It's Your Photos

Friday night was awesome. It was so exciting to see students and their friends and families celebrating art and design. I loved the cameras and baby backpacks and hugging and hot gallery lights and even the shortage of wine.

I also really loved the conversation.

Thanks to everyone who came, and for those of you who haven't yet had the chance, the show will remain in the gallery until July 17.

Analytics are Fun!

Here is a screen shot of today's analytics report for thewhiteboards. With the mapping feature I can see where readers are, which is all over the world (except Africa, at least within the last reporting month). It's pretty cool. If you click on the image above it will open a larger pane, which is sort of a meta image, if you're looking at it in Explorer on your PC. If you get confused, just hit your back button.

Analytics are serious info that can be used for good marketing. Or, for fun, when you think about that one person, somewhere in Iceland, who landed on your blog for just a second before bouncing off somewhere else.

But clearly this is not a world map, it's a map of the states. I noticed that I am not representing well in politically conservative red states with lots of open spaces. Perhaps I'll write about that time in South Dakota when a bus load of us stopped at a bar with an awning of skulls, a talkative regular who had one leg and a deep laugh, and a surprisingly diverse jukebox. Or, how on that same trip, I rode through the Grand Tetons on a horse with real cowboys in a thunderstorm.

But that would be manipulative and weird, because I'd just be trying to trick some people to the blog who aren't interested in design matters. It's like bad SEO when people do mad tagging with repeated key words, to try and drive traffic. Turns out Google is onto you, and so are your readers.

I'll try and keep it real as I write about the Design Communication Arts certificate program at UCLA Extension for aspiring graphic designers who want to think.

Design Challenge from Dwell

Here is something from Dwell:

"At Dwell on Design LA, we have partnered with coolcapitals and Wacom to stage a series of live, graphic design competitions. These competitions are open to design enthusiast and professionals alike and it is your chance to show off your design skills and ideas. Not to mention a chance to win a Sony Vaio notebook.

Design Challenge: Create the graphic design for a customized coolcapitals messenger bag. You will have 30 minutes to sketch a preliminary design idea and explain your concept to the judging panel. If your design is selected, you will be promoted into the final round and given 30 more minutes to work on your design and compete for the daily grand prize of a Sony Vaio."

Courses Cancelled Tonight

Because Westwood is crazy right now, courses are cancelled tonight.

What kind of cash are we talking about?

Image from Crane & Co. for Kate Spade personalized stationary

I get some stock questions as a DCA advisor. One I don't hear that often is, Straight up, Karen, tell me how much money am I going to make? Perhaps people consider it gauche, but it's legit. As someone who is receiving a lot of depressing emails about pay reductions and furloughs, I know making a living is an integral part of making a life.

What you're going to make depends on what you're designing and who you're designing it for. What jobs you go for say something about who you think you are, what you think you can offer, and where you want to go. I don't believe that we all have to strive to be the best ever, and be at the top of the industry and all that hoopla. I know it's un-American, but hey, there are countries to visit, foods to cook and grassy parks to enjoy.

But if you can be selective, be. As someone new to the field it can be tempting to say yes to any job, especially in this economy. Consider though that you likely want to work with people who respect graphic designers as integral to the branding and presentation of a product, not as just decorators. Many people can open Photoshop and create something that looks sorta cool. Not many people can create a system that speaks to a target market based on research and process, culminating in a beautiful execution. If you can do the latter, value it and the market will value you.

There are always anomalies. There are some super duper Photoshop retouchers who are so good and so in demand that they make serious bank. There are also plenty of people who make a good living doing decent but boring or even crummy work. Value is not just a negotiation with your client, but also with yourself.

AIGA puts out annual salary surveys, if you'd like to see the numbers out in 2009.

It's Your Show Opens this Friday!

Image from It's Your Show, 2008

This afternoon Gretchen, Cristina and I will hang the student show in 1010. I like to move things around my apartment, decorating and redecorating, so I think I'll enjoy getting everything together this afternoon. There is a lot of beautiful photography, painting, collage, drawing, graphic design and motion.

Special recognition will be given by a jury of Los Angeles artists to projects displaying excellence in specific elements of art and design.

It’s Your Show opens this Friday, June 26, 6:30-9 pm, at UCLA Extension’s 1010 Westwood Center Gallery. There will be wine, cheese and tasty little sweet bites that are so easy to pop into your mouth before you know it you've lost count, but you're pretty sure you're in the double digits.

