KCAI Blogs

In this poster the designer was combining the music note with a tree to create a metaphor of something bigger than the two separate.

To me, this is allegory. Trying to represent music through geometric shapes. Cover designed by Josef Albers. Just one of many covers.

1. time
2. stairs (progression)
3. train tracks
4. polyphony
5. pattern
6. swing
7. five
8. fragments
9. piano
10. stage

I went to the Marr Sound Archives on Friday to look at their collection of Brubeck's vinyls and books. I took some photos and did a little more digging into some ways to explain/visualize his music. In the past a lot of his album artwork seems to have done by Arnold Roth, who was a freelance cartoonist and has done work for Esquire, The New Yorker, and Playboy.




























I was able to read some from a Brubeck biography and while I was reading it there were a few ideas that spark into my mind.

random statements/ideas/themes that can be used for visual inspiration

• dave's music was described as a "beautiful marriage"
• turning a small club into a combustion chamber
• dave says that hearing with your feet is essential in listening to Jazz
• his music was a mix of swing and structure
• hits his piano hard
• cutting chords
  
• uses sophisticated counter-rhythms
• in trying to keep up with dave, somebody told him that he didn't want a drummer, he wanted a machine
• he wants poly-rhythm, where a guy would stay where he was and then he would play over him or against him in another rhythm
• when dave plays he doesn't read music, hes always going back and forth from looking at his keys to looking at the crowd and that feeds his creative fire

I am enjoying fusing rhetoric with visual ideas to express the music because it is getting me to think about ways of making an image that I would not have come to before. Whatever visual approach I do take to illustrate the concert, I am pretty sure that I want the image to have the vintage qualities that his vinyl records do because it says something about the era that Dave's music was so big in.

The mood board created by Julie and myself was an exercise to work together to see if we could capture the sound of Dave Brubeck into some kind of visual presentation of his music. To us, Brubecks music is colorful and we wanted to represent that with bright primary colors. His music plays a lot with time signatures and we used the proximity between numbers 1 2 3 4 to communicate that relationship. The four numbers also represent a quartet as a whole. The stairs reference his sense of progression and rhythm, which breaks off at the end and goes in a new direction. In the bottom right is a fingerprint which represents his unique mark on jazz because many tried to figure out his formula for his compositions but nobody ever caught on. The * are a sort of retro throw back to the era when the quartet was hot in the 50s and 60s.

Each of these things together in their own ways represent Brubecks music but it was bringing them together in one composition that made it a good challenge. When I see the collage as a whole I see something abstract that may or may not relate to his music but there are little moments that do speak to his music, so there are compositions inside of composition. Whether the entire piece works as a whole to convey his music 100%, I don't think so.

Our typographic warm up was to make expressive compositions with these words:
born in amsterdam—a city that’s steeped in history, yet prides itself on being quite pro- gressive. a place where open mindedness always trumps convention. a city that doesn’t know the meaning of status quo. a unique spirit indeed.

I took the approach in a less literal way; I was not trying to make the word "progressive" look progressive. I was going more so for contrast in size and texture on the page.

Our Community Diagram Draft I feel represents a community well. I always thought of a community focusing around a certain rule set (values, mission, vision). I automatically thought of the bible ( the bible is the core that brings the community together, and everyone always refers back to the text). I feel I am thinking a little marxist, but it does make sense.


The Final Digital Translation of the Community Diagram



I felt that Tom and I's brainstorming session went really well. Its interesting since we used a specific color for our individual contributions, and it really shows the collaboration. We decided to be very specific to urban farming and that helped tremendously. We weren't thinking generally, but specifically. For example we were able to think of specific tools like rakes, shovels, and gloves.

We had a small party at Mark Salmon's home yesterday (8-27) complete with good company and good food.

Visual/verbal rhetoric - Gui Bonsiepe

This article explained the rhetoric (a linguistic element, the art of persuasion with words) and its use in a visual context rather than solely its verbal context. This modern approach applied to graphic design in a very useful tool because of it's ability to influence opinion and actions. Ancient Greeks divided rhetoric into three categories: political, legal, and religious. Since these groups of people use speech to communicate, it is useful to have an understanding of how to communicate effectively, thus influencing opinion and behavior. The messages we create as designers all have the ability to do the same thing which is why we should pay close attention to how we are saying what we are saying. The function of advertising is to communicate and influence opinion and decision making. If we can use rhetoric to influence opinion and decision making through speech, then we can use rhetorical tropes to influence the perception of our visual messages. With the help and knowledge of rhetoric we can observe semantic (meaning) and semiotic qualities (interpretation of signs) of an image.

