I Want To Be Close To You

Is that creepy? I hope so because creepy is what I do.

I just wanted to update a little sumthin sumthin cause I know y’all miss me, and I for damn sure miss y’all too. I’ve been away for so long that wordpress has updated it’s UI and it scares me. What do all these buttons do??

I’ve come here today to share with you some cool videos I found and to promise that there will be updates soon, since I’ve got nothing else going on in my life. I’ve even got a few lined up already! I’m no longer working crazy hours, but that also means I’m not making as much money, which my spending habits (aka my eating habits) have had to adapt. ANYWAY. Enough woe and despair.

I’ve been really feeling these kinds of videos where the audio effects are human videos! I saw some a few weeks ago, and I thought they were just the cutest thing. Of course, going back I couldn’t find the ones I watched, but here are a couple that I enjoyed anyway. :)

Cheers,

Judy

And of course, Who’s Line. I was watching a string of Who’s Line clips a few years back at 3am when this scene just clinched it and sent me tumbling from my chair onto the floor with tears streaming down my face. In a good way, of course.

And Who’s Line, once you get in, you can’t get out. While looking for the above clip, I found another one of a game of Sound Effects that had my parents get up from their room to check if I was okay. I write this with my face in my pillow drenched with tears.

And another. Don’t click the video to get to the youtube page to see the suggested videos. You’ll never get out.

 

Communism

Now, I always knew that North Vietnam was the Commie (offensive?) side of Vietnam. Way back when, Vietnam became a colony of the French, which is why a lot of Vietnamese words do take root in French words. It’s like a bunch of fobs butchered the French language and out came Vietnamese. HA! From what I know, Vietnamese was very closely related with Chinese, but the French came in and our language evolved. Very loosely.

Communism came about when the Vietnamese decided to overthrow the French colonization, and after years of struggle, the Vietnam war came about. The American’s are all up in it because they came in, allied with the French during the war, which is what all those war movies are about, ie Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now.

Anyway, Ho Chi Minh, which all Viet people call by Uncle or Uncle Ho, was the leader of the Communist party in Vietnam that overthrew French Rule. Now, I knew all this background, but I never really thought about how prevalent it is in a communist society, and going back to Vietnam, I can’t believe I’d never seen it before. Back in the day, before any of my family had immigrated to Canada, my grandfather owned a small bus business, where he started off owning half a bus, and eventually came to own two busses. They were rather well off (more so than people in the villages, ie my mother), but when communism came about, my grandfather, basically lost everything and went from being the big boss to just a regular mechanic, in his own company! I think the government took the business away from him, or something.

Last time I was in Vietnam, I was only 13 or so, so I wouldn’t have noticed everything. But here’s a collection of photos of communism posters that I find really aesthetically and historically intriguing. Culture shock, for real.

What is jcp enney?

I know, I know, I’ve been a horrible horrible person. Last post was 2 months ago? How is that even remotely acceptable? I can say I’ve been busy, that there’s been a lot going on in my life, but truly, at heart, would that even be okay? No. I apologize, but I digress.

I was hopping through certain news aggregates, crawling through my design feeds, reading this and that, when I came across an article that I just had to rip my hands into. The thought of it, just so laughable, and provokes an “are you fucking kidding me?” response from myself, but maybe that’s just me.

Here: 

(via UnderConsideration)

Let’s all take a second here and let out a hearty laugh.

HAAAAAAAAAHAAHHAHAHAHHAHAHA.

Yes, apparently J.C. Penney decided to re-do their logo. And changed it to this abomination which “was designed to evoke a sense of movement and discovery as the letters appear to break out of the box, symbolizing an emergence into an exciting, new future.”

Again, HAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHA.

Maybe I’m being too harsh, but really. Now, for those of you out there who are sitting at their computers, wondering just what the fuck is so funny about this. Let me enlighten you.

