Andy Chung

Process Photo

animalyouth — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 01:35:42 +0000

Ipod and Macbook pro added on purpose to make me look like a better designer. In this photo:

Sample spreads from grad project
Foil stamped cover
Letter pressed promotional cards printed by Black Stone Press
Metal type supplied by Black Stone Press
Obama poster proof
Plastic burnisher
Metal ruler
Cutting matte
Crap
Lack of motivation

Foil Stamp round #1

animalyouth — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 04:55:15 +0000

Learning to foil stamp for my book cover. I need to go back and do a cleaner run at it since the “i” in brief is messed up. Emily Carr only uses the worn down type from the letterpress on their foil stamper which is a huge bummer and leads to messed up foil stamps, but I think from what I learned today I can go back and get a cleaner run at it. Also if anyone knows where you can buy single pieces of lead type that would be great, then I wouldn’t need to mess with the Emily Carr type selection.

Cover Ideas

animalyouth — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:50:18 +0000

Letterpressed Html tags something like : A brief selection of online conversation, but debossed so from far away you can’t see it but up close you see the title. Works with concept well because the entire publication is understated and the content only because apparent when you get up close. Same with title; only apparent when up close. Also bonus: letterpressing html tags is extremely ha-ha to me.

Nike certificate of authenticity: hidden images in dots. Hidden title in dots.

Unrelated

animalyouth — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 09:08:54 +0000

This is way more interesting that grad project stuff. For Type V. Archive of Obama’s Victory speech on 04/11/08.

Stuff from this week.

animalyouth — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:07:55 +0000

To come – Finish book and content in next 2 weeks. Work on cover and collateral. Experiment and mess around at the same time.

Weight off my shoulders

animalyouth — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 21:37:22 +0000

One of my main concerns with this project was having adequate time to produce and manufacture my book. I was looking around like crazy for a place that wouldn’t charge an arm and a leg for binding, and I think I’ve come to a pretty adequate solution. Do it myself. It’s really a lot easier than I thought it would be to produce a professional looking perfect bound document. Here’s my first foray into it, stitched glued and bound. 64 blank pages with a cardstock softcover.

If anyone is interested in doing this themselves I got my tutorial off this site, and built my book press by screwing two 2×4′s together and putting my book inbetween them.

I no longer know what I am doing

animalyouth — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:09:25 +0000

So this book is just getting really confusing and I feel like I have no idea what is going on. I messed with the transparency idea and I think it looks cool, although I haven’t really gotten much of a response as far as the concept behind it goes. Is this interesting or is it just crap? I really really need to know.

This is the readable full text without the overlay

This is the text with the overlay, creating a new way of reading the text/pull quotes that will work similarly to what I had before (creating binaries)

What I think was interesting was what happened when I started pulling the pages apart and placing the overlay on pages it wasn’t intended for. This is what happened in this spread:

original:

accidental overlay:

Not sure where that’s going at all. I’m not going to worry so much about this stuff right now and finish off getting my content, I’m sick of looking at these sex conversations.

Ideas ripening

animalyouth — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 05:29:59 +0000

Last week I got kind of dealt with by my mentors in terms of my project lacking in concept – not that the project lacked a concept but the execution did. I was struggling with ways to make the material simply a static book, and to have the reader genuinely interact with the piece to provoke further discourse.

Many of the ideas and questions that were brought up last week:

Why not have the book (if it to be a book) come with a writing utensil, so the viewer knows what to do right off the bat
Having stickers and movable pieces, charts that the reader creates rather than charts that are static
Materials: Going into staples and seeing what is at my disposal, don’t just stick to what I know
Why perfect bound? Why not cerclox or other less refined methods

Basically what they were asking was what is my reasoning for what I am doing. I didn’t really have any but I have thought some things through. I’ve come up with some new ideas and concepts for the execution.

Old Idea and Direction
Last week I had the idea of having the comment form at the end of each chapter. I feel like this was a half step into one direction, and if I were to have the book be an invitation to have the reader to write in it I would want to go full on activity book, rather than half assing it. I no longer feel like this is a direction I want to pursue as part of the original purpose of this project (outlined in the proposal) was to give the book a feel of permanence and importance. Printed material has a certain “object of desire” which would absolutely be ruined if the viewer were invited to write and deface the piece. I think if anything that would take away the value given to the information by putting it in the printed medium.

New Shit
My concept which I have been playing with in my head is the idea of layers. The project fundamentally has two layers to it; the voice of the conversations which take place on the internet, and my voice (no matter how neutral and transparent it is). Playing with this idea of layers I feel like the book could also take on, literally, two layers. The first layer being the printed material, the very book like structure of the conversations pulled from the web. The second layer would be printed on some sort of transparency, ideally something very thin and delicate (ultra thin vellum? bible paper thinness…) which would overlay each and every spread. This transparent layer would act as the layer which provokes interaction and discourse from the reader. It would feature visualizations of the information, blocking out of text forcing the viewer to look behind and to create new meaning, and the linking of related/unrelated/binaries within the text. Through this peering behind “die cuts” (not really die cuts just holes of unprinted space) the viewer is forced to interact with the book in an untraditional way. This could be the peering behind the transparency, rotating the book etc. The thinness of the transparent layer also lends itself to a certain precious quality which only reinforces the nature and intention of the publication. This is also a reason for perfect binding, I guess ideally this thing would be a hardbound publication to really reinforce it’s permanent nature.

Here is a picture of some sketches regarding this dual layer idea, connect the dots and blocked out areas resulting in pull quotes/highlighting of information through hiding of information.

And just remembering the purpose of this project.

For the purposes of my graduate project I intend to research and
explore the ephemeral nature of the conversations and interactions made
possible by Web 2.0 sources and in turn use this information to create
a physical artifact. The physical object will be creating permanence out
of something ephemeral and convoluted, and something tangible out of
something digital. While online users are notoriously impatient and tend to
scan digital text rather than read it (Nielson), a printed object would give
the selected text the emphasis it would otherwise lack online. The benefit of
printing a collection of online discourse is that it offers a genuine insight into
the minds of a huge and very diverse population; the publication becomes
the political, humorous, or controversial conversations that take place at the
bar, on the bus or in the classroom that never get recorded.

The project feels really ambitious to me now, and I am pretty worried about finishing it off. Here is one final picture for Don.

Met with mentors

animalyouth — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 08:19:37 +0000

Got ass kicked. Re-thinking concepts for next week. Hoping for lesser ass kicking in a week. Here’s a picture of some related things that will probably no longer be related.

New Blog & New Post

animalyouth — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 04:27:43 +0000

So long story short my old blog located at animalyouth.com/blog got it’s mysql database overwritten by a friend of mine and basically it is all gone. Sad. Anyway, this will be my new project blog from now on so here’s a little update.

The other day I met with some classmates after class for an informal critique, and here are some things I pulled from it…

Space inbetween – making comments within the text
Creating participation through mad libs
Notes should be intertwined – smaller pages?
Coffee table book
Magnetic words, arrangement of words
Learning through entertainment
Visuals being unassuming is good

I also put together my first chapter into a booklet to see how the flow is. Here are some of the spreads from that.

Also here is a little preview of how this thing will flow. Animated gifs are trendy.

That’s it for right now. Rest of the week is dedicated to inserts and interaction within the pages.