Murakami

     Turning “low art” and taking it to a higher degree of contemporary art, is the essence of Takashi Murakami. Subjects and ideas that are categorized as low culture are seamlessly integrated to higher forms of art and other media. His style called Superflat takes its roots from Japanese manga and anime, combined with contemporary western ideas. Andy Warhol’s method of turning everyday products and turning it into art was flipped around by Murakami, who took his art and applied it on them instead.

     

     Murakami doesn’t just create paintings and sculptures, he also is involved with commercial branding and merchandising, applying his eye catching and iconic style on high end brands. One of the high end brands that chose to collaborate with Murakami is Louis Vuitton. Vibrantly crisp colors and Japanese styling was used for one of Louis Vuitton’s signature bags, which was widely successful, becoming the most illegally copied bag ever.Murakami’s Superflat design is a stark contrast to the usually sophisticated and static Louis Litton designed bags. The colorful pattern shown in picture was applied on a white bag, showing complete trust in the marketability of Murakami’s art. It’s not every day that you find these clashing hues and multi colored eyes imprinted on a designer bag look appealing, but his art has been so popular and widely accepted that contemporary low culture designs like these are transferable to the high class fashion industry. Effortlessly blurring the line between art and commercial branding.

Comparison and Contrast:: Gap logo fiasco

                                         

     There’s a reason why the Gap logo has been running strong for 20 years. After previewing a new logo slated for a holiday marketing campaign, Gap immediately heard and listened to the response from the online community and scrapped their new logo design. Gap wisely listened to the outcry from the hundreds of replies on Facebook saying the same exact thing that the new logo could have been basically designed by an elementary school kid.

     Visually, both logos don't have many similarities. The only similarity that they share is the company logo and the ever present blue box. Everything else is changed, for example, the most glaring change would be the serif typeface to a bolder sans serif. They changed the company name from a slim white disposition to a black, heavy and enlarged type. The type of the company name itself can be a logotype, one can easily make an association with who the company is just by looking at the logo. The updated design looks clunky, unpolished and uninspired. The new logo shows that Gap is going to a completely new direction, which is definitely not good idea when you already have an established brand. Aesthetically, the old logo is refined, fully symmetrical with the lettering centered and surrounded by the dark blue box. On the other hand, the san serif logo is heavily left justified with the iconic dark blue box changed to a small fading blue afterthought at the end of Gap. From a design aspect, I believe that Gap did the right thing in staying with their 20 year old logo. At society’s rate of development, change is inevitable, it’s just that this change of logo isn’t the right one.

Design as Conversation: Banksy

        

        To chuck or not to chuck? Graffiti artist, Banksy, takes everyday street life and transforms it into a controversial work of art. The illegal nature of his work doesn’t stop Banksy from creating these one of a kind “street” art. Why conform and make art only for art museums and exhibits, when you can take existing symbols and give people a different spin on it. His art takes the shape of an existing structure and manages to show us his he views the world with the use of his creativity

        Banksy’s “Flower Chucker” is a powerful piece that we as a society, can learn something from. From what looks like a rebellious man, in a violent stance, a bouquet of flowers in hand ready to throw. Banksy’s political message of bringing peace instead of war is strongly conveyed in this piece. Removing the flowers from his hand, the man’s aggressive stance looks like he should be throwing a Molotov cocktail or a grenade. Instead he holds a colorful arrangement of flowers, ready to throw them and spread peace to all. Not only fine and other forms of commercial design allow communication between the artist/designer and their audience. This conversation between the artist and the audience is the determining factor to the message getting across. To me, graffiti like Banksy’s work communicate more strongly than some forms of art and design. Magically transforming a ragged wall on some nameless street corner into a political pro peace movement is a direct conversation between the artist and the viewers. 

Islands

          

                       Newcomer’s to the indie scene, The XX made noise in 2009 and just recently won the Mercury Prize, an annual music prize awarded for the best album from the UK and Ireland. The young trio from London, focuses on spacey, hypnotizing rhythmic beats, and intimate back and forth musings of between the lead singers. Their music gives me the feeling of vulnerability and honesty all wrapped up and delivered in delicately crafted simple beats and lyrics.  

                     The video that I wanted to analyze entitled Islands. I was never really into the indie scene until I heard this song. I was pretty much hooked onto the band after that. The video is a direct parallel to the heart of this band. Simply complex. It’s like an iceberg, the deeper you go, the more you’ll get their message. The video has the trio sit on a black couch in the middle of set that has X’s lit up on the back wall. Surrounding the trio are 3 couples, dancing to a tight 8 second set of choreography, which is repeated throughout the whole video. The first time I watched it, I didn’t get it at all. I just sat there thinking; hmm they just did the same thing like a hundred times…that was kind of cool? So then I watched it again closely and realized that after each repeated set, the dancers change a small part of the choreography. The intense stories of the 3 couples slowly unfold, with band monotonously still sitting there on the couch, fearing the inevitable. Simple design, complex message.

