respect in the mix. Proximity, continuity, scale, shape and form work together to create visual balance for the eye. An untrained eye will not be able to tell you why a poster will draw them in-but can pick a favorite, nevertheless. The art of creating visual media for the masses is broken down to a science. Attention to composition is absolutely integral when it comes to documenting anything.
I remember when we fisrt began to study form and composition, triangles in Photography 101 just did it for me. I became hypnotized when watching movies at the time. Frame by frame, I could see the ingredients to beautiful. In particular, I remember the Harry Potter scene when the kid took off with the magic broom in the courtyard-or in Black Hawk Down when the helicopter fell. Every shot was crafted, built, cropped-angles, visual continuity, movement, harmony everywhere. Not a single paused frame was neglected.
Design principles are imperative to our daily. Due to the eye’s tendency towards gestalt theory, a sound composition is a visual magnet. We use them to sell, show, teach, seduce, inform, indulge-communicate. This is why we can not forget to create with care. You’ve got x amount of seconds to communicate to eyes, brains across America through a movie and youv’e got an hour and a half to do so; this is why people want to look at movies, because they visually hand craft those frames with love and it shows. You have 30 seconds to create a tv spot that people will not walk away from; what words do you choose to put on the screen? After all, isn’t filming in any form, just a record of information hierarchy? You have .5 seconds before someone decides to click on another webpage, use that giant image for your home page and they are gone. You have photographs to send to your boss, send careless pics and your efforts become wasted. You have to photograph work that represents your team, what are you going to put in your square-your lens, your L7 weenie fingers-what do you say if you neglect composition?
We are creators of visual anthropology. Let us tend to our responsibilities and mind our principles. It’s not about being pretty, it’s about communicating effectively. Photography plays a huge role in design. Recognition is crucial.
2011 was a very good year for AIGA Houston. A quick montage of people, places and events that helped shape our experiences and community in 2011, and helped informed our vision for 2012.
What are you looking forward to in 2012 from AIGA Houston? We’re interested in hearing your thoughts and ideas.
Portfolio shows. They are the debutante’s ball of the design world. It’s the nerve-wracking rite of passage we all go through to demonstrate to the world that we’re ready to leave the comforting nest of design school and spread our wings in the marketplace as professionals. But for the founders of Project Khömble – Carmen Garza, Hugo Perez, Lucie Pognonec and Athena Floudas (above, left to right), all students at the Art Institute of Houston – one portfolio show just wasn’t enough. They wanted something more substantial, more focused, and more unique than the show they all received as graduates. So they got busy working on a crazy idea – an independent portfolio show of their own making – and earned some pretty impressive fans along the way.
This independent portfolio show will be held Friday, December 16 from 6–11pm at Houston’s Alley Theatre, free of charge and open to the public. Be sure to check out khomble.com for more information (including the show’s participants and their portfolio sites) and @KhombleProject on Twitter.
Of course, at this point you may be asking, “what the hell is a Khömble?” read more…
It doesn’t snow very often in Houston, and if it does it really doesn’t stick. Only huge Art Deco snowflakes will last (and they come back every year).
I love the simplicity of these decorations. They harmonize well with the Art Deco architecture that surrounds them. There are many buildings in the Art Deco, Neo Deco and Art Moderne styles in Houston and they give it a part of its particular character. Examples include the River Oaks Theater, the JPMorgan Chase Building (formerly Gulf Building) and the Williams Tower (formerly Transco Tower).
Prior to 1927, most architect-designed buildings in Houston were either local versions of classical revival architecture or Victorian designs adapted for the city’s hot, humid climate. Modernistic architecture’s growing popularity coincided with a conscious effort by Houston’s business and civic leaders to tie the city’s image to the American West and de-emphasize its Southern heritage. For many Houstonians, modernistic buildings represented the city’s future.
Source: houstondeco.org
The decorations were created by Always in Season.
Now that we know a little bit more about how CSS works, in principle, let’s take the next step towards visualization. We’ll dive right in by “looking under the hood” of an example website utilizing some tools that are available for the Firefox browser.
Step 1- Download the Firefox Browser
Thanks to the explosion of amazing free downloadable content, Podcasts are making a serious bid for our attention, giving us something to listen to while we work that is informative, inspirational and entertaining. For Your Ears is an ongoing series in which we highlight/recommend podcasts, lectures and informational series that inspire us.
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DESIGN MATTERS with Debbie Millman
Debbie Millman
Design Observer
In some ways, I feel silly recommending a podcast featuring Debbie Millman. After all – among designers, who isn’t familiar with Debbie and her work? She isn’t exactly low-profile in the design world, having just ended her very successful term as President of AIGA. Most of you reading this I would imagine have at least one of her books in your collection. Yet it surprises me how often I run into people who’ve never heard of the Design Matters podcast.
