Art dances

Line in Design
Last week I mentioned I love clean lines. Line creates movement, grouping and tension on a page. A blank page with nothing but a single brightly colored line can create more visual interest than a whole photograph. Photos cluttered with shapes and made up with thousands of colored pixels can’t compete with a simple razor sharp line.

All this talk of lines, got me curious about line in other art.

Line in Dance
Line is particularly important in dance. How the hands extend, how the back arches etc. The line of the human body is angular and straight, serpentine and curved. Coupled with movement, these lines combined to give us surprising visual reactions.

I remember going to a dance show in Ottawa in 2002 that featured contemporary dance mixed with Japanese traditional forms of dance. The choreographer contrasted the stillness of a single group movement with the soft S shaped movement from one dancer. The movement was so refreshing.

Let Dance Inspire your Design
In color and design class, we briefly touched on the concept of contrast. Nothing demonstrates the use of contrast of line like dance. Without the changes in line of the human body, dance would not exist. The little surprises from dance always inspire my design.

Go out and see a dance show, it might surprise you

Somethings to inspire you.

My Inspiration

Inspiration Drawn from the Past

Ok, so with all my moaning about the need for inspiration, I suppose I should actually take my own advice. I didn’t get the chance to go out and  do anything particularly new (too much homework).

Instead I went back in time to explore something that inspired me in the past. This image was taken by myself just outside of Shanghi in 2002.

Framing Windows and Webpages?

I love the pattern the windows form. its pretty basic by itself. But then they added those heavy block columns in between to make the pattern pop. Makes something boring really standout.

This juxtoposition of pattern with dark columns can be traslated to web site design. Instead of sticking to the normal convention of print design with thin gutters and wide columns. Why not play around with gutter spacing for dramatic effect?  

Too Busy, Need Inspiration

Work overload

Seven hours of color correction homework, another three in web design… the hours of homework will suck the life out of many students in web design and multimedia schools.

But is design school sucking the design right out of poor souls taking these classes?

Nurture your Creativity

Creativity is like that ficus that is looking so dead on your shelf or window ledge over there. Water it and it will look better. (brown is not a healthy color for your plant). But why not go over there and play it some music or pick it up and do the salsa with it and shake some of those dead leaves out. Even better why not feed it some wasabi and see what happens.

If your ficus deserves some TLC, doesn’t your creativity.  My creativity sure needs it. Late nights and tedious assignments picking dust off a badly scanned pictured, is sure to kill my creativity. Without some new infusion of inspiration, going to design school will be nothing more than learning a few extra Photoshop skills.

Go Do Something New

When was the last time I tried something new to get inspired? What about that dodgy restaurant down the street, or that adventure trip my best friend told me about last spring. Without the new things in our lives, we become stale as designers, not to mention boring people.

The Design Adventurer

We must always seek the new, be excited about the different, and be adventurers in the digital world. Shouldn’t all designers be adrenalin junkies of some sort? And if you are not how could you become one?

Color in the Movies

Bad Movies Saved by Good Color

There is something to be said about the importance of color design behind a movie. Normally an overlooked part of a great movie, it becomes a life preserver in a bad one.

Color in Film Can Make or Break a Movie

What film aficionado can forget the little girl in red in Schindler’s List. Or the use of slate grays, blacks and white that made an “abandoned by the system” Richard Kimble seem even more out of step with the world in the Fugitive. And even though I have never been a fan of Quentin Tarantino, I have to say his command over the cartoonish color palette in the two Kill Bill films’s made the violence less excruciating to watch.

Dull Movie Gets Color Boost

I recently watched Elizabeth the Golden Age. While admittedly, it was a pretty decent film. The long winding English history and the over dramatized ending dragged this film down.

What saved this movie from falling victim from “not well thought out squeal territory” was their use of vivid color. Given the drab Gothic stone architecture in all their location shots, the color of the costumes really showed through.

Each dress wore by her majesty, Elizabeth, had vivid jewel tones augmented the message of each scene in the film. Golden yellow opens the film depicting the carefree, playful interactions in the court. Regal purple shows a queen in command of her country’s destiny. Even a line was devoted to showing how wearing blue reminds Elizabeth of her fascination with sea going pirate Walter Raleigh. The color eye candy is what keeps the eyes captivated through this film.

Are You Thinking About Color

All this ruminating on color makes me wonder, how much thought do you put into use of color  when you design? With the heavy use of digital photographs making 4c becoming increasingly more ubiquitous does the average designer today ignoring a more conscious use of color design for convenience sake?