STONE SOUP

              

                Last Tuesdays Stone soup activity was pretty interesting. We were told to bring any arts crafts materials or anything we have around the house that would be an interesting addition to the “soup”. I just recently moved up here so I didn’t have any art materials to bring. I after a furious search all over my apartment, the ingredients that I ended up bringing are a bunch of colorful notecards, pipe cleaners and disposable spoons/forks. Armed with a bunch of random materials, then we were told to create something using the materials that we brought as inspiration. At first, my group and I were just throwing around ideas to see what we can make. Since our ingredient were random and limited, it was pretty hard to come up with an idea then try to create from scratch. We were heading in the wrong direction from the start but eventually figured out that we need to let the items that we brought, steer the direction of the project.

                The final product…Mr. Fredricks the octopus. We got the idea from looking at Christine’s shirt, which had an octopus that was holding something in each tentacle. The octopus was actually a good choice since there were 8 of us in the group, we can decorate our own tentacle with whatever we want. This made the piece a bit more personal since we all contributed to the final product. It was difficult to put together the octopus with all the random stuff that we got but at least the main idea of our project was clear to us. Sure, you definitely wouldn’t be able to guess that our humble octopus and his baby octopus scene is a depiction of daily student life in Davis but who’s counting anyway. All that matters is that we all came together, crafted an idea, and delivered as best as we can.

     Stay classy Mr. Fredricks 

                                                              

Zoom Zoom.

    There is just something about basketball shoe design that intrigues me. It requires the ability to create an aesthetically pleasing and marketable shoe that is also designed to be capable of performing in high competitive play. This balancing act is necessary in order to thrive in the athletic shoe industry. Eric Avar, a famous Nike shoe designer takes this idea and brings it to life with the Zoom Kobe V. Kobe Bryant approached Avar and asked him to develop a low cut and the lightest basketball shoe ever, capable of handling the stress of a full season. The design of the shoe is very unconventional. First, professional basketball players prefer to use high cut shoes that cover the ankle, mostly for support. Secondly, a light shoe usually demands less materials leading to a shoe without a lot of cushioning. These two big concerns were solved by molding the shoe in a way that it acts like an extension of the foot, what may seem like only visually pleasing design concepts on the outside of the shoe also plays a part in the shoe’s performance on the court

    To further extend the marketability and popularity of this shoe line, the designers also decided to produce plenty of colorways for the consumer. They wisely crafted some of these shoe colorways to resonate pop culture. The picture on the top is the Bruce Lee edition, the dominant yellow resembling the famous jumpsuit that Bruce Lee wore in the movie “Game of Death”. The shoe on the bottom is the Dark Knight edition. The caped crusader would’ve been proud of the stylized and updated color scheme that fit the design of the shoe. The Zoom Kobe 5 takes on past concepts and seamlessly integrates them into a new product, giving them a fresh new look.          

Lets have a toast.

The scene, a ballerina striking a pose and a worn down gray floor next to tattered green siding of a warehouse…sounds like a recipe for a rapper’s cover art? For the controversial Kanye West, most definitely. This is the album cover art for Kanye West’s new single “Runaway”. Displayed in bold red above the ballerina, there’s no mistaking that the artist wanted to make statement. Visually, the cover art is both enigmatic and simply designed. The last thing one would associate rap music with is a picture of a ballerina, but in this case, Kanye cleverly unifies the music and the packaging. The single is about telling the girl to runaway from him, with Kanye West admitting to his flaws, an catchy self-incriminating song with blunt lyrics like, “...Let’s have a toast for the jerkoffs! Every one of them that I know.” The design of the cover art and the song both convey the same message, strengthening it, daring and straight to the point.

The worn down and tattered surroundings that the pristine ballerina is in provides a gritty scene. Simplistic but carries a heavy tone. Moving the main subject, which is the ballerina, to the left side shows a fine use of negative space. I really like the muted color scheme used in this design; it’s bold and eye catching without being off-putting to the audience. The composition is well executed and designed to be ambiguous to the listener until they hear the song and fully understand the concept that the artist was trying to deliver.    

My first encounter with design...The Jeepney

Living in the Philippines when I was a kid, jeepneys were an everyday reminder of creative self-expression.  Jeepneys can be found everywhere and are the easiest and cheapest mode of public transportation. The main thing that intrigued me about these humble former US military jeeps was the fact each jeep was original. Sure, the basic structure of the vehicle is similar but I have never seen two jeeps with the same design. The driver or the owner starts out with a blank slate and then peppers the jeep with a taste of their personality. I can always remember the bright and usually clashing colors that cover the jeeps from bumper to bumper. In my view, they were not purely decorating these vehicles for aesthetic purposes but for expressing themselves in the only creative medium that they have access to.

The jeepney provides both form and function. They give the sometimes grey and dull poverty stricken streets a shot of life and energy. It would be pretty hard to imagine a bunch of plain silver military jeeps running up and down Philippine roadways. The range of creativity can also be noted as well, some jeep are painted with one or two basic colors and most of them are lively decorated with intricate designs. Even until today, whenever I go back home and flag a jeepney down, I’m still fascinated its design. Whether it has colorful flags, family crests, or sculpted metal horses on the hood, it’s a pleasant reminder of self-expression in their daily life.