Personal Logo, Take 2

Earlier, I showed Take 1 for a personal logo, which was supposed to be modeled after a Chinese chop (although it looked more like a baby block). After some consideration, I decided that I needed something cleaner. I needed a slogan, too, especially as that was part of the assignment for my Computers and the Arts class (FA2000). As my "chop" looked a little sloppy, I decided to go with just typography. After all, lots of companies has excellent, type-only logos:

See? Works just fine. Also, I thought the forest green that I used on the last try would work well so I decided to go with a bright, flat orange with gray accents. I also needed a nifty slogan. As I decided to do something with data science (which is, after all, one of the reasons I'm here at the U of u) and as I'm trying to be arty and accessible, I tried "The Art of Data Science." Has a nice ring, doesn't it? Also, that phrase has not been copyrighted or used very much, so it can be distinctive.

Soooo, after much hand kerning, here are four variations on the same theme, from simple to complex. (The "BP.c" is short for BartonPoulson.com, by the way. Also, the light gray boxes around all of these is something that WordPress puts on there so you know it's an image file and you can click on it. Those are not part of the logo but the darker gray boxes are.)

Oooh, nice! Personally, I like the third one best because of the way it highlights elements in the slogan. On the other hand, the BP.c could use some explanation, so the fourth is a good one.

I'm pretty happy with these. Next, I get to design an actual web site that uses my fancy new logo. Exciting!

Personal Logo, Take 1

Okay, for my Computers and the Arts class (FA2000) we needed to design a personal logo. My first thought was to model something after a Chinese chop or seal, like one of these:

So, here’s my not-very-impressive attemp at a first draft in my favorite color:

So, hand drawn with Sharpies and, given that I couldn’t even draw it straight, a fair amount of freestyle warping in Photoshop. I kind of the the inverted symmetry between the lowercase "b" and the uppercase "P." Also, the whole ends up rather looking for like a child's alphabet blocks:

Anyhow, that’s the first take. We'll see what happens next.

Mike Lee Smiles on Me

Okay, so it's not exactly a masterpiece, but it's a good first step. The first project for FA2000, Computers and the Arts, was to create a Surrealist collage in Photoshop. After much hemming and hawing, I decided to create an image of my family and I escaping Utah as a smiling Senator Mike Lee (one of our fine, fine Congressional Tea Party demagogues) looms overhead in the manner of, say, Lord  Voldemort and the Death Eaters. Unfortunately, we're driving in a 1960 Citroën DS wagon and getting passed by a Galapagos tortoise (although we have made it to the Bonneville Salt Flats and are therefore just a few miles from Nevada, where a Democrat is in the Senate). Here's the end result:

The whole thing, though, reminds me of a 2008 article I read about the Photoshop spoofs of Sarah Palin entitled "Photoshop for Democracy Revisited: The Sarah Palin File." In it, the author, Henry Jenkins, argues that such creations are actually a useful way of investigating the collective beliefs and prejudices of the nation. As a researcher, therefore, it may be premature to throw such dross in the junk mail folder but, rather, to use them as social indicators. Fascinating.

I must say, however, my all time favorite is the one of Obama and Palin as contestants in Dancing with the Stars:

Photoshop-Induced Cognitive Failure

[The above image, "Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X" by Francis Bacon is illustrative of my current mental condition.]

Well, my last post was all about how wonderful Photoshop is. This one is about how overwhelming it is. Ay yi yi! It's all very, very confusing – masks, channels, layers, fidgets, blotters, who knows what. I can't keep it straight. I guess the upshot of this is that it gives me much more compassion for my statistics students when they get lost.

(On the other hand, I DO intend on going back over all of the class materials, the PDFs, Adobe's own online tutorials and some of the tutorials at lynda.com. I'm sure I'll get this all straightened out.

I am, however, excited to be working on my collage!

Adobe and Me

We're getting started with Photoshop (and the Adobe Creative Suite in general) in FA2000: Computers and the Arts. Very exciting! It's an overwhelming program; so many choices, so many buttons. Ay yi yi . . . But I'm thrilled to have put the lettuce and beans on their own layers in the salad photo! Very cool to move things around so easily. To quote the theme from The Love Boat: "So exciting and new!" (Well, new to me, anyhow.)

Also, in FA3000: Design for the Net I, we're doing some manual HTML coding to create very, VERY simple websites (at least, local pages that open in browsers). Kind of tedious to do it manually, but I think it makes things much clearer. And I'm finally learned about putting the pages in a folder with relative references . . . if only this simple fact had been made clearer to me a few years ago. But I'm looking forward to working on our next assignment, which is to create a web page for a favorite artist. I may cheat and do mine on Edward Tufte, who IS an artist but is known much, much better for his work on data visualization. Here's the man himself:

For reference, here are his major publications, all of which are gorgeous and should be required reading for all designers and data people:

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
• Envisioning Information
• Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative
• Beautiful Evidence

Anyhow, it should be fun.