In Design Matters, Millman interviews the biggest names in the creative world. From rising stars like Jessica Hische to design legends like Milton Glaser, DM is one of the best resources I have found for perspective and philosophy from the greatest minds in design, all in a casual, conversational format that makes the interviewees’ personalities shine through. It’s one thing to admire a designer’s work on a visual level. But to really hear from the designers themselves about how they approach their process, their career ups and downs, and especially how they got to where they are, offers a level of personal insight we rarely get to experience. Debbie Millman has a knack for asking all the right questions and coaxing the most relevant insights from her subjects.
Occasionally, Millman deviates from the standard interview format and strikes a more personal note. My personal favorite DM episode was her interview with Stefan Sagmeister from November of ’09 (her second DM interview with Sagmeister – the former occurred in ’05). Listening to Sagmeister is always engaging and worth one’s time, but it was the intro portion of this episode I found so endearing. Rather than launch directly into the interview, Debbie related a story about her early career, where she faced a series of personal and career setbacks, culminating in an impromptu trip overseas she was too stressed out to truly enjoy. I won’t spoil it for you, but essentially her relating a personal story of career anxiety and learning from one’s failures resonated with me as much – if not more – than any of her 100+ interviews with the icons of design. It’s Millman’s personal touches that make Design Matters something special.
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You can subscribe to Design Matters via iTunes. Be sure to check out the Design Matters Archive as well. Debbie Millman’s Twitter feed is @debbiemillman.
If you have a podcast, lecture or series you’d like to recommend for us to share with the AIGA Houston community, send submissions to education (at) houston.aiga.org.
This Saturday (November 5th) will be CTRL+ART+CREATE: AIGA Houston’s 2nd Annual Art Festival. For those that missed it last year, this year we will be offering live music, raffle prizes and giveaways and free workshops for the kids. Please feel free to stop on by and bring your blankets and lawn chairs to enjoy the nice weather.
To give you, our loyal blog readers, a sneak peek of what to expect, we’ve compiled a listing of some of your local artists and vendors who will be showcasing their work there at the festival. (Note, we will be updating this page as more bios and artwork comes in. So please, check in often. ) read more…
This halloween send some spooky wishes to everyone you know! Treat your friends, family, and loved ones with one of these mad halloween e-cards. Created just for you by Monica Yael Garcia, Oliver Wilkerson, and AIGA Houston.
http://aigahouston.net/halloween/
In my previous post, we were introduced to CSS and given a few points of consideration to help visualize CSS on a very basic level. This follow up article will expound slightly on those ideas and start diving into the visualization process.
Specifically, we looked at this box-model diagram of CSS:
At this point, it’s important to note that, while the image above is completely valid and true, we should actually be thinking of CSS in the following way:
We will expound more on this idea later, but in effect, when you create a new “div” you are essentially creating a new “layer” as the diagram shows. For designers, we should be able to relate to this because Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign all have layering capabilities. We can actively select layers, fill them with color, text and images, etc. and move them up and down so that we control what is on top and what is on bottom.
We also know that when we print, most often it is one ink layering on top of the other. For a process image, various screen patterns made up of cyan, magenta, yellow and black layering on top of one another create the full color image. The same is true for CSS in principle.
What is really cool is that once we truly grasp this concept, we can begin literally layering transparent .png files one on top of the other in our web pages. The only caveat to this is that the .png format isn’t completely supported at the time of this article ***cough – Internet Explorer (the bane of my existence)***. There are workarounds, however, and hopefully later releases of this browser will support .png files; aka “pings”.
A Note on Layering and Nesting
The primary difference between layering in CSS and layering in Photoshop, for example, is the concept of “nesting”. In CSS, we have to remember that although one div is layered on top of another, it is done so relative to its parent element.
In the diagram above, although we can clearly see div class=”main” layered on top of everything else, we have to remember that in the HTML markup, “main” will still be “nested” within “body”:
Thus, any CSS rules you have applied to “body” will also apply to “main” – unless you override them. We will discuss more about how to create CSS rules and their application, but by definition, CSS rules you create “cascade” down to the next element – or elements “nested” within them. These “nested” elements are also known as “children”. So, in effect we have a “parent/child” relationship with CSS and nested divs.
In my next article, we will specifically cover visualization tools so we can see this in action. If you want to get ahead, go ahead and start by downloading Firefox and the downloading and installing the Firebug Add-On.
Enjoy!
