Photo: Walker Evans

Chicagoland: The Urgency

We are surrounded by messages telling us what to do, where to go, what to avoid. And operating in a risk society means much of what we see in signage is meant to create a sense of urgency. From color usage like yellow, orange, red, white and black, to typography and font weights – urgency has become its own language of sorts.

I traveled through Chicago’s downtown and various areas surrounding the city in search of this urgent direction. Below is a pictorial.
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From Paula Scher’s Make It Bigger:

Focus groups can’t be expected to respond positively to something new, because if it’s something really new it’s going to look “too something,” which means not sufficiently like other things like it that already exist in the marketplace. Focus testing tells you what the consumer already accepts, not what they will accept in the future.

My Take On The State of Higher Education Web ____

I spent the last few days sitting in various meeting rooms, talking to a great community of people whom I normally only interact with over Twitter or otherwise, and having a good bit of fun. I love the HighEdWeb conference. I missed it so much in 2009 when I was unable to attend. This year was just as much fun, if not more, as I’m no longer the new kid.

But. My entire outlook on the web in Higher Education has changed. And I realized that it hasn’t changed to be in line with the rest of the community.
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Typography

Typography assignment for Media Concepts.

Typography Exercise

We were given a sheet with descriptions. The assignment was to render our name in suitable fonts keeping mind of size, location in the box, spacing, etc.

Image of the Week

Assignment:

Control your political feelings (hard to do these days, but this class is NOT about politics, it’s MEDIA STUDIES!), and tell us how you think these posters compare in terms of their impact on the public (feelings they evoke, memorability, ability to motivate, power to incite rage/euphoria, all other).

What I find interesting about both images is the timeliness of their references. The Fairey image immediately reminded me (upon first view) of soviet propaganda art (or the Che Guevara image we’ve all seen – which, during the Cold War makes a lot of sense with this art style). The vector silhouette with monochrome coloring and the large “HOPE” looked, to me, like “OBEY”. But this style was popular in graphic and web circles at the time of its release and I doubt most non-design nerds (true of us, yes???) would pinpoint it as “propaganda,” even if the head nod was there. It’s an image of “¡Revolución!” that fit well into the “change” mantra of his campaign.
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