Media, Events, Experiments
hfour
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Posts by hfour
Self-Portrait
Aug 17th
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Every few years, I create a self portrait. Many find it to be challenge to create a visual representation of how they actually look without illustrating how they think they look. In 1999, I created a 36″x48″ acrylic portrait on sheet-board, in the style of a three colour propaganda print, using yellow, red and black. The lack of additional elements made the overall work feel incomplete. In 2001, I created a self portrait using oils, but lacked the patience to slowly build layers of paint up to create depth, and the painting ended up feeling plastic and doll-like. It has since been discarded.
2004-2008′s self portraits were primarily photographic, with various exposure and lighting techniques being used to create some sense of originality.
The most recent was produced in Illustrator based on a photograph taken in May 2010, in Yosemite, California. The style is reminiscent of the early 20th century snake oil salesman. I completed the design by using wood-typefaces and an ornamental to accentuate the period.
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Avenir Typeface Genealogical Study
Aug 17th
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Avenir, designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1988, was created as a more contemporary version of Futura crossed with Univers. This infographic shows the influence ratios the Typeface’s ‘parents’ had on each letter.
Avenir!
A brief and epic history since 1988 – This report is of questionable historical value due to possible and definite inaccuracies.
As Reported by Stuart Ward
Adrian Frutiger was sitting in his soundproof typeface development idea-dome sometime in the mid eighties when he arrived at an interesting conclusion, it was time to make a new typeface for the future.. Although the excesses of the 80s knew no bounds, we cannot be absolutely certain that Frutiger actually owned a typeface development ideadome, or even if the specifications of his idea-dome included soundproofing.
Frutiger and decided that Univers and Helvetica were getting a little long in the teeth after having kicked Clear and Simple Design’s ass for just over three decades, and it was time for a changing of the guard. Apparently some people didn’t get the memo, and continue to mainline Helvetica into their designs like some burnt out modernist minimal junkie.
Before Helvetica and Univers were the only typefaces available in any design studio, 19th century sans-serifs had eclipsed, for several years, the constructivist stylings of Gill Sans and Futura.
Since Frutiger was an Alpenhorn blowing, cheese drilling Switzerlander with a penchant for Late 1920s German typefaces, he logically chose Futura as a source of inspiration for his contemporary masterpiece, and named the creation Avenir, which is French for Future, or je ne sais quoi. Genial! The ‘a’ in Futura was considered to hinder legibility due to it similarity to b, d, p and q, stated Frutiger, so it was replaced with the traditional roman style a.
New evidence has come to light regarding a dark secret to Avenir’s past: A recently discovered phone-tap recording has revealed that Frutiger tried to issue a fatwa against the Futura ‘a‘ because it’s lack of design sense led to a loss of faith. Bau-chika-Bauhaus.
Some interesting points about Avenir:
1. There is no Avenir Italic style, only oblique, created mathematically with precision reaching values close to Godly levels. Using Avenir Oblique fonts instantly upgrades your ability to be contemporary and professionally-fun. (Despite the fact that professionals’ fun in the 80s consisted of lines of cocaine on ladies’ cleavage, rolled up suit sleeves, and crimped hair, Avenir Oblique managed to soar above its 1980s roots; perhaps it’s incubation inside an idea-dome had something to do with it.)
2. After designing Versailles in the early 80s, Frutiger regretted the opulence and excess of the era, just a little, and decided to scrap the serifs for a while, sort of like giving up chocolate covered bacon for lent.
3. The ‘o’ is not a perfect circle.
4. The vertical strokes are thicker than the horizontals. Different strokes for different folks.
5. Avenir looks nothing like handwriting.
6. Avenir comes in varying thicknesses, from 35-95, including 45,55,65 and 85. The meanings of these numbers and what happened to 75 is a mystery.
7. Not content with a typeface which didn’t include condensed fonts, some Japanese guy by the name of Kobayashi worked with Frutiger to create Avenir Next. Since the rise of online type foundries, Typefaces with few fonts in the family are considered low art and campy. Plus, Typefaces with more fonts sell for more money.
8. Because Avenir wasn’t entirely immune to the anything goes lifestyle during it’s conception, the City of Amsterdam has given it a home on its corporate identity. You can take a typeface out of the 80s, but you can take the 80s out of the typeface.
Final Word
What was old is new again, with the surgical expertise of a man who has been ‘shaping our words’ for more than half a century. Avenir, truly towards a brighter future.
TL;DR
Avenir’s font design was inspired by Futura and Univers.
