Doug Cottier - Project 2

The artist who I (tried to) model my pieces after in this project was Paul Rand. Although Rand passed away more than a decade ago, his legacy of world-renowned graphic design lives on. He was most famous for designing graphics for many of today's corporate identities: IBM, UPS, Adobe, and Volkswagen just to name a few. He had a number of artistic theories that he applied to his designs. Those that I attempted to incorporate into my project were the notions of 'defamiliarizing the ordinary' and 'making the familiar strange'. In addition, some stand-out quotes from Rand shaped how I went about this project:

• "Ideas do not need to be esoteric to be original or exciting"
• A logo "cannot survive unless it is designed with the utmost simplicity and restraint"

My piece for movement consists of the recycling logo placed over the skyline of a city. When coming up with this idea, I employed both of Rand's quotes and his artistic theories. The recycling sign was featured in quite a few of my preliminary sketches for movement, but it was all by itself, and lacked any substance or meaning. Once we were instructed to correlate our pieces with pre-existing designers, I had almost pre-determined that a revamped recycling sign would end up being my final piece for movement. I am happy with how it turned out - in my personal opinion it is the strongest of my four compositions. I think the recycling sign itself establishes a sense of movement in the piece, although the fact that the movement repeats itself sort of takes away from this effect. I feel like this piece was also my best one in terms of craftsmanship. With these projects, it didn't take long for me and my big clumsy hands to determine that using the X-Acto knife was not going to be easy. But when it came to this piece, I slowed down, took my time, and I think it resulted in a somewhat misleadingly good display of cutting skills.

My piece for balance was primarily oriented around Paul Rand's artistic theory of making the familiar strange. I wanted to incorporate my admiration for the success of family-friend Chris Martin into one of my pieces. Whenever I see him simultaneously playing the piano and singing, it has always radiated sort of an inexplicable artistic awesomeness to me. When a particular song, titled 'Politik', is played live, all that is visible on stage is Chris spotlighted at the piano, playing and singing. Politik is what I tried to recreate in this piece through Rand's notion of making the familiar strange and keeping it simple. I have never been able to competently represent human figures artistically so what I have always fallen back on is drawing them as bathroom-door-people. I thought this could act as sort of a simplification and could be considered making the familiar strange. So in essence this piece is how Coldplay's performance of Politik would look on the door of a restroom. I feel as though this composition could have also been categorized in emphasis/economy, but personally it stood out (and was intended to be) more of a balance one. I think it is relatively balanced simply because the weight distribution isn't off and there is nowhere where it is overwhelmingly black or overwhelmingly white.

My piece for emphasis/economy was also the case of a series of meaningless preliminary sketches that I wanted to advance through Paul Rand's theories and adjust into an acceptable composition. The concept of honour has somewhat of a strange respect in my family and is commonly employed by my dad as a motivating force for me. This method of his has had such a profound impact on me that I decided to have it tattooed on my back in Japanese. Before I enrolled in this class, it was virtually the only semi-artistic thing about me. For this reason I really wanted to express it in my physical artwork. I think that Paul Rand was a suitable designer to associate this piece with because I wanted it to be simple and non-esoteric. I considered only featuring the Japanese script in the top right corner, but convinced myself that the lines add a slight sense of depth. Also, I felt that the addition of the English word honour solidifies the message that I was trying to convey because without it, the composition would have very little meaning to an English audience. My understanding of emphasis/economy was using a minimal amount of space to emphasize the meaning of the piece. I am sort of unsure as to whether or not I accomplished this through this composition. My one clear downfall with this one was maintaining the pristine blackness of the gouache. I wish I had taken better care of the black gouache because it evidently takes away from the presentation of the composition.

My repetition piece was the last one that I composed. I feel that this is the weakest of my four compositions in the sense that it does not effectively represent repetition. It's only relatable feature to repetition is the inclusion of two keys and the similar opposing patterns that they establish. Like the recycling/skyline piece, this one was difficult to cut out. Originally in my 8x8'' sketch there were four (thinner) horizontal lines on each key. But my clumsiness prevailed and I was forced to take away a line on both of the keys. Apart from this modification, I think they turned out alright - the fact that they are identifiable as keys is satisfactory to me in itself.

I really enjoyed indulging myself in this project and exploring the limits my artistic capabilities through the methods of Paul Rand and the medium of gouache.