NEW: Tips and Tricks.

As mentioned before, I’m leaving white for what it is, and I decided to start from scratch.

Lately I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learned so far, after these 4 years. Well, I concluded that I’m almost graduated and don’t feel like I know what I should know about graphic design. There are some crucial things they just didn’t teach us. And that’s why I decided to make a kind of guide/tips and tricks for the Sint Lucas student. These guides will help them to be more succesful and to grow better and faster as a graphic designer.

There will be a little book for each year + the entrance exam. The idea is that students will get a book at the start of each year.

The size of these books will get bigger because the student will grow as a person and graphic designer during the 4 year program.

The amount of pages will decrease, since the student will have less and less to learn.

These verbs will represent the structure of the books. I’ve chosen these 8 verbs because they are phases in ‘the creating process’ of a student/designer.

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The Whiteness of Obama.

I had this idea to do research on the whiteness of Obama (->power). Not white as in white race, but more in a symbolic way. By showing how neutral, pure, honest,… he is. etc.

I planned on using his speeches to do that. I started out indicating the pauses and did work on the neutrality aspect too.

I also edited one of his speeches:

Pauses can be added in many places to add impact to your communications.

• Pause after somebody has spoken and before you speak.
• Pause before a punchline or particularly important point to increase tension and add Emphasis. Pausing at irregular points can also increase tension.
• Pause after a punchline or important points in order to let it sink in.
• Pause between a request phrase and command phrase in the same request sentence.
• Combine pauses with dramatic action, such as uncovering a new product, pointing to something important, etc.
• Use hesitation devices such as ‘ers’ and ‘ums’ to prevent people from interrupting during the pause.<!– hesitation devices –>
• Use Body Language signals to emphasize the pause. A simple way of doing this is to freeze the body, perhaps with an expectant expression on your face. Knowing smiles and looking around whilst making eye-contact also is effective.

source:

http://changingminds.org/techniques/language/persuasive/pauses.htm

Moby Dick.

If there’s one book where the writer plays with the symbolic value of white, it must be Moby Dick.

Herman Melville explored the color white in the chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale.”

“From a very young age, popular media teaches us that we can spot the good guys from a mile away, based solely on their entirely white costumes. This small piece of conventional wisdom presents a serious problem for Moby Dick?s readers, as Herman Melville shrouds his title character, the vicious, homicidal whale in the color traditionally reserved for heroes. Without a close reading of the text, the simple fact that the whale is associated with white might be enough to convince the reader that he is in fact the hero of the story. However, this is not the case, as close reading of the text suggests only Moby Dick?s fundamental ?naturalness? as well as the whale?s ability to serve as a metaphor for the color, and, in turn all of those things for which the color itself serves as a metaphor. The effects of Melville?s decision to employ the whale in such a way are numerous, spanning from the simple, unnerving juxtaposition of the color?s purity with the whale?s monstrosity, to a complex, subtle condemnation of racism.”

source:

http://www.academon.com/lib/paper/6659.html

White on White.

There’s this book called ‘White’, I might have mentioned it before, from Stéphanie Busuttil. The book is a collection of pictures showing ‘white art’.

The book starts with an interesting essay/introduction by Pierre Sterckx called ‘White on White’. In my opinion and from my point of view he talked about a lot of things that weren’t relevant for my project and made it just more complicated for me to understand. I erased/whitened these lines of text to give the usefull text more attention and breathing space.

Update.

I decided to stop working on ‘the power of white’ since it’s just not working for me. First, I’m gonna update this blog with some stuff I worked on a while ago when I was still doing the white thing, and will then tell you sth more about what I’m doing right now.

Martin Margiela

A while ago I visited the exhibition of fashion designer Martin Margiela at the MoMu in Antwerp. I just uploaded the pictures I took that day on my computer. Anyone who knows Martin Margiela, knows he has a thing with the colour white.

Great video.

Great video from the us designstudio.

Abstract animation.

I made an abstract animation about white light.

Click here to see it.

White: all or nothing?

So far, after a lot of reading, seeing and hearing, I can conclude that white ain’t just white. White can be distinguished in 2 opposite meanings. Or white is everything, or white is nothing. On the one hand you can understand white as light, and on the other hand white as in matter.

I guess most people would see white as nothing, achromatic and empty, and wouldn’t even call it a colour. Which, in a way, is correct. But, I believe, the opposite is even more true.

As mentioned before, light is white. White, in this meaning, exists out of all the colours of the spectrum. Without that (white) light we would be lost in a black, dark world, where colours would have no meaning at all.

Since I’m searching for the ultimate power of white, this contradiction is pretty important, ’cause it shows that white probably has more than one ultimate power. In the approach of ‘white is nothing’, I would (now) say it is its neutrality that makes white powerful. If you believe ‘white is everything’, well, the fact that it is everything, or at least makes everything what it is, that is the power of white.