An animated version of the typeface investigation has also been created…
The video shows the primary historical sources of Avenir: Futura and Univers. Each letter in upper and lower case was determined to be on a range somewhere between the inspiring typefaces, and this was indicated with point position as well as colour gradient. The middle section of the animation shows the mix of the Univers ‘Q’ and the Futura ‘Q’ to make an Avenir ‘Q’, which is a clear hybrid of the two when visually represented with its parents.
Snowboard Design
Aug 17th
Mid Summer snowboard design: ‘Lock and Load’.
The top of the board features a ‘bordello cowboy’ motif with decorative dueling pistols, organic flourishes, and decorative wings.
The bottom of the board has a rifle silhouette in gold, so when a rider has dismounted and is carrying their board it appears upon first glance that they are carrying a gold gun.
I wished to celebrate the gunslinger outlaw feeling which snowboarders sometimes exude. Although a part of mainstream culture, they are somehow perceived to be on the fringes of morality and order.
As an added bonus to the snowboard design I posted earlier this summer, I created a very short video animation of the content of the design.
This very short practice video features 3D layers imported from the illustrator file, animated and viewed with a moving camera.
Glitch video experiment: datamoshing + poledance.
Jul 10th
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I used some footage from my friend Lu’s poledance show last year in Tokyo to experiment with datamoshing. I did it the hard way, by encoding each segment with only a first i-frame (keyframe), and then proceeded to remove them too with a different piece of software. I learned about some technicalities of encoding with h264 and avi file formats, which may end up being useful some time in the future.
The way video is compressed for some web formats, there can be graphical errors when skipping through the timeline, due to the infrequency of key frames, or video frames which consist of complete graphical image information. The subsequent (inbetween) frames contain information related to the movements and changes of graphical information. To put it as simply as possible, there is a picture followed by information about how to move specific part of the picture, another picture, and then more movement information. When the graphic image frames are discarded, the inbetween frames continue to move and change inaccurate information, leading to an interesting result.
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All the software for osx can be found (for free too) at: http://www.court13.com/datamoshkit.zip
Thanks to the datamosher tutorial vids: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYytVzbPky8 Apparently there’s an easy way, an now that I ‘understand the principle, I’ll try it in AfterEffects.
Creative Circuit Board Etching
Jul 2nd
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Revisiting a project created in 2003…
Etching circuit boards as a form of creative expression? I made a series of images by combining 19th century botanical illustrations scanned from antique hardcovers with circuit-like shapes created in digitally. The images were used as light resists in the creation of a photoresist, which was in turn used as an etching resist. The first part of the process is similar to traditional photography, performed in a dark room with developer and stop bath chemicals.
The series, titled ‘Circuitree’ was displayed at the Nickle Gallery in Calgary, Canada.
The relationships between the dualities of nature and technology; science and art; creative processes and analytical processes were investigated.
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Digital Drawings etched on circuit board.
Average size 6” x 6”, series of 8
2003
I would like to once again use this technique as a creative process, with a more technological final work in mind. I would like to see the circuits actually able to perform a task beyond a being a decorative and contemplative form.
Recycled Painting Project
Jul 2nd
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An ongoing project using waste cardboard from boxes and packaging as a painting surface to renew the refuse materials’ perceived value, and to raise awareness to the amount of waste which is created by western lifestyles. The pieces shown are two collared shirt packing boards and a piece of the packaging for a home storage unit, all of which would normally be disposed of and promptly forgotten. Not shown are cereal boxes, a cookie box and the stiffening board at the bottom of a paper pad.
The process of creation also plays a key role in the final rendering of the pieces. As gestural and random layers of paint are built up on top of each other, a composition emerges. Only after the first few painting sessions do I know the outcome of the painting. The decorative pseudo-ornamentals are references to Mucha’s illustration style.
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Mixed media on card stock paper and cardboard.
Varying Sizes – mostly small
2007- Present
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Blacklist Tokyo + TLC exclusive concert invitation
Jul 2nd
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Just a quick text animation from the video commercial for Blacklist Tokyo’s exclusive event featuring TLC. (Yes, that band you thought was gone forever.) Wish I could be at the event, but it didn’t work out that way. The total commercial is 30 seconds long, but I’ve decided only to show the first few seconds.
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Viterum logo design process report.
Jul 2nd
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I developed a logo and wordmark for a Tokyo based eco-consulting company last year. I created a design process report based on the workflow, read the Case Study PDF file, if you’re interested in seeing how this logo came to be.
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