The Bottle Project

The bottle project assignment required us to demonstrate using two plastic bottles. The bottles were used to exhibit and bring two matching or opposing words to life. This demonstration could be displayed in any possible way, there were no restrictions. I decided to use science to illustrate my ideas and concepts, and to engage the viewer further more through live experiments conducted on the bottles.

 We were asked to create 50 thumbnail sketches of our ideas and concepts. The bottles represented two words that had some sort of relationship (antonyms, synonyms, etc.)

The final three selections I went with were:

Calm v/s Excited

Construct v/s Deconstruct

Social v/s Antisocial 

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1. Calm v/s Excited (or hyper)

‘Calm’ was extremely easy to display. I had diluted coke in one bottle with no fizz. Diet coke + Mentos did the trick to demonstrate the word ‘excited’ in the other bottle. When diet coke was put into a newly poured bottle of diet coke it immediately fizzes up due to the carbon dioxide produced by the mixture, this gives it a feeling of being hyper or excited. Unfortunately I’m having difficulty in embedding videos or uploading pictures so I am adding links. Hope it works!

Click here to view.

2. Construct v/s Deconstruct

I used two balloons, some vinegar, and Eno powder for this one. The balloons were attached to the nozzle of the bottles and as soon as the powder was poured into the vinegar the balloons began to inflate. While both the balloons inflated, I poked a hole in one of them to demonstrate the words “construct” and deconstruct” at the same time.

This was the end result of the experiment.

3. Social v/s antisocial

This was so much of fun to work with, but yet the most hands on experiment. After plenty of trial and errors did I finally get it right. The social bottle was extremely easy to show. I mixed water, food colouring, Savalon. All these were soluble liquids that blended well to illustrate the definition of the word “social”.

“Anti-social” was a bit tricky to do. After three trials I finally accomplished what I had initially aimed to do. I used immiscible liquids for this one, there was vegetable oil, water, milk, and maple syrup. Due to their various densities they all settled as separate layers instead of mixing as one. 

My Process & Skills (7) Human Rights, Human Wrongs

This is my eighth and the last entry for this semester.
Our class had a final assignment called “Human Rights, Human Wrongs”.

“Human Rights, Human Wrongs” is a poster assignment that allows the student to chose and interpret a social issue of interest to him or her. The student will voice their opinion in the chosen topic by creating a visual, conceptual statement using the juxtaposition of type and image.
The poster is directed at the general public and it’s aim is to create awareness for the issue and invite the viewer to question or consider his or her point if view on the topic. To achieve this, use the medium to your advantage. The poster is a medium whose intent is to grab the attention and draw the viewer in. It can be a powerful medium when designed and executed successfully.

 

The topic I took was child labor abuse in apparel industry, especially in brands so-called “fast-fashion”.

The other day, one of my ESL teachers said, “You fashion-conscious students must buy the fast-fashion clothing wisely, because it’s cheaper than the high-end brands and as fashionable as them! haha!” — I couldn’t believe what my ears heard. Of course, my ESL classmates majoring fashion design never agreed with this teacher.

And I noticed that many American people like her never think of what a fast-fashion means. They never care the reason why fast-fashion brands can sell their products in such a low, too much low prices. They can’t imagine what has happened in the opposite side of the earth, they don’t pay attentions to that kind of news or documentary films.

Shame on us. It reminds me an article about the Tazreen factory fire that killed 112 garment workers, and the Rana Plaza building collapse killing 1,129 people. No, honestly, I totally forgot the names of the buildings and the numbers of killed workers in Bangladesh. All I remembered is this featured image of the article.

http://jezebel.com/whats-the-solution-to-the-worlds-sweatshop-problem-511688272

Well, well, I never say that I’ve never bought fast-fashion clothing ever and forever. Sometimes I do buy their cheap products, as you do. But when I saw the store is filled with tons of cheap mass-products and it looks like mountains of garbage, it hurts my heart every time. I feel so guilty to buy a T-shirt in $9.99. Am I a wise customer, indeed?

So I went to “fast-fashion districts” at Fifth Avenue. You might know where it is, very close to our University Center. I took some spy photos (again! I’m quite good at it), and designed an opinion poster concerning child labor abuse.

