Hands Collection for HIV Poster

A social welfare poster is my latest assignment I've done. The HIV is my choice but how can I relate this sensitive topic to what people visually understand about HIV. And also understand what I will put in my poster.

There are many posters in my city that just contains words - and it ends up with the problem is not anyone can read and therefore we lost a certain number of viewers. Our purpose less or more has limitation.

My poster has images and also text on it. I tried to put the concept on the image and also want a relationship between the text and the image part.

The hand, is where you and the world touch each other. Everybody that have normal physical body got hands and fingers. And the only differences that we will notice is the appearance of them. It can be the skin colors, the shape of the fingers, the size, the decoration, the smoothness ... And your hand is no doubt physically the same as an HIV one. Why you cannot recognize them in public (when they're still strong) is that they're just like you. You just have a restriction yourself and began to feel scared when you see them in the hospital or somewhere for HIV patients.

So why just judge them like other people besides you?

Creating Collage Photo

This is my work on doing the first Collage.
Before I just got confused about how can I find my face looks like something.
Many people talk about my face shape. They said it made they can know that's me while seeing me braining something - looking at one invisible point.
My face shape is like an oval - or as my sister says "looks like a reversed triangle" - I'm not quite comfortable when people saying that straight to me though. But now it did help me out with the problem in doing my work. So I tried to find things looks like my face.

There is a small dust vacuum cleaner in my house. And the shape of it is round, quite big near the handle and smaller at the "mouth"(for collecting dust) - i felt it will fit my face shape. Then I took photos with many different views of it and began editing.

The most interesting thing is when I resize it smaller to fit my face size, it just perfectly fit every curves. I don't need to cut or add any curve. And the metal part with circle holes on it made me think of a mask.

The next part is for the eye and my hair. That time I got a curly hair and I always let it fall in the front of my shoulder. I thought of the handle of the vacuum but it just too straight for my purpose. Then the string is the perfect choice. About the eye, I don't want to make collage of both two, it's just irrelevant, so I made for one. The power button of the machine is really cool for this and I add it as an eye. While adjusting it to the eye, i found a cool depth when i took the button photo. Then I highlight it a little bit and made it merge a small space with the skin and the metal. A stress on the whole portrait like i want it to be. Because I like my eyes most on my face.

The highlight really did a main part in doing this work. It increased the quality and the emotional look that i want to create. The black background is all what i need to complete the collage.

My original portrait

The dust vacuum machine

My final collage work

Camera Technique

This short clip had some of the basic camera techniques like span, tilt, dolly, zoom in and out. Some parts are quite not clear but if you see again, you will see it.

Type Choice

I love written old style, and this font P22 Virginian came to me as a tool to express the typography power in designing mysterious media design.

Summary for this font:
_ It was created by Ted Stanton (in 2005)
_ It is a part of "Staunton Script Family"

This font is used for printing historic novel and imitate the hand writing annotation and in family bible.

I'm still finding the facts about this font. It is not an old style font but the use of it is popular in making accent graphic recent multimedia work's purposes today.

There is a piece of music that i found really suit with the font's use and meaning


References:
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/sherwood/p22-virginian/p22-virginian/index.html
http://freeplaymusic.com/search/preview_file.php?id=2022&dur=0&type=mp3
http://memory.loc.gov/mss/mgw/mgw2/012/2440242.jpg

Art work process - Maximalism

Since we have known about Maximalism and Minimalism and I know that many of you love Maximalism with curves, many florist decoration, I found this interesting video. It show us about the process of creating things on wall (not graffiti style) - erasing and drawing new things. Here and there we could see it's interactive with things happening from the real word. And the ending would make you laugh :) Enjoy it my friend. There are many kinds and signs that we've already known before. Here is one out of thousand ways we can do with them to create Art works.

1 week with Art Work

Philharmonie de Paris

This is a recent amazing design made by the architect Jean Nouvel in the process of building the Paris Hall. The New York Times spread the news and also provided some computer rendering photos of this architecture.

Throughout the two recent decades, the French government had poured money into building and renovating museums, library, and opera houses. This led to disappointment in orchestral lovers thought. Although there are also places that can satisfy their requirement, an art trend construction seemed to be still in need.

The audience now don’t need to wait any longer since Philharmonie de Paris, as it will be called, is scheduled to open in the Parc de la Villette, in northeast Paris, in 2012.

There were considerations in placing this building in France and many more facts about it that you can view in the article written by Allan Riding – New York Times online. Here I just want to show you the newest pictures that they got from this building project so you can have an overview of it. I love the curves covered the whole space, experts call they’re built in “vineyard” style, “with the audience on all sides of the orchestra on multilevel terraces”. It has the seat capacity of 2,400.

Reference:
Building a Paris Hall Around Its Audience

Great HELVETICA event 2007

These recent weeks are really weeks for typography. We have already known the Helvetica with its popularity all over the world. 2007, Helvetica celebrates its 50^th birthday (March 24^th, 2007) and there was a big event for this. A documentary film was made about Helvetica by Gary Huswit and was premiered on April 6^th, 2007. This film will be screening nearly as 100 events all over the world. If you check this screening schedule , you can see that the tickets on April 11 in MassArt Eventworks, Boston,USA were already sold out (up to this point – when I am writing this entry). New dates and cities will be added every week. This really made me hope for a ticket if they screen the film in Vietnam.

Below I got some pictures on the Helvetica 50^th birthday (March 24, 2007) and a short video clip about the documentary film.

Helvetica50
Museum für Gestaltung Zürich & the Freitag factory
March 24, 2007


The panel discussion "Will This Typeface Last Forever?" Left to right: Erik Spiekermann, Alfred Hoffmann, Lars Müller, David Carson, Manuel Krebs. [Gary Hustwit not pictured... because he's taking the picture...]



The panel audience.



Reception after the panel, with the 12 finalists in the museum's Helvetica50 poster competition.



Poster competition finalists.



Poster entry, detail.



Spiekermann meets the press.



Museum director Christian Brändle introduces the film screening. At capacity with 300 attendees, 200 turned away...



The afterparty at the Freitag factory, hosted by soDA magazine. 700+ in attendance.



Live visuals by a team of artists with overhead projectors.



The big H.



Happy 50th Helvetica!

If you’re interested in this event, please visit the links in my references.

REFERENCES
Design Observer, Michael Bierut, Our Little Secret.
Helvetica Film Web Site
More document clips on this event
Picture sources: [link]

Typography with Concepts

There are words that have various meaning when they're put in different type fonts and different backgrounds or just simply color. This is the first time I try arranging a word in different ways to create different meanings.


The first one I chose formal style to do with black font and blue background. I separate the "RE" from the "MEMBER" with the purpose to make it look like an emphasis on how things that you remember related to the people involved in. You can see I also have enough space for the "RE" if it is pushed into the blue zone to be perfect. A reminder.



The second one I want it to be more romantic. Yes, this meaning is quite popular. Remember can be missing, looking back precious moments. The tone in the image should be a little bit sad and moody, so I chose script style with a florist sign (actually it's a special character that you can find in Character Map easily) to make it smoother and curlier.



The final one is the strongest style. The red brings you "warning" and the target sign makes you focus. I put 2 target signs one with low opacity in the centre of the word "REMEMBER" and the second one with yellow at the corner but just a quarter of it. Often when people remind you something, you of course want to remember it, but lost concentration is what you more often meet when you're busy and this banner is also considered as a reminder or a warning that you may cause if you forgot things.