Storytelling and Simplicity (4/20/11)

The theme for this week’s class was still storytelling. On Wednesday morning, we laid out our homework assignment and walked around class looking at everyone’s work. The assignment was to choose three images that were unrelated to one another and that just by looking at the images in a certain order, it would tell a story. The majority of the images people chose did a very well job in conveying their stories. There were a few stories that Professor Jimmy chose and put them up on the wall. These were images that he didn’t quite get the concept of the story. We later on discussed them in class. For my images, I chose an empty plate, which looked like it had crumbs and sprinkles left on it, a curious looking girl, and an English bulldog lying on its stomach. I thought that this expressed a very cute story. There was an empty plate, a girl looking for her sweets, and a dog who looks like he’s/she’s very happy and possibly full. My images were one of the few that were put up on the wall. What I didn’t pay close attention to was what the curious girl was looking at. All I noticed was the curious girl. I didn’t pay attention to her surroundings. It turned out that she was looking at an oven door. Or more like looking to see what was cooking inside the oven. So when the images were put together, it didn’t quite make sense to have an empty plate, a girl looking into the oven, and a happy dog. Now, if I had cropped out the oven and only left the curious girl, it would have made a lot more sense. Some of my classmates understood the story. They thought that the little girl was looking through a window or screen door, looking for either the dog or for the missing sweets. I now know that I need to pay closer attention to my work and the images I choose. I want to be as clear as possible when I am telling a story. Especially when I am doing work for a client. I need to be extremely clear on what I communicate to them because I want to make sure that they fully understand me.

Also in class, Professor Moss shared with us a book called French Fries by Dennis Bernstein and Warren Lehrer. This book’s format is like no other book I’ve seen before. It is a very creatively made book. The story is written as a play and inside it has an enormous amount of graphic designs and typography. When reading the book, you know it’s a different person speaking because each person’s dialog has a specific font color and font face to represent him or her. When I tried to look for this book on Amazon.com, I was blown away by how expensive this book is. For a brand new book, its $1,100.00 and used is from $250.00. That is insane.

For the remainder of the class, we got the chance to watch another TED talk. The speaker’s name was John Maeda. His name did not sound familiar to me, so I Googled his name and found out that he is a world-renowned graphic designer, visual artist, computer scientist and educator. He is currently the President at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He wrote a booked called Laws of Simplicity. His talk was very intriguing. It really grabbed my attention and he was very funny too. He has definitely experimented with anything and everything a computer has to offer. It was hilarious that he scanned French fries and created an image of French fry fields, and he also scanned in cheetos to create cheetos graphics. His whole theme is based on simplicity but as people, we love complexity. He ran statistics on how humans and simplicity are intertwined. How humans want simplicity, to be able to enjoy more in life, and want less work, or less pain. Everything in life has its ups and downs. As we get older, our brain strength, physical strength, vision and social responsibility will all eventually start to decline. But the positive side is that our wisdom is always growing. Also by being able to be apart of the TED experience, wisdom goes up at an even higher rate. I would one-day love to be able to afford to go to a live TED talk. I think it would be a very enlightening experience.