 

 

The more cheaper we buy clothing, The more younger sweatshop workers become. Someone should stop this bad loop, and it must be us, customers. We can be more and more ethical.

You can use this poster to your social activities. For example, a protest against demonstration on the street like this.

 

 

TIME Picks the Best Magazine Covers of 2015

By David Schonauer   Thursday December 17, 2015

Magazines fired back with photography in 2015.

“Today we continue our look back at the year that was by featuring Time magazine’s choice of the best magazine covers the year.  “Our selection of the top 10 covers of 2015 displays an exquisite use of photography, notes Time Director of Photography and Visual Enterprise Kira Pollack.

Her staff compiled its list after looking at a range of magazine categories, from news and sports to celebrity and fashion, and then interviewing the people behind the covers, including photographers, creative directors and top editors…”

Read and See More at AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY’s site: http://www.ai-ap.com/publications/article/16143/the-year-that-was-time-picks-the-best-magazine-co.html

My Process & Skills (6) Twin Box

 

This is my product for Twin Box Project.

Build two 4″x4″x4″ boxes. Then, present 2 companion concepts using your boxes. They can be opposites, twin deities, or any pairing that you would like. The idea is to communicate your concept through these two boxes.

• To think conceptually
• To recognize and use the power of metaphor
• To gain experience solving problems three dimensionally

I chose the theme “Depth/Height” by the result of a majority vote in class. Other themes are “Night/Day” and “In/Out”.

To depict the concept in three dimensional, once I tried to use popsicle sticks, and it totally failed. Then I found a pack of ‘golf pencils’ at Staples. I got cheap 200  short pencils by $15. Not so bad.

 

I measured the height of pencils, neatly arranging in line. Then I built them up to express “Height”. Unexpectedly, it looks like a Christmas tree, while I had imagined it’s gonna like a bonfire.

 

“Depth” box took so much time. I spent about four-times hours compared to “Height”. I cut them up with a saw, sharpened them by hand pencil sharpeners, and sanded them by a rough file and sandpaper, to arrange in line according to height. There are 14 pencils on one side, which means there are total 196 pencils on a box.

 

 

 

I was so surprised that most of classmates and my instructor didn’t believe the pencils were hand-sharpened. Yes, they were!!! I did!!! Until my fingers became swollen, and further and further!!!

They screamed “Why don’t you use an electric sharpener!?” And my answer was “It didn’t work for this kind of sensitive work. Automatic equipment sharpens too much than I desired.”

 

To me, it was not the 2 BOX project, but the 200+ PENCIL project. But I’m happy with it.

 

Book Project

Hi everyone. I’d like to share the process of my book project in P&S class.

For my book project I chose Aubrey Beardsley’s artwork, Salome, for the content. Making a book was recreating an atmosphere in the book. So the first thing I considered was how I could illustrate the mood and atmosphere of Beardsley’s artwork, and create in the reader an emotion or mood. This project had a no-adhesives rule, so the ways of binding the book were also a consideration.

I started to sketch several shapes of the book to figure out which shape would work, and decided to use the one that had a sense of peering into a model of a stage.

The format of my piece meant to resemble a carousel. It has two layers, one for the artwork and other for the frame. For the frame, I decided to use a type of drop curtain- like in a theater. I drew a pattern inspired by one of Beardsley’s illustrations.

The most difficult thing for me was choosing the typeface. I repeatedly asked myself, which typeface will fit to the time and the theme?. After much trial and error, I decided to use Caslon,because its legibility and delicate line and beautiful curve will match to the theme.

I used sewing machine to put each layer together, and it enabled me to show fine stitches as a pattern. Finally for biding, because my book need to open 360 degrees to look like a carousel, I chose Coptic bound.

Throughout this project, I really focused on “recreating an atmosphere”. I had hard time making decision for this book, but at the end I am really happy with my final result.

My Process & Skills (5) Photo Book

This is my product for Photo Book Project.

(I don’t know why but I couldn’t upload my photos on this blog, so I posted them to my site and linked to them below.)

 

For this Book Project, our class had the same theme as Photo Essay Project. Since I finished my Photo Essay with “Texture”, my book naturally has the same theme.

I named this book “You can’t touch this”. There are no captions for each photo, I only put this statement inside of the cover, as an introduction.

