Designing Olmec Pandas
First - new Shoot today; meet our design family.
Five weeks have passed since I began Portfolio Center, and I can say with complete confidence that this is where I belong. I'm excited to wake up in the morning. I feel that I have improved tremendously as a designer already. My friends, instructors, and classes consistently amaze me, and I love them all. So what exactly is going on here to keep the smile on my face? What's a day in the life of a Portfolio Center designer?
Let's take Sylvia's class as an example. All first quarter design students must take Design Aesthetics with Sylvia Gaffney. It's a rite of passage class that you hear rumors about - students leaving class crying after their work is critiqued, pulling all-nighters to finish the varied batches of home assignments every week, and egos being demolished into grains of sand. It is by far my favorite class. Our first week assignment was to select an animal and an ancient civilization from a list and merge the two - design the animal as the civilization would have, even (especially) if they never co-existed. This meant researching the civilization at the library and coming up with a "design alphabet" of the materials, shapes, lines, glyphs, and letterforms they used. Then we drew 100 2"x2" rough thumbnails of ideas from a list of suggestions (3 with heavy distortions, 3 out of cut paper, 3 underneath views, etc.), cleaned up and redrew our best 33, and then made 5"x6" sketches of our best 11. Class time is mainly spent on critiques, with each student getting 15-20 minutes to receive feedback on his/her work. It's not just about a union of the civilization and the animal - it's placement on the page, color values, an area of focus, contrast, and dozens of other details. I chose the Olmec civilization and the Giant Panda. I know way too much about the Olmecs now - from their ritual decapitation of statues to their forced deformations of the skull to their worship of jaguars. They were the mother culture of Mesoamerica, starting many things that the more-famous Mayans would later build upon (calendars, ball games, temples). I chose it for a nostalgic reason - because on an old Nickelodeon show, Legends of the Hidden Temple, there was a giant talking head called Olmec. Turns out that this is the calling card of the Olmecs - enormous basalt heads weighing an average of about 5 tons.
But this is not a history lesson; sorry. Week two made us create our best 5 designs as 10"x12", and enlarge our personal favorite to 20"x24", all in grayscale. We recreated our posters using cutout paper (down to every last detail - harder than it sounds) in week three and learned that we were making a poster for a children's exhibit in a zoo or museum. Week four had us adding titles ("Bamboo and Basalt Ajawsphere"), dates (May 15 - August 9, 2004), and a venue's logo and typography (Port Discovery in Baltimore). For this week, we had to start the thumbnail process over with bag or packaging designs for our souvenir store, all with secondary reuses. I made three miniature bags for yesterday's class and will eventually be buying the materials to actually create finished versions (you'll see pictures of all this stuff one day...probably at the end of the quarter). One of my boxes has a blue/green cellophane front that shows through an Olmec landscape in the back interior; the front can unhook and fold down to become a lake for a playset that includes a clip-on panda clutching to the Indiana Jones whip-rope handles.
We're also sent on various seemingly crazy assignments every week. Go to an Asian paper store and check out the handmade papers. Go to an orchard and find the connection between the veins of lemon citrus, rinds, bark and leaves. Buy the latest issue of Newsweek and read the article about McMansions and think about the obsession with bigger houses when smaller houses are often much more functional. Interview a kid. Observe someone doing something extremely well and think about if they're doing it consciously or not. We usually have a dozen little adventures/assignments/projects a week for that class alone, and they force us to get outside of our comfort zone and try new things while seeing more of Atlanta.
The heart of the class is the critique. Sylvia knows her stuff - everything from the most obscure details about your civilization to instantly solving a problem you're having with a simple, creative answer. And now I've been saturated with the world of design. An Olmec Panda poster isn't anything in the big picture, but I'm suddenly realizing why I'm here - design truly influences the way I live. We interact with millions of designs a day, whether it's the bed we sleep in, the car we drive in or the food we eat. Portfolio Center infuses a need to stop accepting the normal and get creative in order to change the world. It's a message that I read in The Fountainhead this summer and still continues to motivate me to explode through the limits of my imagination. This is an industry and atmosphere that I feel so comfortable in, surrounded by a diverse talent of people from all walks of life.
Yeah, life's pretty good right now.
Tuesday, October 28 at 10:36 PM
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