Typographic systems

Have you ever wondered yourself that you have the talent to be an artist?
This Tuesday I spent whole day (and night) to make almost 40 layouts of 8 kinds of frameworks for the advanced typography class. I’m glad that my works caught others’ eyes. When I was trying to arrange these 8 kinds of framework, I found out that random system and transitional system were easier and freer to do than the other 5 systems and the result was equally good.
The assignment asks us to develop a set of directions. Unfortunately, I’m a person with little sense of directions. So I always print out the direction from Map request and highlight all the turns, street names, free way exits, and other landmarks that are important. Naturally, when I design the poster for directions, I capitalize all the turns, street names, and free way exits just to be considerate for drivers like me. In addition, I made it easy and arranged left turn directions on the left and right turn directions on the right. I also used spaces between directions to show scales of real distances.
Further, from the notes of Typographic Systems by Kimberly Elam, I learn that nonobjective elements, such as rectangular strokes, circles, rules and tone, can attract attention, control hierarchy and the compositional texture of the message. However, they need to be carefully placed or used so that will avoid overwhelming the message. I think this is very usefully and need to experiment in many ways.

John Maeda's art works

Simplicity

Because of a class assignment, I got a chance to know one of the outstanding graphic designer in this century-- John Maeda. John Maeda, a programmer and an artist, is a pioneer of linking design and technology successfully. I was fascinated by his speech at TED.com. The speech was about his recent book Laws of Simplicity and how he came up with the idea of simplicity. I really enjoy his clear and humor way of speech. Also, I like the digital calendar which was a bunch of flying letters jumping out from the bottom of the imagine, though it's kind of complex. However, just as he mentioned that man love complexity. As a graphic design student, I really encourage other students see this speech.
When a civilization came to a certain kind of over-developed, human being came to realize that what is more important to himself and what is real beauty; not all the material things or our outlook, on the contrary, it's the simplicity of the life, ourself. I guess that's why a successful and well known artist, John Maeda, try to simplify his life and art work off course.