Kathleen Manuel

Being someone who’s pretty interested in video games, Grand Theft Auto is a game that I have had my eye on since 2015. I loved watching gameplay on it back then and to this day since many ridiculous moments can be had while playing even though it’s based in reality, you can pretty much do anything you want as an open world kind of game. 

So you can imagine my excitement when I discovered that a font designer from Canada named Ray Larabie helped design the font for the game. Not only that, but upon further research, he designed more fonts for other popular games like Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect. 

Young Ray Larabie actually took inspiration from video games himself at arcades and became fascinated with the bitmap made fonts surrounding him. He then tried remaking them at home on a TRS-80, a desktop microcomputer that was launched in 1977. It’s awesome to see how video games can inspire people in different ways creatively, for Larabie it was typefaces and myself with illustration, in a way I can connect with his experience and I hope that people continue to find inspiration through games.

I would like to start this blog post off with a disclaimer that I am not a huge fan of punk rock music however, I do respect it along with the grunge aesthetic of some album covers, most notably Jamie Reid’s work. 

Reid was most known for his work for an English punk rock band named the “Sex Pistols”, which by the way, is a pretty awesome name in my opinion. He was able to match the vibe of their music with his unique style of collage work, torn up edges, lettering using cut outs from newspapers, kind of like an edgy scrapbook. 

Being born into a politically active family, he became involved with politics himself and was drawn towards socio-political reform and opposed the right. He discovered rock music which influenced him greatly and created works that included political ideas. This was viewed as quite scandalous from other individuals. 

Although like I mentioned earlier, not a fan of punk rock, but just the concept of going against the grain and standing up for what you believe in, is incredibly inspiring to me.

Going into this lecture, I was more than happy to find that there were a lot more female designers popping up. One person that caught my attention however, was Lisa Strausfeld. Although she wasn’t talked about much, her work fascinated me by combining architecture and graphic design. 

With a background of graduating with a master’s degree in architecture from the prestigious school of Harvard, along with a media arts and sciences degree there’s no wonder she was able to create some incredible pieces. She partnered with Pentagon in 2002 which launched her into the world of digital information projects along with a team. 

Strausfeld was fascinated with visualizing data in a three dimensional space. She states that “The screen is a space. “For me, it was always a space. It was a space you can enter.” It’s thanks to designers like her, we truly get to see digital design on an even larger scale and appreciate it.

The 60s poster aesthetic was most definitely a change of pace from the whole clean cut modern design style, but in a good, funky and fresh way. Although I’m one for some good sleek designs with more muted and pastel colour palettes, I have to say, getting hit in the face with bright colours and crazy, melty graphics scratches an itch in my brain I never thought I had. 

When I was searching for inspiration while doing the 60s album cover project, I came across quite a few newer designs done digitally that were inspired by this iconic aesthetic. Originally, these posters were mostly done by hand using all sorts of traditional mediums like spray paints. This made me wonder how much the psychedelic era inspired design today. 

Advertisers today use this trippy style to promote the positive ideas that the 60s put forward, peace, free love and all that fun stuff. In addition to this, posters were normally made to promote bands at the time along with the style for albums, which has inspired bands today to mimic that.

Paul Rand’s name is one that tends to pop up a lot during my time here in IDEA. Yet I still feel like I’m only scratching the surface and this blog finally gives me an opportunity to look into his career more deeply and the story behind him being one of the biggest influencers behind bringing modern design to America. 

Now everyone knows about his work at IBM and NeXT, I mean it’s pretty iconic, how could you not? “But how did he get here?” I asked myself after hearing his name pop up for the 50th time finally peaking my curiosity. 

After some research I found that when him and his family moved to Brooklyn, He first became inspired by figures on posters and comics and attempted to redraw them, however, drawing figures was against his parents’ beliefs. This resorted to him having to draw at the back of his father’s grocery store in secret and would probably explain why he had to take night classes for art on top of school and even learning art history through a magazine he found in a Macy’s bookstore. His dedication to the craft is truly motivating and inspiring. 

This project was most definitely a learning experience for me more than anything. I think the idea overall was good, I love the look of faded images in the background that still gave information which is what I tried to do with the years. Unfortunately the end result didn’t end up as well as I would have liked it. Although I made a sketch and drafted it out, water colour ended up being my worst enemy. The main thing I took away from this project is to not only draft out the concept but test to see if the medium would go well with the concept.

