Travel and Creativity

Kelmscott House, the former home of William Morris

History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed;
art has remembered the people, because they created. –William Morris

We create new ideas and images using the information we have, including art, design, textures, scenes, sounds smells and culture. Travel feeds your creativity by expanding your source material. Travel gives you time to think while in transit on planes, trains and boats. Travel takes you away from your computers. Travel allows you to see the familiar  in a new light.

Travel makes you appreciate home like never before.

I just returned from two weeks in the UK. We flew into London and traveled by train throughout Scotland. Britain is a paradise for lovers of art, design and architecture. Most of their world-class museums have free entry and are well maintained and designed.

On a personal note, I revisited William Morris’s Kelmscott House in Hammersmith where I lived many years ago when I was studying calligraphy and bookbinding in London as part of my graduate study. My fellow students were all studying some aspect of Morris, including political thought, epic poetry, utopian literature, calligraphy, stained glass and tapestry design, pattern design, typography, furniture design and fine printing.

You can link to our full UK travel blog here: artpoints2010.wordpress.com

“Every design problem has a craft basis.” Saul Bass

When I work with real, physical materials of any kind, they give back to me in a way that hours at my (beloved) MacBook never does.

After seeing the terrific film,  Julie & Julia, I was reminded of a quote by Saul Bass that I recently encountered in an article by Ralph Caplan.

Bass describes “fooling with cut paper” as the path to developing his simple, brilliant design.

Creativity suffers when our daily lives become more and more divorced from cooking real, unprocessed food, weeding the garden or writing a greeting card by hand.

Communication and work have migrated to the keyboard, where we can get much more done with such stellar efficiency.

I am inspired to unearth my ancient, battered copy of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” to make Julia Child’s cheese soufflé for the first time in many years.  It is time to fool around in the kitchen. Hold my email!

Readers–I need some encouragement. Please leave a comment!

Creating a panorama in Photoshop

Panorama of the Getty Villa in Malibu, PHOTOMERGED  from four individual shots.

We were driving north from LA last week and made a stop at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. What a lovely place! It is not a large museum, but the collection is of very high quality in a diversity of areas including ancient art, European and American painting, Asian art and Contemporary Art. For more about the Museum, read my review at Artpoints.net

Panorama of the entrance to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art

I took three digital photos of the Museum entrance and used Photoshop’s PHOTOMERGE function to create a panorama. If you have never done this, it is amazingly easy;

1. Take two or more digital photos of a landscape or architectural vista (I used three shots). No need for a tripod, Photoshop will correct for minor differences. Make sure that there is some overlap between each view.

2. Open the photos in Photoshop.

3. FILE>AUTOMATE>PHOTOMERGE

4. Browse or Add Open Files and click OK.
Photoshop will now create a panorama with a separate  layer and layer masks for each photo.

Before flattening the image, you can edit the layer masks as I did to remove a red car that drove into one of my shots.

original shot no car

original shot with unwanted car, before Photomerge

Merged panorama after editing the layer mask to hide the car

5. If you do not like what you got, go back and experiment with different settings.

6. If you want to do some stretching and correcting around the edges, you must first flatten the image into a single layer. Save a copy of your original if you think that you might want to do more editing.

Then…
EDIT>TRANSFORM>WARP

7. When you are happy with the result, use the Crop Tool to get rid of the ragged edges.

8. Your panorama is ready!

Living the History of Desktop Publishing

I spent the last few days compiling a History of DTP for the enlightenment of my Fall Desktop Publishing class. What should have taken me a few hours, became a two day project as I scoured the Web, finding ever more interesting material.

I learned Illustrator 88 in 1988, when no one knew much about it. We had only the confusing manuals to guide us. I recall weeping in frustration into my keyboard  over the Pen Tool. The program shipped on a floppy disk.

Photoshop debuted late in 1989. At that time, there were no consumer level scanners, digital cameras or color printers. To get prints of our Photoshop files, we set up film cameras on tripods in front of our computer monitors and shot film.

We had no idea of being deprived. We were too busy learning exciting new skills.

To see and download the entire presentation, go to:  http://www.artpoints.net/dtp.html

Winning in Las Vegas without gambling

We recently made a short trip to Las Vegas to visit friends and see the fabulous Crique du Soleil production, KA. We loved the new Monorail and stayed as far clear of the casinos as we could manage.

We attended a meeting of the Las Vegas chapter of the AIGA to see a screening of a new documentary about the legendary designer Milton Glaser and won a signed copy of a reproduction of the iconic Dylan Poster from 1966. It is at the framers now!

Web Design Projects

HollyNewtonArt.com

This is a portfolio site for a friend.
I choose the paper-texture/letterpress theme to compliment Holly’s love of natural materials. One interesting challenge was showing the unframed paintings to their best advantage. My solution was to purchase photos of empty frames from istockphoto.com. In Photoshop, I set the layer blending mode of the full-color frames to LUMINOSITY to harmonize with the blue color palette of the site. Photoshop is an amazing tool for design.

Blumen Biodynamic Skin Care

This site is for an invented skin care company. I used photos of the flowers in my garden to design the packaging, navigation and sidebars.

Deutsche Grammophon

The assignment was the redesign of an existing corporate site in the music category. I designed a new logo using a softer version their existing yellow and gray color palette. In the existing site, an unreadable logo is fighting a loosing battle with the tag line. I feel that this company needs to undertake a full overhaul of their visual identity. My design presents one possible direction.

My web design final

I felt a real sadness after class, my year of being a student is concluded. I have learned so much from this experience. When I take my place on the other side of the desk, it will be with a new appreciation for the anxieties and pressures of being a student.

Hello world!

I am coming to the end of my sabbatical year of studying web design at Santa Monica College.

One of the reasons for this sabbatical leave is that technology in computer graphics is evolving so quickly that it is nearly impossible to stay current while carrying a full teaching load. I experienced this acutely even within the short time span of an academic year. In Fall 2008,  we worked with Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, and over Winter break, SMC converted to CS4 for Spring 2009. CS4 is a giant step in the migration to CSS standards in web design, and for me, there was a whole new learning curve. It has taken some time, but now I prefer the new CSS technology.