Reading Response: Paul Rand & Lupton

How does this reading inform your thought/making process?

Time and movement is in every bit of advertisement and design.  I don’t think that I ever consciously acknowledged it, or if it was all in my subconscious.  I fully understand and recognize what Ellen Lupton is talking about when she states all of the ways that design creates movement: long exposure Photography, implied motion, eruption of form, or change in position, rotation, scale, shape, color, depth, and transparency.  While reading this section, I definitely thought more about why I was creating my animations as I was in Flash.  Even though you can realize that you need to add something specific to a design, the most important part was knowing why you needed to add that piece in the first place.  Through this reading I’m starting to question myself more on why I feel a need to add each element.  I’ve also been trying to think more so what idea I’m trying to promote and then choosing the transition based on that.

What transitions do you identify? What are your thoughts on his design philosophy and work in relation to this project? and this class?

All transitions are shown within his video; wipe, zoom, pan, fade, and swap.

I totally agree that there is always an ulterior motive to design and normally it is to sell and because it’s popular.  It was interesting to me that he stated that “the genre of graphic design and painting is art, it’s all art.”  I feel that often the assumption is made that art and design are two different sides of the spectrum, holding no relation to one another.  According to Rand though, design is part of the larger category of art, which really makes sense when I think about it.  Design works with influences from illustration, fashion, photography, music, movies, anything related to the field of art.  I fully agree with Rand, because I believe that all that is around us, from the people that we meet to what we see and feel, inspires us.

One of the big concepts that has been pushed in class is reason.  We’ve needed reason for why we do everything in our design.  I know at my last school my answer was always “I don’t know” when asked why I used certain images, aligned text as I did.  I hadn’t put much thought into it, but that is one of the major concepts that we’ve been learning in our design classes.  Design is not design unless it holds a purpose, without a purpose, it’s just some objects thrown together.  This is the main concept that we’re using in this animation project.  We’ve been faced with the challenge of transforming a 2D poster into an animation.  Rand also believes that everyone has their own definition of graphic design, and it’s going to differ from ours; but, they’re all design.  You can see this in how different all of our posters were, as well as with our current animations how they’re all using the same concepts and transitions but used in different ways.