A note to my devoted fans: I'll be performing a slow redesign/reorganization of Dave Makes dot com over the next few months in preparation for portfolio night, the culminating event before I graduate from the College of DuPage Graphic Design program. As for the blog, I will be switching over from Blogger to Wordpress, so things might get moved around. Just a heads up.
Just before winter break, five designers including myself put up a show in the College of DuPage Wings Gallery (located on the first floor of the SRC) called "Insight." Each of us created a poster that posed a question, and in front of each poster was a podium with a pad of paper and a slot into which anyone could drop their answers. Now that school is back from break, we've taken the answers and created books full of our interpretations of the answers.
The question I asked was "How can I be happy everyday?" This is an important question to me because I always feel driven to discover new things and seek out new experiences in life, and I enjoy discussing somewhat philosophical ideas that have real-world applications in everyday use. I felt that this question would also open up the audience's answers to a wide range of interesting and personal prescriptions that would also reflect their own lifestyle choices.
This was a very important and personal question to me, so I chose to create a self-portrait. This also helped draw in people, as I hoped all of my student friends and coworkers at the school would be ensnared by the familiar sight of my big dorky glasses and beard staring out at them from the gallery. When you get close to the poster, however, the portrait dissolves into a series of colored squares that make up a calendar of 2010. My hope was that this would facilitate some real thinking as people walked up to the podium and considered, what do we do every day that makes us who we are?
As a graphic designer, I spend a lot of time in front of a computer, and my work usually winds up passing through or being created entirely in one piece of software or another by Adobe. This is fine, it's certainly faster than the process used to be before everyone had a glowing icon of an apple in their laps. Recently, though, I've felt that there's a limitation in using this software, and I've seen a lot of homogenization in the design community's collective work. Our teachers demand that we do all of our concept work with paper and pencil, and then we can move to the computer to create the finished version, but I wanted to explore an avenue that had as little to do with the computer as possible.
I like to try new things (which usually means things I'm not very good at), but the answers I received seemed to justify, even encourage this stepping outside my comfort zone. For the answer book, I combined two things I have little to no talent for: origami and calligraphy. I folded sixteen original designs from single sheets of origami paper, wrote the answers on them with a somewhat uncooperative calligraphic fountain pen, and photographed the resulting works against various textures in and around the school. We printed them out, bound them, and voila! "Analog" graphic design.
Thanks to the contributors of answers to our show, you really blew my expectations out of the water and gave me some great words to chew over. I hope the answer book gives you something to think about as well. Thanks also to Grace Blevins, Chris Walker, Jake Albaugh, and Ogi for inviting me to be part of this inspiring show.
If you'd like to see the show in person, it should be up in the Wings Gallery at the College of DuPage's SRC building at least through the rest of January.
This is a quick 30 second spot for the College of Dupage Library's Digital Commons service. I've worked out a new logo and identity that involves a network of interconnected dots as a graphic element. The dots can also be animated, as seen in the video.
Those kooky guys at Hix Bros. music put together an awesome Christmas album, and they're giving the profits to Mutual Ground, which provides services in southern Kane County and Kendall County for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. Plus, it's full of good 'ol rockin' holiday cheer, and the cover is by Tina and me! So order a copy straight from the Hix Bros. or from CD baby, and feel good about donating to a good cause this holiday season.
Another semester has ended, but being the ever-vigilant artists we are, we are using this break as an opportunity to create more projects. Here is the concept for our latest project-in-progress, entitled 30 Seconds, 30 Days:
3 musicians collaborate (Dave Jacob Hoffman, Jake Albaugh, and Dan Huff) to record exactly 30 seconds of audio every day for 30 days beginning December 10th, 2009. The result is 90 tracks, totaling 45 minutes, which is then compiled into a freely released album.
As I'm writing this, we have just completed the third day, and there is already a broad range of sounds to tickle your earhairs. So click here to visit the 30 Seconds, 30 Days project, and then bookmark it and check back regularly to see how it's progressing. When the whole thing wraps up, I'll be sure to post the final compilation here for easy downloading.
Here it is, what you've all been waiting for! The SECRET ZOMBIE PROJECT is revealed.
"But what is it?" you may be asking yourself. Well, that's why I've brought to you this EXCLUSIVE MAKING-OF SPECIAL FEATURE.
I have been doing some work for the College of DuPage Library, and one of the ideas they had was a series of videos about different parts of the library. This project started out as a simple "How to print" instructional video, until the librarian I was working with on the project said "I wish we could do something crazy, like zombies in the library or something."
Now, I wasn't sure what I could get away with. After all, librarians are bookish folks who go around filing things and shushing people, right?
Not quite. I drew up a quick storyboard with the zombie concept, and they loved it.
Then I told them it was going to be a cartoon. I got a bunch of librarians together and recorded an undead chorus of frightful moans. I recorded hokey old-timey instructional video narration, and threw in old public-domain music for kicks.
They ate it up. Who are these librarians?
Next, I threw together an animatic (moving storyboard) to be presented at the Library's staff meeting.
Digging out a few more illustrations from last semester. I was playing with the same style for both of these projects, since they both involved representing the "green" movement in some way. The first was meant to be used as an illustration for a magazine spread, with the article overlayed on top of it. The second was meant to be a poster.
I'm digging out some work from the spring semester that I never got around to posting. This one is a simplified isometric map of the College of DuPage's Student Resource center. You might remember the SRC icons that were incorporated into this project.
The assignment was to represent the map in 3D, and I decided to go with an isometric view in honor of all the great RPG video games and technical illustrations that have influenced me. It was a lot of fun to define such a rigid, simplified world and then populate it all sorts of people and critters doing goofy things.
The way the different floors of the building were layered in space, it looked like the whole scene was in the middle of being dropped into place. I added some random objects floating around the scene to add a little more humor.
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