Beautiful Losers Review

Beautiful Losers is a documentary film that was made in 2008, which is about a group of young rebellious outsiders who in the end come together in a storefront gallery. In the beginning, it shows how each artist started out as just individuals who enjoy to display their creativity on the streets. Later on, it shows the sacrifices they made to keep doing the thing they love, which is art. Beautiful Losers not only displays the work of these individuals, but it is an art piece itself. Lastly, Beautiful Losers goes into the backgrounds of the following artists: filmmaker, Harmony Korine, skateboarder Ed Templeton, graffiti artist Barry McGee, filmmaker and album cover designer Mike Mills, and the creator of the Obama Hope Posters, Shepard Fairey.

The thing I loved most about this documentary is that it sends the message to all of its’ viewers that it doesn’t matter where you come from, if you are willing to work hard at the thing you love, you can be successful. After watching Beautiful Losers, I felt inspired by how they created beautiful pieces of art and were able to overcome the obstacles that were presented to them. This documentary proved to me that anyone can make it big, if they just try hard. As well, there will always be sacrifices to be made along the road to making it big. It also shows that their are so many different mediums to use out there besides the computer, pencil, charcoal, etc. My favorite artist was Barry McGee, because he would create the strangest face with spray paint. I have never seen that particular style and I just really fell in love with the abnormal faces he would make.

Overall, I really enjoyed the documentary, Beautiful Losers. It’s not only inspiring for artists, but for others that do not believe that they have what it takes to succeed in life. I also found it very touching at the end, that they dedicated it Margaret Kilgallen. She also had a very unique style of creating human beings. Lastly, I recommend that every artist should watch

because it is truly inspiring and eye opening.

Journal #7

I walked around downtown Bonner Springs and also went by the railroad and the old part of Bonner Springs, Kansas.

Here is the found signage/type I found:

Journal #6

Daniel Pink

Daniel stated that the most inspiring design is the eraser because it allows you to make mistakes. The eraser on mechanical pencil, the white board / chalkboard eraser allow you to erase your mistakes. Which also means that you can create. Design can address systems, such as education and health care. Most of the design takes in too much of an engineering approach. It maximizes efficiency without calling into question if that system makes much sense. Pink believes that standardized testing isn’t the right system for the 21st century because it isn’t the proper way to test student’s knowledge. On the other hand, How do we cut costs of Healthcare since they haven’t realized that we have a system that rewards intervention rather than prevention in the first place. Systems of education healthcare housing and transportation need better design. When design thinking is applied it makes the world a little bit better.

Emily Pilloton

She has been more interested in design as a process. The thing that helped her shape the way she thinks today was the show Macgyver from the 90s, not as a product, but a person. Macgyver is famous for creating crazy gadgets with basic design materials. He had minimal resources, but they always worked perfectly, even if it wasn’t realistic. Emily said the thing that design should tackle next is education K-12. She teaches in the poorest county in the state. Design as community should think about how you can offer the best parts of the design to imagine a different kind of public education system. They should redesign materials, spaces, and experiences for students, teachers, and parents. As well, they should actually teach designing as to solve problems. Just redesigning education itself, thinking about it as a system levels problem. It should be a core subject with basic sensibility. She believes that the education system is messed up. Lastly, she said: How can we bring design as a process. so it works better and can deliver services to students better in a more efficient way?

Luis Fitch

The design that inspired Luis the most he got from the kitchen of his mom, the folcajete, a stone tool, which is the traditional version of a blender. You can make guacamole or salsa in there by just grinding with the brick element. Fitch said that the food taste different when made with it. It still is popular in contemporary time. He showed how to make guacamole by using the folcajete. The problem that he believed design should solve next is the whole idea of cross cultural design. Where different design ideas from different cultures can understand each other more. Not just design, but also music, food, and etc.. It is a realistic problem and it is starting to happen today.