Visual/verbal comparison a comparison that starts with verbal signs and is continued with visual signs

Visual/verbal analogy a relatum (one of the objects expressed verbally is paralleled by a similar relatum expressed visually)

Visual/verbal mentonymy a relatum indicated by verbal signs is visualized by signs in a real relationship to the verbal relatum (cause instead of effect, tool instead of activity, producer instead of product)

Visual/verbal chain a topic begun in words continued and complete visually

Visual/verbal negation verbal signs negate what is shown visually

Visual synecdoche a relatum expressed verbally is visualized by a part representing the whole, or vice-versa

Verbal specification a visual sign accompanied by only as much text as is necessary for its comprehension

Visual substitution one visual sign replaced by another because of its formal characteristics

Syntactic climax and anticlimax a purely visual figure

Visual/verbal parallelism visual and verbal signs representing the same relatum

Associative mediation one verbal sign out of a series is illustrated by a series of
visual signs, which lead, in turn, to another relatum of the verbal signs

Language as a model for graphic design - Type + Image - Meggs
"Discover all available means of persuasion in any given situation either to inform (rational appeal) to delight or win over (ethical appeal) or move (emotional appeal) an audience." -Aristotle

This reading went into more depth about rhetorical tropes(simile, metaphor, personification, metonymy, pun, hyperbole, antithesis, irony, allegory, synecdoche) and how they can be used effectively to produce meaning. Language relies on understood meaning. It is a system that uses our understanding to communicate ideas. We communicate our ideas with signs (sounds, visual gestures, marks). Our basic understanding comes from language and it is the primary model for other communication like film and graphic design. You can create an image in someones mind with the words you use and choose, and you can also do the same thing by presenting it to them visually in a way that evokes understanding.

Find + Share

Pun - give a helping hand. Hands stand in for people making the letters have personification.



Antithesis - this ad uses the juxtaposition of two separate things and combines them into one for greater impact. It also uses metaphor in that eating these carrots you are eating something poisonous. It uses allegory in the sense that it is morally wrong to genetically modify foods that deplete the food's nutrition.




Metaphor - putting your child around smoke is like putting a bag over their head. It also uses allegory in that smoke stands in for death and bad health.




Hyperbole - exaggeration of hair shape to show that when you use priorin shampoo your hair will have lots of volume.




Personification - this chicken is posing like a human, giving it human qualities makes you have second thoughts about eating it.




Metonymy - replacing the ash tray with lungs, a close association when it comes to smoking.

I have been thinking about how Brubeck's music sounds and ways to visualize it. I was also able to get a movie from Netflix called Rediscovering Dave Brubeck and that gave me a good visualization of Dave himself and the way he plays. It was nice seeing him talk about his music and I learned some interesting things like:

Many black jazz musicians and critics didn't like Brubeck because they felt that he was too stiff in comparison to the smooth cool jazz from players like Miles Davis.They qorded it as he couldn't "swing". Brubeck was quoted responding to a critic by saying "Any jackass can swing, but to invent and make something new, that's what I'm trying to do." Dave was a pioneer of what was caled "West coast jazz" which was a sort of code for "white jazz". Jazz was born in the south in Louisiana and grew in other directions in the craddles of jazz such as Chicago, New York City, and our very own Kansas City. They felt that Dave's background growing up in the west on a caddle ranch was nothing close to where jazz came from and the hardships it expressed.

I have been looking at some of Brubeck's album art for inspiration













Some words and ideas I have been thinking about to relate to his music and visual representation:

• syncopation
• rhythm
• pattern
• poly-tone
  
• bombastic
• train tracks
• repetition
• tempo
• continuation
• proximity
  

"2010 Kansas City Flatfile" at H&R Block Artspace

Now through Sept. 25, 2010

frank oviedo, partner at liquid 9 (video post-production and graphic design shop with a lot of music-related clients) told me they are quite busy right now and a fall internship could be a cool opportunity for that special someone, sophomore through senior.

liquid9.tv

send a well-written letter of interest and resume to frankie.oviedo [at] liquid9.tv