The show will be open in the 1010 Westwood Boulevard gallery from June 26-July 17.

CG Con 2009

This is happening:

CG CON 09: The Educational Creative Computer Graphics Conference 09

It's an educational computer graphics conference and job fair with 24 lectures in Digital Painting, Digital Modeling and Digital Animation in Los Angeles. It will feature guest speakers from the 3D, visual effects, concept design, post-production and game industry.

If you're a student and you want to go, use coupon code "CGCON09" for a discount.

Spec Work: Why we don't forward those emails to you

Occasionally I will get an email in the DCA inbox from someone with a project for a student. Usually this email is somewhat frantic, incredibly vague and very presumptuous. Sometimes it's not.

But more often than not, the essence of what that person is looking for is free or cheap graphic design work that will involve little creative control for the designer. This is a disservice the student, the professional designer and the industry.

AIGA has a good write-up about it here.

Crime Solving with Type!

With a hyphen, like crime-solving? Or two words, as above?

Not the point. I left those questions when I left an overhead (the kind that use bulbs and transparencies) in a 10th grade classroom in Hayward, California.

The point is this dude who goes by Sparky, who lives in London (where was he when I was doing my U.K. themed posts?) wrote about a Sex Pistols poster fake, which Christie's caught onto later. He also has a pretty cool personal design website going on. However, it looks like the first post about it may have been at typofile.

See how important research is in design? See? The designers could've created a realistic fraud if they had done some type research. Not that I'm encouraging criminality. Just research.

Compy Comps

As a UCLA Extension employee I am entitled to a complimentary enrollment every quarter. As the Design Communication Arts Program Coordinator, I attend courses in my area anyway. The comps come in handy if I want to branch out, say, and learn Spanish or take more novel writing courses. Neither of which I want to do right now because Spanish is either twice a week or Saturday mornings and novel writing has not yet resurfaced as a personal desire since the completion of my freshman attempt.

Thus, this quarter, I am staying close to DCA home. I have to confess I'm not yet convinced of my dedication to matriculation, as it's hard to keep going into the night in an environment that is my job. Students and instructors see me and ask questions, and sometimes, I'm sorry, but this is true and I just want to be honest with you, sometimes I'm grumpy and want to be anonymous. Yes, I like my job very much, but you know, sometimes I want to be doing other things. I hope you understand.

For summer quarter I'm thinking I may take Mixed Media with James Fish. My hope is that it would be an immersion thing - one of those activities where you lose yourself and don't realize that two hours have passed and not once did you think about why you're living in Los Angeles when you want to be somewhere else. I'm also going to closely follow SEO Writing with Lori Culwell, which is online. I'm into that course because I keep this here blog and it would be cool to add a few new readers, not that I don't really appreciate those of you who are already with me, because I do.

That's my plan. The quarter starts Monday, so I'll see how I feel then.

PISAF - Puchon International Student Animation Festival

Poster Design by Ki-Wan Park

Today a stylish lime green envelope with squiggly decoration arrived. When I opened it, I found this poster with an adorable purple character who a big block nose that opens into his mouth. He (Wait! I don't know why I'm calling it a He. Is that my hegemonic cultural assumption? I don't think this character is complex enough to have a reproductive system, if that is indeed what determines gender identity or pronoun)...

Where was I?

Oh, IT has a block body and little arms and legs that look like rolls of Playdoh. The body may, in fact, be made of eraser.

Anyway, it is the face of the 11th Puchon International Student Animation Festival. The Korean language site is up and running, but the English language site is still in development. If you want complete contest information in English, let me know and I can email you a copy of the forms.

What will your character look like?

Be On "Command X": A Graphic Design Reality Show

From aiga.org:

“Command X: Season 2” is a graphic design reality show featuring seven up-and-coming designers — current AIGA members who are college graduates and under age 26 — who step into the spotlight, complete design challenges and have the chance to break into the industry in front of 2,000 peers, heroes and potential employers! This is a rare chance to show off your talent before the world's best designers and win $1,000 in cash plus other cool prizes (not to mention the glory).

Details are here.

Girl Scouts: The New Paradigm

Female Merit Badge poster by Mary Yeager

During a very awkward time in a Houston suburb, I was a Girl Scout. There's a lot to say about this period in my life that is more appropriate for a fifth date than a work blog. But likely you survived adolescence as well, and if you were especially unpopular because you had lived overseas up until you were enrolled in the most clique-centric preppie conservative religious fourth grade class ever, then you know what I'm talking about.