Tony Hawk

Design that inspired him the most is apple products because they took what used to be an only business product and made it fun and useful in everyday life and they continued to do it with music products and telephones. It changed family values and it took an idea and made it much more accessible and fun. The thing that Tony Hawk said needs to happen in design is that as our technology gets more advance it gets more intimidating and much less accessible to general public, so they need to make it easier and fun to use. Not only that, but making it exciting and making it beautiful. He believes that is what apple has proven to do and everyone needs to take inspiration from that.

Ze Frank

Procrastinated because he hates talking about design. He likes the social game Werewolf. Which is 15-17 people assigned at table and they are all assigned a different thing. Everyone has to figure out who the werewolf is and sometimes, there may not even be a werewolf. It’s a conversation and it gets dicier with simple moves. It makes you reevaluate what you believe on how you are manipulated and the way you think you are designing the communications that you are having. Social design is what inspires him because it takes advantages of our complexity of our social interactions and simplifies it for a moment and we can look through it different lenses.

Design should solve all of the problems. Even design should be redesigned. Today is a glorious age for designers because they are getting feedback and we can see how the choices we make in our work are affecting the people that are consuming our work. Frank believes that we should design religion, design art, and even dinner conversations should be designed. Everything should be exposed to what is being processed. He also thinks that there is a way of design that needs more attention. One to One Design, which is a way to communicate. One to Many design, which is what most design industries are doing. Many to Many design which is more collaborative created projects. He wants to see more of Many to One design, where they all come together and try to come up with a solution in one single person’s life. For example, make Mike less lonely. He believes it is inspiring to see a bunch of designers focus their attention to one single thing. Frank said it would help him pay attention more in the world he lives in.

Reflection:

My favorite video that I watched, had to Luis Fitch because my mother has a couple of folcajte and I never really thought of it to be design. This entire time, I just thought it was an old school Mexican tradition. I was also able to relate to it more because I have had sauces that my mom made with the folcajte. My favorite response to the problem that design should solve next was Ze Frank, because many designer’s can settle for the obvious problem or they can actually all work together on the one single person’s life and create something completely random but still is able to solve the solution. It helped me realize that there are other ways to view design.

The way I would answer these questions:

I believe that the most interesting design is sign/street design. It amazes me the way the signs on the roads are designed and how we learn what each symbol means without needing words on the sign. The symbols on the different streets signs are so simple but yet they can still be complicated for some people if they were never taught them. The signs are informative and do not completely distract the drivers from the road in front of them. Without them in our society, the roads would be much more complicated. The problem I believe design should solve next is the way today’s society becomes so addicted to new technology. Yes, technology keeps advancing, but the way the are designing technology is going rapidly. A really good example is Apple, because they keep redesigning and upgrading their phones, computers, ipods, or ipads that it is getting to a point where they are not really fitting the consumers. The reason for that is because they are redesigning each item in such a short period of time, that it makes the first consumers regret buying the first product. I believe that they should come up with a solution on timing out their products and creating bigger changes in their new versions instead of adding a little bit of detail to it.

Journal #5

Jonathan Harris makes projects that reimagine how humans relate to technology and to each other. Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, his projects range from building the world’s largest time capsule to documenting an Alaskan Eskimo whale hunt on the Arctic Ocean. He is the co-creator of We Feel Fine, which measures the emotional temperature of the human world through large-scale blog analysis, and created recent projects about online dating, modern mythology, anonymity, news and language.

The project I enjoyed the most of Jonathan Harris is his dating website and how he compared house windows to the little profile pictures on the dating website. I found this brilliant because it is true that we imagine other people’s life through their window and he was taking that idea and making it into everyone being trapped in an apartment window. That was a great concept and was unique because most dating websites just have small profiles and pictures. Then when he figured out that that idea was already created he created the balloon idea and somewhat had the same concept as the apartment idea but everyone was just stuck in a balloon and he would form words and shapes out of balloons. The idea was very well thought out because he had female balloons and pink and male balloons as blue. In addition, the balloon would be darker if that person was old. He also had different movements and speech bubbles to pop up that had information about them. This entire dating profile intrigued me because they researched very small things that plays a part in what makes the balloon dating site a successful design.

