Variety Show

I got the chance to work on a poster for a Variety Show at the Mobtown Ballroom. I know that I sent out an email to everyone saying you should come check it out and you should. But I never got the chance to show you all what it looks like and since I think it looks pretty sweet hopefully you will too. I collaborated with a friend and illustrator Marissa Lanterman, she drew the portraits and we both worked on the design together. Come to the Variety Show!!!

Writing to Entertain

One point that I found interesting in Chapter 8 is the questions Zinseer wants us to ask ourselves before we begin writing like "What attitude am I going to take toward the material?" (Involved? Detached? Judgmental? Ironic? Amused?) Also in Chapter 10, Zinseer mentions that some writers like long latin words over short Anglo-Saxon words. I believe I found someone who has both these qualities in his writing and I find it very entertaining to read whatever comes out of his head. Some examples...

In the average day most of us brave a tempest of platitudes, advice, criticism, plans, and good, old-fashioned common sense. You have to budget money, pay your bills, respond to emails, and tolerate the tiresome discourse of the well intentioned and responsible.

On the other hand, maybe right after failing an exam in your second year of med school, you find yourself extremely distressed, so you call me to have a drink. As you get out of your car in Reservoir Hill, a roving band of feral cats overpowers you and you never make it to the front door. When I leave to go to the ballroom in the morning (let’s be honest, in the afternoon), I find a pile of bones and tendons, licked clean by the raspy tongues of countless man-eating felines.

Humor is the main staple in the blog posts that Michael writes on a somewhat regular basis. He always has a point to make and always gets to his point, but its usually through humor. I love to read his posts and I know everyone else does too.

COLORS

Here is a pretty cool site that will help you create color schemes for future projects. I'm sure most of you know about this already but I thought I would share it just in case. http://colorschemedesigner.com/

Call to Arms! not so much...

Last semester in my rhetorical criticism class I read a really interesting article about how the "We Can Do It" poster of WWII fame was not as famous as most of us think. Now maybe some of you knew this already but I did not and was fascinated by what people perceived as the truth about Rosie the Riveter.  the first myth about Rosie was that it was done by Norman Rockwell for the Saturday Evening Post but it was actually done by J. Howard Miller for Westinghouse as a way to motivate people already in the work force at Westinghouse. It was not a "call to arms" for the women of America and it was only seen during the month of February in 1943.

There is a lot of information on Wikipedia as well and it seems correct from what I remember of the article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Do_It! If you would like to see a few more pieces of J. Howard Miller's you can look here http://americangallery.wordpress.com/category/miller-j-howard/

Safeway Logos

The first logo/brand that came to mind when I read this assignment was the Safeway brand chips. I really enjoy how simple the bag is and it stands out from all the others. All the other bags are extremely colorful but the Safeway bags are brown. Each bag has a different illustration on it as well and a clever saying like "Chip Outta Luck."

Vector Images

I thought I would share a website that lets you download free vector images. I get a lot from this site and thought it might come in helpful for some of you. They have a ton of images, sometimes they send you to shutterstock but for the most part they offer their own downloads. Here are a couple examples from http://all-free-download.com/