Anyway.

Some time ago I was reading Jezebel, which had this Female Merit Badge Poster by Mary Yaeger. It's a brilliant repurposing of the Girl Scout sash and badge ritual in a much more realistic way. Selling cookies door-to-door, which was right about when I decided GS was too stressful and not for me, is much less a part of a young woman's life than the passages portrayed here. I think it would be a fun poster to have in a bathroom, but maybe it's a little too graphic for some.

Also, this reminds me of Judy Chicago, who has a way different website than I expected for some reason. I saw some of her work at the WACK! exhibit way back. In 2007. When I was living in L.A. Because I've been living in L.A. for five years. How did this happen?

Yeah, merit badges. Maybe there is one for living in L.A. as a woman, which is sometimes something to endure in itself.

Wow. I really brought down the party. Let's get back to merit badges... Yay for life! We are not alone in our passages.

Cristina on Logos

She's got something to say about them. Or rather, she doesn't say something directly about logos, but comments on a website that does.

Communication Arts Extends Contest Deadline

From their Call for Entries:

Enter the most prestigious juried competitions for graphic design and advertising! Any design or advertising project printed, published or aired for the first time between June 3, 2008 and June 1, 2009 is eligible.

FINAL DEADLINE EXTENSION for entries is June 15, 2009.

Winners are selected by a nationally representative panel of distinguished visual communicators and published in the Annuals and on the CA Web site. Art and creative directors, graphic designers and copywriters make these competitions a priority for worldwide promotion—a valuable resource for potential clients and colleagues.

Why Enter?
CA's Award of Excellence is one of the most-coveted awards in the industry. If chosen, winning places you in the highest ranks of your profession. Ask any creative director which competitions rank as the most influential, and they'll place Communication Arts at the top of the list.

Do it here

I am in Infographic Heaven. Join me!

Look what I found! http://www.good.is/transparency

This is my favorite graphic design genre, if I may. It's art communicating design and design communicating art! Okay, that may be pushing it, but I feel like it's doing some serious triple duty.

Thanks, Lucie, for introducing me to this magazine.

Finding Your Way with Signs

a.k.a. "Signage and Wayfinding"

I took this photo on a rainy afternoon in Bellagio, I think. Um, it may have been Varenna... some charming town on Lake Como, anyway. I love how there is so much going on. I was walking, so there was plenty of time to take it in. But if I were at this stop sign at night, looking for my hotel, with a local in the car behind me, this probably would have freaked me out.

Nearby, was this sign:



This sign is so great because it tells a story besides the usual - Hey! There is a school nearby so keep a lookout for kids running wild! To me, it tells the story of a headstrong younger sister who will enthusiastically drag her brother on any adventure she likes, unthwarted by his complaining that he just wants to read. Or whatever. They're such cute Italian kids.

Signs are cool because they're informational rather than just commercial - they are necessary. So, it's fun to experiment with them to make them more than functional, but also fun. That's why the course with Lucy Gonzalez, coming up again in the fall, will be a good one. Check out the kind of design work she does at Newsom Design.

Portfolio Night

Elvira emailed me about this. It costs $35 so maybe there is an open bar?

Op Art?

I don't know why this is in the Opinions section of the NYT, but it's neato.

The artist, Jeff Zenick says, "When I make these drawings, I can’t help but think about the people I’m depicting. I make up stories in my head about them, wondering what they were like (or are like), calculating how old they’d be now and the chances that they’re still alive."

He draws them from old yearbooks. Check it out here.

Informational Graphics

I love maps you hold in your hand, furniture assembly instructions, how-to guides and other informational graphics. Sometimes the NYT has really awesome charts and graphs explaining how something came to be. That is the job of Steve Duenes.

This one, explaining the economic crisis, was on boingboing.net. So much information graphically illustrated on a two-page spread! So awesome, infographics are.

The guy who did this "Anatomy of a Collapse" is Jess Bachman; his website is wallstats.com and there are other crazy complex posters there, including a really intricate one on Death and Taxes.

Warm and Fuzzy... Icons?

