Blog Week 7

Hey guys! How are you? NICE!

how has digital media changed music culture? That is a very interesting question. Personally, I feel that a lot of bands today are more dependent on their digital media skills and connections than their actual music. I blame www.myspace.com. Bands are able to represent themselves however they see fit, but most of the time the attention is focused on the layout of their page and what colours, images, patterns they've used...and not their music! This is not to say that digital media has harmed the music industry in any way. It has helped listeners connect to music like never before. However, when bands becomes more about computer generated images I'm not feeling it. I really wanted to put a link of band that is truly awful but had a very cool layout. Unfortunately their layout has changed, but their music is still bad (the band is called brokencyde by the way. their lyrics are vulgar so I didn't post the link). But this is just one example of how digital media has harmed music culture. Digital media in music is a good thing! There is a sense of connectivity developed between listener and artist when a fan can see their favourite band's new video, or download their album covers to their ipod's. Although millions upon millions of fans are probably doing the same thing, that one fan feels they know the band/artist better than before.

Digital media allows artists to showcase what they represent. A simple change in typography can represent an artist as a pop sensation or a death metal celebration! Digital media is also a very useful tool that artists can use to change how their listeners perceive them.

I've been enjoying music all my life, but it has definitely been changing over the past 5 years, how I enjoy it I mean. Let's see, I'd be in gr. 8 then. So I don't think I had a myspace account, or an ipod, or enough money to buy CD's. But I did have a TV! I would watch MuchMusic to look for new bands all the time. When I found one I liked, I would quickly scurry to my computer and try and find them on the internet. I could watch their videos, interviews, and where they would be playing next! Everything was there, it was just very slow.

Today, if I want to find a new band, I'll just go on myspace and browse through the top artists category. I can pick a band whose profile picture looks cool and then listen to them. It is much faster than my gr. 8 years.

Design is definitely more important to me now.I appreciate if a band takes time to create nice album artwork or create a really eye catching video. If a band takes the time to do something for their fans, I will do something for them and listen to their album and boost their playcount on myspace.

It's a good thing.

Week 6: Flash Animation

Hey guys! How are you? That's good. This week is all about flash animation. So here we go.

I had the idea of doing an interactive instrument. Essentially the user can click on a certain area of my instrument and it will play a sound. Whether this is a guitar, a drumkit, or an imaginary instrument, like a krodgyallaphone! Either way, I think that the user will get a real kick out of being able to create and arrange their own music with the samples I have provided. This idea essentially came from last week's tutorial when we introduced sound into our flash animations. So I want to make something that is as stimulating for the ears as it is for the eyes.

I'm going to make the music samples myself. "What genre will it be?" you may be asking yourself (assuming that someone is reading this), Electronic of course! What screams interactivity more than electronic music? I'll keep you updated as I progress.

Bye guys.

Poster Assignment

Hey guys. It's Phil here, and the last couple weeks I have been working on a poster. Would you like to see it.....Ok, here you go.

The site asked me what size I want to upload my picture as. I chose large so that you could see the detail. DAS GOOD?

I had a lot of fun creating this fictional band poster. I wanted to do a band poster, more specifically; I wanted to do a band poster for an electronic band. Whenever I see artwork or promotional flyers for electronic bands, the images always grab my attention. So I wanted to do something similar to that. Something that would attract a fan of electronic music/culture.

I chose to use the colours of the German flag for the majority of my poster. I find that the red, black, and orange are very captivating and will grab people’s attention if they were to walk by this poster on the street. I chose to repeat the band name, Das Brohas, multiple times behind all of the images for two reasons. The first was to fulfill the CRAP principle of repetition. Secondly, I wanted the colours to descend towards the band name. So that a viewer would instinctively follow the descent of the colours to the band name and information.

I chose to surround the band name and information in a red 5 sided polygon. I purposely made the polygon point downwards so that the text would correspond with the shape. The font I used inside of the polygon seemed very futuristic and digital, which is why I used it.

The model in my poster is Simon Teskouras (my brother). I chose to cover his eyes in all three of the pictures I took. I did this because I found that his eyes would be too distracting and would take away from the overall image of the poster. I used the smudge tool to drag part of my brother’s torso to create a sort of frame for the band name and information. I also used a paintbrush to accentuate each of the band members by outlining their bodies in their corresponding colour.

