Final Reflections

This blog has become a compendium of thinking, specifically, how I filter incoming information and process it, creating snippets of imagery and words to use in my work. I tend to remember quotes, or parts of them, and they rattle around in my head while I go about the day until I see something that will bring one of them jumping up to attention, going, “See, that’s what I’m talking about!” I do tend to anthropomorphize words, or the visualization of them in letters at least. Letters have such presence and personality and I tend to wrap my design around them. For me, without letters, there would be no design. The book that has resulted is a collection of words that like, and how I happened to interpret and re-present them. Because everything we create is a re-presentation of something else.

Found Paper

Random pieces of paper collected on a walk in the neighborhood. Discarded paper always seems to me like precious artifacts of an unknown life. It's fun to imagine what importance these pieces of paper held to their previous owners and what misadventures occurred for them to get lost.

“Do not be surprised if the poetic emerges from deep within the bowels of the ordinary.” Nice typography (at least in the title) and elegant graphic elements on a mundane scheduling document.

“Travel to the edge of anything and the path becomes much more seductive than the noted destination.” Collecting and collaging is the fun part. Finding the connections among the pieces (they are there, or at least can be imagined) is the breaking away from process.

“Nurture an appreciation of the mundane.” Again, the unnoticed elements make life beautiful, like this piece of paper that has been textured by being dragged over the pavement again and again.

Context and added value

I'm focusing on the ideas of context as well as details that enhance the context. When I wrote down a conversation a few weeks back, I wasn't able to transcribe every word, so the statements don't make any sense when read out of context. When you're listening to a conversation and you miss a few words, you understand that there was information that would validate what you did hear, as well as nonverbal communication. When viewed as purely written statements, there is something missing that would help validate it further. The context and the supporting details go hand-in-hand. There is an added element in an interaction that is lacking in a transcription, that is why a screenplay is so much different than watching the actual drama being enacted. There is "added value" in the enacted version.