Survey of Media & Design, Week 1:
Our instructor, Chris Williams, gives us surveys to find out
about our individual tastes, experiences, and interests.

Survey of Media & Design, Week 2:
The aforementioned instructor gives us individual assignments with
subject matter intended to be the polar opposite of our natural bents.

This is why I spent two weeks designing book jackets for Commodified Evil’s Wayward Children: Black Metal and Death Metal as Purveyors of an Alternative Form of Modern Escapism.

Was he challenging my values or poking fun at my innocence? I kind of wondered.

This is what I had at the beginning of the third week of class. We were supposed to continue working while Chris came around and gave us input.

I thought I was being pretty clever to use the humble rectangle to symbolize doors (“escapism”), mass production (“commodified”), menacing blackness, and EQ forms for the audio part. His input: It means so much that it means nothing.	I like typography and I thought the contrast and positioning was quite “knifey” and appropriate. His input: It’s totally clean Swiss design. Grunge it up.

Hm.

I was relieved to discover that he was just as interested in a smart and tasteful solution as I was, but a little wary of the advice, simply because it countered my typical design thought process.

I went with it, though. These two covers ended up thus:

On the white one, I narrowed down the message and ended up with a stronger image. And oh, how I love faux 3D – maybe even more than I love ambiguous minimalism. lol.

The black one was really where the breakthrough took place. You see, I had been in somewhat of a design funk prior to this assignment. Developing my critical eye had brought me to the belief that 99% of design choices are wrong, and that I was always aiming for a microscopic target called “Good Design.” I felt paralyzed, unable to experiment without immediately criticizing in my head.

As I toppled and twisted the lines of types, I could feel the little white picket fences falling away. I could breathe; I was having fun! (I had actually forgotten that design was supposed to be fun.)

The problem with being told to ‘break rules’ is that there are many, many variables to affect (size, spacing, weight, positioning, angle, etc.) I had nothing to govern my choices anymore, so I felt lost. When I explained this to Chris, his advice was, “find a visual relationship that looks wrongly right, and then make that happen elsewhere again… and again… and again.”

Wow!  A principle of grunge that I could run with. So you see my result above. It isn’t wrongly perfect, but for a first attempt in this style, I was quite excited.

Education really should be a form of tough love. I feel like I have gone to school for two years without having been challenged through feedback. To be fair, many assignments must be completed within one week, so there is little opportunity for teachers to influence my work in progress. But this quarter, I have really seen the value of uncannily individualized advice. I also want to be able to give it in my areas of teaching!

Check out the PDF to see the whole project completed.