Type/Layout terms

_ What are the advantages of a multiple column grid?

They contain several spatial intervals, which provide endless compositional options. They are flexible and accommodate a range of visual elements. They also provide opportunities to create rhythm, drama, movement, and tension through the interaction of visual elements.

_ How many characters is optimal for a line length? words per line?

There should be between 45-75 characters on a line, so about 12 words per line.

_ Why is the baseline grid used in design?

it allows type to sit up on imaginary lines and allows continuity within a design.

_ What is a typographic river?

A typographic river is a white column of gaps in the text.

_ From the readings what does clothesline or flow line mean?

Flowlines divide the page into horizontal spatial divisions and create additional alignment points for the placement of the visual elements. They are guides that help the designer establish consistent alignment across and down the page.

_ How can you incorporate white space into your designs?

Leave margins of paper open, break text into smaller paragraphs and group them.

_ What is type color/texture mean?

Type color refers to the density of typographic elements and their perceived gray value, which is the overall feeling of lightness and darkness on the page. The color is affected by the typeface, horizontal and vertical space, and amount of text on the page.

_ What is x-height, how does it effect type color?

X-height refers to the height of the lowercase letters without ascenders and descenders. Ascenders rise up from the baseline above the x-height to the camp height and sometime higher. It effects type color because the higher the type color the lighter it appears and it is also more readable.

_ In justification or H&J terms what do the numbers: minimum, optimum, maximum mean?

If text is justified, there is reasonable minimum word space (usually M/5 or a fifth of an em). There is also a maximum word space and optimum word space to hopefully avoid bad rivers.

_ What are some ways to indicate a new paragraph. Are there any rules?

Ornaments, drop lines, pilcrows and boxes, and bullets are used to mark breaks in streams of continuous text, outdented paragraphs, white space. One rule about paragraphs is to set the opening paragraphs flush left. In continuous text, mark all paragraphs after the first with an indent of at least one en or equal to the leading.

_ What are some things to look out for when hyphenating text.

Hyphenatino requires careful attention. TO improve the appearance of text includes; avoiding more than two hyphenated lines in a row and be alert on how words split. If possible, try to break them into even halves instead of leaving a stump at the end or beginning of a line. As well, never hyphenate proper names.

_ What does CMYK and RGB mean?

CMYK s a subtractive color model, used in color printing, and is also used to describe the printing process itself. It stands It stands for Cyan Magenta Yellow and Key(black).

RGB is additive color model, uses red, green, blue light to produce color.

_ What does hanging punctuation mean?

It is optical alignment with asterisks, apostrophes, commas, en dashes, hyphens, periods, and quotation marks. Usually, it hangs out of the line of text. It is also needed when a slight indent is created that is visual distracting.

_ What is the difference between a foot mark and an apostrophe?

A foot mark is often known as a dumb apostrophe, just like an inch mark is known as a dumb quote, they were common in typewriters and are straight apostrophes. True apostrophes are curved or angled.

_ What is the difference between an inch mark and a quote mark (smart quote)?

Inch marks were common in type writers, they are straight quotation marks. Quote marks are the ones that should be used and are curved or angled.

_ What is a hyphen, en dash and em dashes, what are the differences and when are they used.

Hyphen is used for hyphenated words and breaking words in a paragraph setting. En dash is used in compound terms to separate items, for example, dates, locations, times and phone numbers. Em dash is used to separate thoughts.

_ What are ligatures, why are they used, when are they not used, what are common ligatures

It is specially designed character produced by combining two or three letters into one unified form. They replace pairs of letters that collide into each other to improve legibility. The common ligatures are ff, ffi, ffl, fi, and fj. It is used in the typefaces where the lowercase f extends into the space of the letter following it. IF the letter rises above the x-height, it will touch the f.