More than twenty years ago, a certain hit tune of M.C.Hammer had hailed around the world. A Japanese little girl also loved it, and interpreted the lyric; “Anything essential coolness is untouchable to your hands, because it’s always intangible.”

Since then, I have been fascinated to release a shutter to it. Something far away, something over the fence, something only visible in a finder. Something tactile but not touchable. All photographs in this book were taken in New York City 2015, and have a kind of texture. Unkempt plants, stickers placed by hands, or old trodden lacking pavements. We can see some patterns and orders in them, but it’s not with a computer-measured neatness. An error attracts us to touch it, just like a hole in a hand-knitting sweater.

But you, and even I, can’t touch this. These are all tactile things that you can only feel its beauty through printed pictures.

 

I used a technique of accordion folding, and chose red and black cardboard to the cover page. All I focused on was “Texture”.

These are some of mock-ups, which were made by recycled paper, small sticky tabs, a cardboard which picked up from the refuse room of my apartment.

 

 

AAS GD Type Meet up

Throughout the month of November and into the first week of December, I attended two out of the six AAS GD Type Meet up Peer Led Sessions. I met the lovely Lauren Peters-Collaer who is a third semester AAS GD student that will be graduating later this month. Since I was usually the only person there, the sessions were based around what I wanted to learn and work on. Lauren would always have some sort of activity/workshop planned and we would start from there. She is a great mentor that introduced me to many different resources such as: Fonts in Use, Type Wolf, and Typographic Posters.

Check out this animated video called Word As Image by Ji Lee and try creating your own!

She also introduced me to two typography based summer courses that would be worth checking out from SVA. If you are looking for something to do over the summer, you may want to check these out: Typography as Language and Masters Workshop. Typography as Language is a one month program that is based in New York. Masters Workshop is a two-week program that is in Italy. These sessions are taught by different guest lecturers.

For those that are interested in typography should definitely attend these sessions! Hopefully more will be scheduled soon.

Bottles

For my Bottles project, I was initially stumped on what I could do. I wasn’t crazy about my sketches and none of the ideas I had really stuck to me. I was also in the process of finishing up my Photo Essay since I decided to redo the essay the week before it was due so I really wasn’t giving this project my full attention.

My first bottle idea that I really liked but never executed came to me when I was walking my dog. As I was walking him, I noticed heaps of garbage bags occupying the sidewalk and obstructing our way to walk. Then I thought about the assignment and the fact that we’re using plastic bottles and adding even more to the waste we produce and adding to landfills. I wanted to do a time lapse video of all the garage I produce in a week and document that and in an alternative week, I would reduce my footprint and restrict myself to only producing waste that would be able to fit into the bottle. This first idea lead to me explore beyond the obvious. I started to think about my past and what influences have impacted my life. I initially started with my geography background and then moved to my healthcare background. Listing out words that were important concepts in both of those worlds, I landed on creating a set of binoculars that would reflect visually impaired and perfect vision.

I cut out the bottom of both the bottles and started to think about creating filter lenses to show different visual impairments. At some point during my brainstorming, kaleidoscope popped into my head as well. I started with a list of eight that I narrowed down to five after coming across some technical difficulties with implementing three. My original list consisted of: myopia, hyperopia, presbyopia, cataracts, floats, retinal detachment, peripheral vision loss and age-related macular degeneration. Since, I wanted the binoculars to be reflective of real life objects in that given point in time the person is looking into it, I had a hard time demonstrating myopia, hyperopia and presbyopia. With the aforementioned, it seemed like the only way to be able to show this properly was to actually place a static picture on the filter. This would change my original idea of having the binoculars be interactive and reflect what is being seen at that point in time so I decided to give those three up and worked with the others.

My process then led me to research and get some images of what vision would be like for the remaining five impairments. I knew right away that I wanted to use plastic sheets to create my filters so I went down to Canal Plastics and picked up a few pieces. I also knew that for many of the filters, I would use spray paint to create the filters. At one point, I did get stuck on the floaters filter because I wanted it to be as realistic as possible so I wanted the black dots/floating lines to actually be able to move in the filter. This wasn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be. In the end, I settled for piercing holes through the plastic and using tread to create the floaters.