Paula Modersohn-Becker was born on February 8, 1876 into a German family that valued art and culture. Because of this, she was enrolled into a school dedicated to art at the age of 16 where she developed a full interest towards art. Her dedication to art didn’t stop there as she went on to further her education in Paris in the early 1900s where she developed a passion towards nude figure painting.

She was then unhappily married in Worpswede which drew her towards advancing her artistic career as a way to escape with a heavy longing to go back to Paris. She eventually couldn’t handle it anymore and she ran away without notice in the middle of the night to live out her dreams which complicated things further with Otto, her husband. They had an incredibly unstable relationship as Otto refused to let her go even when she was thriving in Paris with her art career during this time. He moved in with her and got her pregnant which sadly resulted in her death 18 days after giving birth. I find her story to be quite inspiring as she stopped at nothing to pursue her love for art.

Simeon Solomon caught my attention when I started researching for artists from the Pre-Raphaelites period with his paintings, I quickly became invested in his life story and I would like to briefly share that with you. Being the final child of 7 other siblings in a relatively skilled household of artists, Simeon Solomon was born on October 9, 1840 in London. He was inspired by Shakespeare, the Bible and other popular Pre-Raphaelite artists, which, fun fact, he met, for example; Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais.

He later discovered a love for the classism style and went on to create some pieces that were previously deemed as controversial as he was figuring out his sexuality during the ripe times of blatant homophobia in Victorian England. I was shocked to later find out that he was arrested in a public urinal with an older man for sodomy, however when he was released, he still went on to become an influential figure with the help of others who were inspired by his works. 

This is a summary I wrote for English 100 on the article “The importance of urban forests: why money really does grow on trees”.

In the article “The importance of urban forests: why money really does grow on trees” (2016), Amy Fleming reports the evidence behind the economical, social, and societal benefits of trees in municipal areas. The author claims that millions of dollars can be saved as evident in New York City (6) using greenery alone to reduce the cost of energy and improving air quality with trees cutting the usage of air conditioning by 30%  due to them being capable of cooling cities between 2C and 8C, and being capable of filtering fine particles of pollutants in the air (5). Regarding the social benefits, Fleming reports on the statements of public health expert William Bird. According to Bird, “In areas with more trees, people get out more, they know their neighbours more, they have less anxiety and depression.” (qtd. in Fleming 9). Bird’s point is that it is beneficial for communities’ overall wellbeing, mental and physical. Society requires future generations to further expand our knowledge in the world, Bird states, “that each generation will pass on less experience of the natural environment” (qtd. in Fleming 9). Basically, Bird is saying that society will be disconnected from nature in the future due to a lack of forestry which will hinder impending environmental developments.

During the lecture, I was quite inspired by the french painter and lithographer, Jules Cheret, known as the father of the modern poster. Seeing his poster designs how he developed a better sense of design as time went by and his posters became more prominent. I was drawn in by his use of typography and direction in his posters, he was able to capture the right moods for various advertisement posters, energetic, elegant etc. Jules Cheret was said to also inspire a German poster artist named Adolfo Hohenstein, an Italian poster designer that is considered the father of Italian poster art. 

Play Poster Papa

Hohenstein was originally born of German descent in 1854 growing up in Vienna where he was able to find a passion for art and was able to develop his passion by painting the environment around him. He then settled in Milan in 1879 where in 1889 he decided to pursue poster design when getting approached by a musical publisher named Giulio Ricordi. He eventually became the artistic director where he worked in the studio under Ricordi. He went on to create well known posters for various productions such as Tosca (1900) and Madame Butterfly (1904). He was well known for his attention to detail regarding lighting and strong compositions which included framing and typography that effectively communicated the point of his posters. 

The Italian Art Nouveau

During this time as well, a style of Italian architecture formed a movement for itself as the “Italian Art Nouveau”. This style is named the Liberty Style which was similar to the Baroque style. Some identifications for this style include, attention to detail, focus on more sophisticated aesthetics, and movement using continuous lines. The materials most used during this time for architecture were wrought iron and glass. One of the biggest figures for this style was an architect named Ernesto Basilewho created the Villino Florio in Palermo in 1899.