I cannot say that I encountered many challenges. Although I did find erasing my backyard from the image of my brother quite tedious. The magic wand tool did not work so I had to doo it all with the layer mask tool with a paint brush.

I genuinely enjoyed doing this assignment and am pretty proud of the final result. I had no idea how to work Photoshop five weeks ago. However, I used the information from the tutorials and just fooled around with different images and created something that I think looks pretty good.

From this assignment I learned that Photoshop is a wild beast, but can be tamed if you have the skills! You can lasso and magic wand your images to make them look exactly how you want them to. As I progressively got a better handle on Photoshop, I started to enjoy the project even more.

The class critique was also helpful. Except I didn't really get any "criticism" per-say. I would have liked to have heard more things I could have changed about my poster. But, I'm not complaining about the nice comments. I liked the nice comments as well.

And there you have it. I hope you liked my poster. be sure to buy your tickets well in advance.

Typography

Hello everyone. Let's talk about typography!

This first image is from a hardcore/grindcore(ish) Christian band called, With Blood Comes Cleans

ing. This is the album cover of their album, "Horror". As you can see the typography used to display the band's name is very hard to interpret. Many band's in the hardcore genres a

nd sub-genres choose to use a typographic font like this one that is web-like and hard to read. Is this effective?It's hard to say. For a person

who listens to top 40 radio, it is completely ineffective

. That person will look at this album, and won't be able to distinguish who the artist is. But With Blood Comes Cleansing isn't writing songs for listeners like that. They are writing

songs for people who love hardcore music. So, in a way, this typography can become very exclusive and very effective for the demographic they are

writing for. Bands like these are writing music for the love of the music. If making money was the band's main concern, they would have used Times New Roman instead (a

nd italicized it for some extra spice).

The second design that used typography that I liked is a poster for the movie Green Street Hooligans. There are two different typographic styles used in this poser, each of them being very effective. The first typographic style is the title of the movie, Green Street Hooligans. This font has a military feel to it, and is kind of scratched out a bit in some places. This gives the font a rougher look. And of course "Hooligans" is in a bigger typeface than the other words on the poster. Even though I've seen this movie, I think if I hadn't, and then I looked at this poster, I could guess what it was about. The typography is effective in that sense. The typography allows the viewer to classify this as an action movie, and not that a romantic comedy, children's movie, etc. The words underneath, "Stand You

r Ground" also enhance the message of the movie. By the way it is spray-painted on the wall and the fact that those three words are often associated with fighting. Giving the audience another clue to what this movie is about.

The third image I found that has really cool typography is the album cover of southern-hardcore Christian band, Maylene and the Sons of Disaster. This is the cover of their album, "3" or "III" as it's written. I find this typography very effective on many different levels. First of all, the words are placed so elegantly over a rickety ol' southern bridge (assuming it is in the south). The letters flow together very nicely and paint a pretty clear picture to what the band is all about. At first glance I look at this picture and think, "Oh cool! Maylene has a new album out!? I am going to go 'buy' it!". While an old man in Alabama might look at this album and think, "This album looks pretty southern. I want to see what the kids have done to the southern music scene these days!". This typography is effective because it is true to the southern roots of the band, and allows others to clearly understand what type of band this might be before listening to their music.

This is where I got these awesome images from (in the same order the images are displayed)!

http://img.imeem.com/ai/WDL2LKUSPYTCOV774Z7WDIDNWVK4Q2KZ.jpg

http://www.listal.com/image/productsus/1000/B000FBNG1O/dvds/green-street-hooligans.jpg

http://leeswinford.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/maylene_iiicover1.jpg

Bye guys.

Phil

Find 3 designs (posters, flyers, billboards, magazine ads/layouts, album art, political propaganda, product labels, product packaging, DVD covers, whatever) and discuss the typographic choices made in the design. Is the typography effective? Why or why not? Does the typography effectively address a particular target audience and / or support the central message or theme of the design? Etc. Try to identify the font used if possible.
You may photograph or scan the designs, or find them on the internet. Give credit for where you found the designs.