I also wanted the filters to be educational so I used the vinyl sticker printer in the AMT lab to print labels for the tops of each filter. At first, I wanted to sticker cutout the names of the filters and have the letters punched out. After the stickers were cutout and the letters were removed, it became apparent that this would not work because of the small counters in some of the letters so I opted to have the entire label printed on clear vinyl instead to still give the same look.

As for the actual bottles, the bottoms were cut out and a small slit was cut for the filter to sit in, but I still had another problem. The bottles needed to be attached together somehow and still allow for angle adjustment for different pupil distances. At that point, I decided to use elastic bands to hold the filters together and the cap of the bottom became a wedge in the middle to create the perfect angle. This solution actually also automatically solved another problem I had with the filter always falling out when people moved around to look at different things in their surroundings.

Photo Essay

My photo essay initial idea was to take photos of different perspectives that are different from our usual view. I wanted to play with bird’s eye view and also low angle perspectives, like what my dog would see. During my first few rounds of taking pictures, I brought my dog with my and included him in various shots.

Knowing that the photo essay would be later placed in a book; I decided to pay the Center for Book Arts a visit to get some inspiration on possible book layout and ideas. The visit was fun and I was able to see letterpress in action, but I still did not know what kind of binding I would use for my book. I was certain I wanted to bind and not fold an instant book though.

I kept exploring the internet to see what I could do and I came across a scrapbook idea that I really liked. By this point of reviewing and choosing pictures, the photo essay was shaping into a photo essay around Bentley, my bichon frise and poodle mix dog. It was becoming like “A day in the life of Bentley.” Although I love my dog to bits and pieces, reviewing my pictures again the week before it was due, I realized I wasn’t completely happy with what I had. I felt like I was beefing up the book with a lot of craft and that the story and pictures itself were not all that strong. I spoke to Carmile and showed her some of the shots that I really liked and she told me to take the week to go back to taking pictures.

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At this point, I knew I had to work fast and work hard so I wouldn’t fall behind. I narrowed down 600+ pictures to 24 and sent contacts sheets to Carmile for feedback. Coincidentally, in my Typography class that week, we were starting our new project, a fun facts book so our professor actually brought in a bunch of samples of book mockups that she created and I saw the perfect layout for my subject! Remember how I said I really wanted to bind? Guess what, that changed. I opted for a folded instant book instead. I also created a sleeve for it and made the book reversible and can be folded both ways.

I’m actually quite happy with the final product, even though I didn’t get to bind. Production was painful though. It took approximately four 2-hour sessions at the AMT Lab plotter to be able to print the two documents the way I wanted it.

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My Process & Skills (4) Photo Board

These are my long journey of Photo Essay Project. http://processandskills.com/2015/10/31/my-process-skills-2-photo-essay/
http://processandskills.com/2015/11/08/my-process-skills-3-photo-editting/

And, this is my final presentation board of Photo Essay Project. 12 pictures on a 15 x 20 inches light-gray board.

As writing before, once I lost the theme. And it was found at last, with reviewing hundreds of photos I took. These two photos became my key principle.

I’m not sure what these are, though I myself took pictures of them. The one is a discarded vase on the roadside. It has been thrown away as a trash, because of its crack. But it’s beautiful. The other is a lighting covered with a mesh net, at the entrance of Vera List Center (6 E.16th building). I took this for killing time while I was waiting for the elevator (Yes, the most frustrating one in our school).

“Texture” — that’s what I found from these 2 photos. So I chose and edited 12 photos, through exploring the texture of them. My eyes caught abstract pictures, and lost meanings on it. Finally, human-beings have totally disappeared from my choice.

12 photos were selected as 3 each by 4 sets of similarities: “Something litten”, “Something fragile”, “Something dotted”, and “Something to be palpated”. I made my rough sketches with thumbnails on my notebook. And shuffled them for putting on the board. You can see the difference between the sketch and the final board.

I cut all of my 5 x 3 photos into squares. Seeing a picture in the typical photo size (such as 3×5 or 4×6), your eyes naturally seek “What is seen? What did the photographer take?” because the size has meanings. However, I just wanted to let them be as collections of “Texture”. I must fit them into the exact same size in flat, so that they become more and more abstract.