Back in October of 2010, Gap sent the design world ablaze with controversy after they unveiled their new logo. This, too, was a logo symbolizing the Gap brand evolving, moving into the future, and “breaking out of the box.” The only problem with this new logo was that it was ground-breakingly horrific. They took their iconic blue square, scaled it down till it was barely visible, used a gradient that recalled of the 90’s, and stuck it in the corner under some well-to-do Helvetica bold. For days, posts of outrage everywhere popped up, designers cried, and the public stood by unbeknownst to the chaos. This may seem a little melodramatic, I realize, but just a few days later, Gap took back their logo redesign (or had it thrown back in their face), and opened up the floor to designers, holding a contest to design their new logo.

It was a big deal, that fiasco. Everyone was making fun of Gap and they retreated, tails between their legs. The Gap president made it seem like it was all planned, to create buzz about the Gap again. After all, they’re not that stupid. But are they really that smart?

And now it seems jcp enney is following in their footsteps. At least they’ve kept their original typeface, the one-size-fits-all Helvetica. HA. Their new logo seems to want the consumer to start calling it JCP, but really, J.C. Penney is what’s been ingrained in our minds, and it pretty much rolls off the tongue. JCP sounds like it’s trying to be too hip. That, coupled with the awkward splitting of the name, the unorthodox mass of colour that dominates the left side of the logo, creates just an unsightly thing. This may just be nitpicky, but I understand the being uncentered in terms of horizontal placement, but the choice in vertical placement within the square bothers me immensely.

I mean, it’s not a horrid logo with crazy colour gradience and a papyrus/comic sans love child typeface, but it’s not ground-breaking graphic design either. There’s a static, been-there-done-that quality about it. Maybe they should have learned from the mistakes of Gap.

T-Minus 12 Hours!

That is the amount of time till my flight and I still haven’t finished packing. To make matters worse, this is what just arrived in the mail:

So exciting to read them! I’m probably going to bring the third one to Vietnam along with some fiction too. I’ve got a bunch of clothes to weight, a house to clean, and some other things to do. Oh no, I’ve got to find my camera charger. And what am I doing instead of all of that? Writing this blog. Oh yes, priorities.

I actually don’t know what else to write except for that little update and the next time you hear from me, I’ll be half-way across the world. Woot woot. Excited. Food. Weather [screw cold-ass Canada]. Carefree-ness. Life is good.

Mangosteen’s

I’m a design student and yet I haven’t done a post on actual design yet. I think that can be classified above slightly disgraceful. I should really be writing an essay analyzing different ways of interpreting French nuances in an 18th century painting, but as you can probably tell, it’s not particularly riveting. Instead, I’d rather do this.

A few months ago, I was approached to design a logo and menus for a new restaurant opening up in Toronto. Exciting! I’ve done a bunch of corporate identity work in school and a couple of logos and business cards here and there, but this seems to me like my first actual real life work, so now that it’s basically complete, I wanted to do a little “process” behind how I worked towards the final product.

This particular project wasn’t too extensive as the client already had a pretty clear idea of what they wanted, so it was just my job to execute in a cleaner style than what they had.

This is what they gave me to work with, just a general mock up.

As always, it starts off with some visual research and sketching.

Some preliminary stuff. This is how I work at the beginning of a project.

Some variations that I came out with.

What we chose.

Type Variation

So a change of colour for legibility purposes and of course, client says the type is too small. So variations on type size. We ended up going with the last one.

Final as a sign.

AND IT'S UP!!!!!

When they sent me this photo, I was ecstatic. This is my first real big sign out in the real world. Sure, I’ve got some business card design or posters floating around somewhere, but this is a permanent fixture on a building on a real road in a real city. This feeling is something I’ve never felt before. Excitement, pride, something something?? This is probably what Ted Mosby was talking about when he told his kids about the first building he designed in New York. Yes, I feel like that. I think this feeling is what is going to keep me in the field. I will definitely be going to this place to eat, so when it opens, you guys can all expect a restaurant review too.