Walmart wants you to feel good about buying from them. So does any retailer. The NY Times has a good slideshow and article about how Walmart and other companies are redoing their logos to be softer and friendlier. Softer and friendler seems to mean lowercase type, the incorporation of leaves and sprites and taglines designed to make you feel good.

Not a Planet, Not a Galaxy, But a Universe

When I was younger I used to love to watch thirtysomething which, along with my crush on Dwayne Wayne on A Different World, really confounded my mother. But their lives looked so much better than my adolescent doings. Now of course I'm in my thirties and my life still doesn't resemble theirs, maybe because I'm not married with children living in Pennsylvania, and that's just fine.

Also, because of that show I thought that working in advertising would be the best thing ever. I wanted to sit around like Ken Olin and that other guy with the red beard, shooting Nerf basketball and dreaming up awesome tag lines we could high five about.

Eventually I learned an important lesson: reality is not like what is on television or in the movies. Occasionally, I admit, I must still remind myself of this dissonance, which always makes me wonder which part of myself is still so young to believe, even for a minute, that on my deathbed I should somehow be able to review my life in a montage that plays like Love, Actually.

Back to advertising. To put it kindly, I now know it's not for me. I think this post in Advertising Age, with this accompanying document, begins to explain why. While design research is a good thing, this is so self-important and weird. I mean, it's about Pepsi, A CARBONATED BEVERAGE, and it makes my brain feel purple. (Of course it's about so much more since it's a multinational corporation that deals in a tankers of money, but I'll not get into that now.)

Rupal Parekh, who wrote the post agrees with me, and he works in advertising, so maybe this is me making an example of the exception rather than the rule.

... Nah, in this case, I don't think so. Advertising firms seem to really believe that they can make a universe out of a brand. Who wants to live there?

Plus, as a people, we really need to drink less soda.

Tank Think Business Grow

AIGA Presents: BusinessMatters: Grow Your Business Think Tank

11 June 2009 | 6:30 pm - 9:30 pm

UCLA Extension at Figueroa Courtyard

For more info go here

Is a shirt a shirt when it's not a shirt?

This post title is an attempt to paraphrase Kant as though he had seen Scott's shirt puck today.

Cristina's post about this same topic was reminicient of a game of Clue to me, which is a game I've never really played but feel I have a fairly strong understanding of just through pop culture.

Anyway, about packaging. Apparently this shirt has been encased in a tin can for a few years, which in itself seems excessive to me. Will that tin can be reused? Can you put cookies in it? Or it will it immeidately go into the recycling, or worse, the trash? Why would a t-shirt come in a tin? Why? Answer me, please.

There are so many questions about this particular product that can only be answered through time. Of course Cristina and I want to unravel the shirt to see what it looks like. But no, Scott has to be all detached about it and patient enough to let time answer all.

Why does everything seem to relate to my own philosophical challenges these days? Hmmm...

Creative Types + Wonks = Battle

One of the top ten articles on the NYT today is called Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise. It's not just about creativity anymore, it's also about measurably.

I have mixed feelings about this. I mean, part of the joy and potential payback of creativity is taking risks. (Okay, so in this case creativity is a web ad.) Sometimes it takes time for a risk to pay off. But if you have to immediately get the numbers in, then there isn't enough time to see if something can catch on.

BTW, this is the same problem with the stock market. Shareholders expect high earnings each quarter, the company goes after those kinds of returns, the long-view is lost, and we end up with retirement portfolios that look like they've been on liquid diets.

The other side though, is that numbers can be measured. If you want to know if something is working, it sure is nice to be able to test it and see. (Thanks, science!) Just putting it out there and interpreting the silence or even the buying behavior is way more flawed then counting clicks on a banner ad.

It's just sometimes I wish everything wasn't about money.

Instructor Appreciation

I missed one of my favorite events this past Saturday - our annual Instructor Appreciation Breakfast. It's when everyone piles into an okay room at Lindbrook, eats bagels, talks to one another, and gets appreciated for what they bring to our programs. It includes DCA, studio, visual, photography and art history instructors. It's also a cool time to see instructors get to know one another and get all business cardy and stuff.

"Oh, you're in 415? Right, I've seen you there on Tuesdays. I'm in 416." Talk of work and interests ensues.

Since I spent a brief albeit memorable time in the classroom as a teacher, I appreciate how much work it is to do it well. I'm so thankful for professionals who want to share their knowledge with others who want to learn, and who are constantly innovating new and effective ways to pass it on.

Thanks, instructors!