Day Three in Boston…

After our interviews this morning we rode the green line to the Financial District and then walked over to the North End and saw a bunch of shops and restaurants in Little Italy. It was interesting. I think Little Italy in NY is a bit more authentic, but Boston has Manhattan whopped on bakeries. There was this incredible little place called Mike’s Pastries and it was awesome. Since we were in Little Italy I had to have a cannoli and it was super good. I also bought this hunk of Italian bread that I just munched on while we walked around.

We ate lunch at this little Mom and Pop hole in the wall called the Theo’s Corner Café. It was great. I had a plate of spaghetti and meatballs for four bucks. That was the first time I got to kick Boston back financially. We also saw some historic stuff like Paul Revere’s house and some old churches and shopping districts. We walked all the way to the shore, but the cold wind was like a brisk ice water slap in the face and we had to pack it in.

Later for dinner we hit an Irish Pub, but I had to turn in early due to a rough migraine. Tomorrow we are going to try and visit the Contemporary Art Center. I’m also looking forward to getting back home and seeing the kiddies.

Trip to Boston (still in progress)…

Julie and I arrived in Boston on Wednesday night at about 6:30 PM. After checking into the hotel and calling the fam to let then know that me made it O.K., we decided to go out and explore the city and find something to eat. Both of us have been so redunkulously busy lately that neither of us had time to prep for the trip. We knew where nothing was and didn’t even have a map. So, we just decided to walk until we found someplace that looked like it would have good local seafood.

We ended up at this place called the Atlantic Seafood Company. It’s a nicer place (by that I mean a little more expensive than I expected), but holy crap man, was that some gooooooood seafood. The place gets fresh fish in everyday—they even reprint their menus every day to keep up with the latest deliveries. We both had some clam “chowda” in a bread bowl and then we had some appetizers too (fried clams and some Italian style calamari). Really great stuff. Nothing like that in the Midwest. Since it was already late, we headed in for the night and prepared for our interviews the next day (well actually today).

I woke up early this morning and we had some morning interviews. During the lunch break we headed over to the mall which is connected to our hotel. Had some lunch, hit the Barnes and Noble for a map and headed back for the afternoon interview. After we were finished interviewing we decided we would hop on the subway and head out to Harvard to look around. We only had to take two trains to get there and it was a pretty fast and easy to navigate trip. The trains run on a color system and their direction is either called “in” or “out” of the city. So, we took the green in and transferred to red and took that out to Harvard. (I sound like a Bostonian already!). All the people that we’ve run into on the street and asked for help are super friendly. This is really a great city. It has the feeling of Manhattan, but a little smaller and much cleaner, and even a bit safer I think. And what’s pretty interesting is that an authentic, rich, blue collar Boston accent almost sounds like another language.

Anyway, back to Harvard. Harvard was pretty cool. Surprisingly, it was much more “touristy” than I expected—with gift shops, restaurants, the whole bit. But most of that was close to the stop where you get off of the train, once you walk into campus more it’s pretty much like you expect. Beautiful, old architecture everywhere you look. You really get a sense of how committed they are to their physical institution. Every building is brick or marble with wood all over the inside and they all have the feeling of giant old Catholic schoolhouses. It’s worth a visit. But, by far, the best part about Harvard was the Fogg Art Museum. When we first got there I was kind of bummed because I had to pay to get in, and I was considering whether or not it was really worth it to pay to get into just some university art museum. But man alive, it was absolutely worth it! What an incredible collection of stuff! There is one room that has Monet, Manet, Lautrech, Matisse, VanGogh and Picasso all right across from one another. And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. They have so many significant wonderful examples of work from a great range of artists. I even snapped off a few pictures of a Moholy-Nagy and a El Lissitzky before the security guard caught me. See below. I’ve never seen a Lissitzky before in person—very cool.

After taking the trains back from Harvard we met up with a former NKU student who now lives in Boston and he told us of this great sandwich shop that we went to called the Parish House. Great food, but again I spent too much money. This trip is great, but I think it’s going to break me. I see a lot of McDonalds in my future ; )

More interviews tomorrow during the day and later we’re heading to the North Shore to see all of the historic stuff. In addition to all of the landmarks, I hear there are some authentic mom and pop bakeries there that I will have to patronize. I’ll let you know how it goes.

A New Blog is Born!

