Word. It’s now at the end of the 3rd week (woah!) and while I have direction in all my classes, I don’t have any direction in any of my classes. It’s a roller coaster of great concepts followed by backlashes of not having deeper meanings to the metaphors you came up with the week prior.
Example A: Creating a beverage line for Angelina Jolie. Through my research I found out that she has a tattoo with a quote from Tennessee Williams. He wrote “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof” where the main character drinks whiskey until he hears the “click.” Applying this to the intriguing allure of Angelina, I figured it would be great to create a whiskey line called Clik and work a little dangerous beauty into the label with a picture of a loaded revolver pointing at the viewer. Last week, everyone loved the idea. With this info I worked all of my designs around this revolver. Different flourishes, borders, smoke swirls, etc. Some were really cool, but oh, oh, this week in class it appears that I did not take this metaphor one step further into a more abstract concept. Hmph. Back to the drawing board.
Exhibit B: Logos class. Oi, sweet baby Jesus. What on earth is going on here? We have to concept a logo for something we hate, something we love, and a family of logos. My hate logo: hearing, not listening- which has formulated into war, esp. Vietnam war because the similarities between that war and the mess we’re in now in Iraq is freakin’ nutz. I have a slight direction with a cartoon blindfolded gorilla to symbolize how our troops were not trained to fight defense and were totally trampled by the guerrilla opposition, but it’s not enough. I need to delve deeper into this whole shebang. But how? Then there’s my love logo which is Lazy Sundays. I did a lot of camping and resting textures, and somehow the class settled on the idea that I should create a new logo for Laz-Y-Boy or Arondak chairs. Woo… I guess it’ll be fine, but I have no clue what my next step should be. Then there’s the family of logos which we decided will be depicting Freud’s developmental stages. God help me with that one.
So this is when the quarter starts to become tough. It’s easy to initially concept, and it’s easy to put all the stuff together for the final deliverables, but the week by week process of figuring out how good design is actually done is so hard. I really felt like I was getting somewhere at the end of last quarter, but I’m quickly realizing that as much as I thought I knew what to look for to make a good design, I honestly still have no clue. I’ll just have to keep on truckin’. Man, it’s been a long time since I’ve used that phrase. Oh, what late hours and little sleep can do to a brain 