Arteliance

As Eden asked:

Have you managed to post something thought-provoking every day, or do you feel like you clogged up the Internet with less-than-satisfying content for the sake of endurance?

50/50: I wrote more of my own stuff this year (about half the time, and that is a big deal for me) but also filled in with link posts half the time.

What I learned: Writing every day is a good idea. Posting every day, not so much.

Blogging at a Snail’s Pace - NYTimes.com

Ms. Ganley, the blogger in Vermont, has a slogan that encapsulates the trend: “Blog to reflect, Tweet to connect.” Blogging, she said, “is that slow place.”

Sometimes I long to be good at reflection and find exactly the right words… But, alas, I am more likely to find just the right code for an ellipsis (…).

Wordpress themes:

Die Neue Typographie: The New Typography a tribute to Jan Tschichold

Writing For Designers based on Veryplaintxt by Scott Wallick

Other designs:

Subtraction by Khoi Vinh

Daring Fireball by John Gruber

These are all more Minimalist than my previous sketches. Perhaps as Twyla Tharp said:

The tricky part about scratching, however, is that you can’t stop with one idea. Henry James said that genius is the act of perceiving similarity among disparate things. In the empty room you’re trying to connect the dots, linking A to B to C to maybe come up with H. Scratching is a means of identifying A, and if you can get to A, you’ve got a grip on the slippery rock wall. You’ve got purchase. You can move on to B, which is mandatory. You cannot stop with one idea. You don’t really have a workable idea until you combine two ideas.

Here is a list of some of the ideas from yesterday:

• Work Environment and things that are used (concrete):

  • working - coffee cup, paper and mouse
  • computer picture
  • art tools: paper, pencil jar etc
  • print background: press sheets, loupe, pantone swatches (experience), spec-ing type
  • photographic equipment and tools (seeing and capturing) -> light?
  • typography: metal, letterpress etc
  • tools = eyes, brains, ears
  • artsy collage type thing
  • symbols and plans, wayfinding, signage, organization, clarity, blueprints
  • Type overlays photos etc (multi-layered, messy)
  • textures

• Design is (ways to define it - abstract):

  • multiple A’s (typography, many ways of presenting things, thinking about them)
  • different ways of seeing: glasses, microscopes, telescope, magnifying glass, digital, analog, insight, big picture/little picture (fractal?)
  • targets, goals, strategies, aim
  • connection (of minds); communication, transmission of ideas
  • concepts: diagrams, graphs, maps, drilling down to the heart of the matter
  • more on diagrams, abstracts, visual representation of non-create things like ideas
  • gears/machinery: design as a cog in overall business plan

• What design does (movement, emotional):

  • patterns: morphing, transformation, nothing to something, sketch to final?
  • simplicity, road, journey, prairie ref sinclair
  • life, energy, mark making, scribbles forming an image (how I draw)
  • urban sketches/story-telling (design is story-telling)
  • perspective, urban, architecture, escher, surprising
  • focus (broad to narrow)

Most designs can, IMHO, be broken down into these 3 aspects. Good designs incorporate all 3.

This blog post is just for me as I had great fun this morning dusting off and limbering up my old, slightly rusty, design skills. Its been 8 years since I worked as an Art Director/Graphic Designer and I felt the urge to give it a go. Perhaps after Tuesday, I simply felt the need to make a change (is that Obama I hear?).

Blogging about something creative during the process of creating it is risky and sub-optimal. One should finish it and then go back and write about it in a step-by-step fashion so as to give the impression that creativity is understandable and logical—especially in public. In hindsight, creativity generally is logical and understandable, however, the process is the exciting part. With that in mind and in the spirit of change I am going to blog my process—including all the messy bits.

Background

When I started this blog three and a half years ago, I made up the word Arteliance to combine the elements of art and design with experience and reliability. I also promised not to get bogged down by constantly redesigning it and simply loaded the default Kubrick template and stuck with it.

My concept of this being primarily a blog about art and design hasn’t changed and I have no desire to “monetize”, “commoditize” or “target” anything or anyone. Thus, the overall strategy is simply to provide an interesting and readable format for a diverse subject matter while at the same time sharpening up my design thinking skills.

That said, I still need a visual for what Arteliance is about and for the design that will best facilitate and communicate that.

Brainstorming

Below are a couple of pages from my sketchbook containing quick thumbnails of the things I am thinking about. The process here is to get as many ideas as possible down quickly without judging or discarding any of them and then later identify some that are worth developing further. In this process, I am defining some options for things I might want to communicate and include as part of defining what this blog is about.

The next step will be to develop some of these thoughts further and begin to narrow them down.

Wherein the author once again makes an attempt to contribute original content rather than living vicariously through other people’s blogs while at the same time remembering how to write more than 140 characters at a time. For the record, the first draft of this post was only one sentence and came in at 137 characters and I spent much longer on fooling around with the nablopomo badge and learning GIMP than I should have.

A Flickr set featuring ‘The End’ of old movies.

via: SERIF

My observations so far:

• It’s a good idea to write everyday; not a good idea to post everyday. Quality counts.
• It takes more time than I thought it would.
• I’d always been suspicious of blogging—thinking it might be egotistical. Now that I’m doing it everyday I see it’s the opposite—it’s not about what I can get—it’s about what I can share.

An exercise to gain insight into blog design, colour, and structure based on this fascinating full-size, 374-page reproduction of the entire 2007 IKEA catalogue reduced & abstracted to only averaged color & lay-out structure.