Lately I’ve been looking for a way to renew my enthusiam in blogging. I thought of something that may be pretty exciting as long as it doesn’t land me in jail. I started a new blog that is completely open to the public for anyone to post whatever they want. Check it out here: http://www.differenteveryhour.blogspot.com. The username and password are in the heading of the homepage so you really can log in and make a post of anything. I imagine there will be some idiot that puts kiddie porn on there I’ll have to delete, but this site should work as an incredible social experiment.

Pass it on, tell your friends and assuming it gets popular, it should be different every hour.

An Email From Fenny…

So today I got the following email:

On Feb 17, 2006, at 8:17 PM, Fenny wrote:

Hi Tobias Brauer,

My name is Fenny, I'm a graphic design student
But now I really have big problem, which i cannot come up with any idea. How do I resolve that? I mean how usually graphic designer think? I spent so much for one project, but i cannot get idea, or concept, I mean blank, don't know what to do or suppose to do. I'm really scare, and desperate now. So I just want to know how usually designer come up with an idea? Could you please help me here? I don't even know how to do brainstorming. Sorry I ask you this, i know this is stupid but i really need some advice.

Thank You,
Fenny

Here was my response:

I use three different techniques for brainstorming:

The first method is a bit strange and as far as I know, I’m the only one who can get it to work. The way it works is that I try to think of an impossible answer to my problem. For example if I’m designing a business card, I’ll say something like: “Okay, this business card is going to cure cancer.” It sounds crazy I know, but bear with me. I know that the business card really isn’t going to cure cancer, but I start to think about how it could be possible that it would do such a thing. Maybe it’s made of a cellular medicinal material that melts as soon as it touches your skin. Maybe it has the ability to alter DNA if eaten. Whatever… And as I start to think about these different scenarios all of these visual design ideas also pop into my head. For example with the DNA thing, I start to think about how DNA mapping looks on those film negative images, or a sequence of a particular strain of numbers or letters. And now that I have some visual ideas, I start to try and apply those to the specific project I am working on. Will it somehow fit my client? Okay that’s method one. I told you it was a bit strange.

Method two: The old list technique. What I do here is take a piece of paper and a pencil and “just have at it” with all of the words that start to pop into my head associated with this idea. For example if I am thinking about an ad campaign idea for a soap company, my list would start like: bubble, suds, clean, wet, water, chemicals, smell, perfume, pink, etc…And I would go on and on like this for at least 100 words. The key to being successful with this one is that there are no dumb ideas. If you’re thinking about the soap company and the word “motorcycles” pops into your head you still have to write it down and add it to the list. The next step in this method is to number all of the items and find a way to randomly start to put them together. The more random and unusual the combination the better. It would be great to combine say “motorcycles” and “bubbles” and see where you could head with that. Maybe it’s a campaign about tough cleaning soap that’s for a sensitive “Hell’s Angel” or something. Or maybe there’s some kind of idea that could come from bubbles racing all over the dirt and cleaning very quickly. Or maybe the latest bubble character could wear a leather jacket and have a tattoo. Whatever… See how it works?

Method three is by far the most fun, but also the most dangerous. It’s very simple: You just go somewhere you’re not allowed to be and pay attention. For example: Get a clipboard, put on a tie and walk behind the counter at McDonald’s whether you work there or not. Just start walking around back there like you’re some kind of supervisor checking up on them. You may or may not get caught, but the success of this idea usually comes from the thrill of “maybe” getting caught. In those few brief moments when you’re risking getting in trouble your adrenaline is probably in an overload mode. All of your senses are heightened and if you use that thrill to pay attention, you can notice all sorts of details that you would not have ordinarily experienced. Maybe there’s a weird wallpaper back there, or maybe the manager has an unusual hair color, or perhaps there’s some kind of cool contraption back there for cookin’ up the patties…Whatever! The idea is that your going to get to see new stuff and that new stuff is going to make you think differently. Maybe that wallpaper pattern would make a great geometric background in your design. Maybe that hamburger cooker is made up of all of these cool shapes. I used to teach this method regularly in my classes until one day when one of the student groups with this task decided they would go joy riding in a campus police car for their influence! Somehow or rather, we all escaped that one without getting into any real trouble, but this method is sort of a “try it at your own risk” technique.

Good luck Fenny. I hope you do well on your project.

-Tobias


The picture above is the latest trophy winner from Illustration: Tommy Yacchari.

“Um…Do You Know Carson Palmer?”

Over this past Christmas holiday, my Aunt asked me if I would be willing to come and give a talk at a local private grade school on working as an artist professionally. At the time, the first Thursday in February seemed like awhile away and it’s pretty hard to say no to your Godmother, so I said “sure.”

Well, I forgot all about it until she reminded me yesterday and as a result I didn’t really take the time to prepare something for it as I should have, but as it turns out it didn’t really matter much. I always thought I would dread something like this, but the kids were so genuine and sweet that I could’ve been talking about being a potato farmer or creating a new type of waffle and they would’ve gotten about the same amount of information out of the talk.

Since I really had nothing prepared, I went through the usual spiel about how I arrived at design, where I went to school, blah, blah, blah. And then I posed a question to the group asking them to define graphic design. Some of them had some decent ideas here and there. They knew about logos and signs and junk and one of them even brought up “pinstriping.” (They ranged in age from 5th through 7th grade, so that last one surprised me a bit.) After I started to explain to them all of the different places in their life where they can find graphic design and how much they use it everyday, it may have sunk in for about three or four of the 100+ kids I was speaking to. But the interesting thing for me was just how polite and attentive they were trying to be, even if what I was saying made no sense to them.

Well that was enough of me talking, so I started the question and answer session by asking them what some of their favorite logos were, and their responses sounded like they were reading line for line off of the mall directory kiosk. Aeropostel, American Eagle, Old Navy and on and on and on. This went on for probably 10 minutes. Realizing that we were getting a bit off track, I asked if any of them had any “questions” about graphic design. One of them then asked me if I had designed anything that they would recognize or was famous. I started to tell them how I’ve done some design work for the group of surgeons that work on the Cincinnati Reds and Cincinnati Bengals and that they may have seen my logo and advertisement designs for them in the baseball program or on some television commercials. Another hand then goes up. (This is when it really got great.)

“So, Um…do you know Carson Palmer?”

“Uhhh, no. No I don’t.”

Another hand.

“Yes?”

“Do you know Ken Griffey Jr.?”

“No. I met him once, but I don’t really know him.”

Another hand,

“Yes, you?”

“Ummm…so, do you think Carson Palmer will be okay?”

“Yeah, I think he’s going to be just fine.”

“Good. ’Cause I was pretty worried.”

Another hand.

“So most of what you do is really for girls right?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, the stuff you make is all for stuff that gets bought, and everybody knows that girls are the ones who buy stuff.”

“Well, I’m not sure that’s entirely true. It probably goes both ways.”

Another hand goes up.

“Can I have your autograph?”

“Sure.”

It was just about then when the moderator wrapped up the presentation session and that was it. Teaching college students is very, very, very different from teaching in a grade school. I’m definitely working in the right place.

Today Was Supposed To Be A Trophy Day!!!

We finally had the first final crit in Illustration today, and I forgot all about the freakin’ trophy! For the first assignment I had the students working on spot illustrations. I know for sure who would’ve won the stinking thing too—darnit! I’ll give it to him on Monday and snap a picture then.

A friend and colleague of mine here at NKU, Tom Davie has a solo painting show up in the small gallery right now. It’s a great collection. He’s been working like mad lately on his paintings ever since he made the decision to ditch us and go pro (I guess I can say that in public now, right Tom? Hence, our current graphic design faculty search.). Anyway, it’s paying off, because his work is super nice. The Parishioner Series is a cool mix of all the great things that can be visually appreciated about both painting and graphic design. He has recently launched a blog for his painting studio: studiotwentysix2, and of course its main focus right now is the show. It’s worth stopping by to see the photos of the work.

No luck on getting a signed Chip Kidd book. Julie couldn’t make it to the evening event. Oh well. I may just buy another copy and mail it to him and request a signature. I’ll let you know if it works out.

In a strange, unrelated and useless factoid, for some reason my profile views right now are at 666! Freaky, huh? Please encourage your friends to click on my face (over there to the left) really soon, so Old Beezlebub doesn’t get me.

I’ve been looking for another excuse/reason to get back to Germany soon. This looks like a good one.

As I am writing this post, I just got an email that says UC’s AIGA Student chapter is hosting a lecture by Rebeca Méndez tomorrow night at 7:00 pm. Is it bad that I don’t recognize her name? Well, it’s off to Google I go to learn more about her.

Listening: German II, Unit 7.
Reading: Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess.