Thursday, February 28, 2008

Notes About Today's Demo

Disadvantage of raster based programs:
Enlarging images causes it to become "funky" and lose data.

Dodging - lightening the image (set to 10% and according to what you're changing [ex: midtone or shadow])
Burn - darken the image

Adjusting the Brightness of the Entire Picture In Photoshop:
Image > Adjustments > Curves

Highlights:
Light parts of a photo.

Midtones:
Regularly lit parts of a photo.

Shadows:
Dark parts of a photo.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Today's Notes

expanded text that is wider.
orphan - a single word on a whole line.
widow - a broken word.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Bibliography

Cohen, Jean-Louis. Mies van der Rohe. London: E & FN SPON, 1996.

Shulze, Franz. Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography.
Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1985

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Fonts

Only use decorative fonts for logos NEVER FOR NORMAL TEXT. They don't read well at small sizes.

The scans below show the select few fonts that do most of the work in graphic design (text wise)

There are thousands of fonts, but they're needed in special cases.

sans-serif: assertive, used for headers. (Use these for the header, at least two)

Preferred Fonts

scan the handouts into the blog

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Photos and Such

I had been having trouble using blogger's image upload service. It took some time, but I finally was able to reduce the size of my scans and upload these pictures to the internet. Here they are (in no specific order)

Mies Van Der Rohe

*****


The German Pavillion

*****


The Villa

*****
These Last two are of the 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments.

Full View




Indoors

*****

All that's left is to put it all together in Quark!




Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Pages For Pictures

In the Jean-Louis Cohen Book:

German Pavillion: 53-57
Villa Tugendhat: 58-61
860-880 Lake Shore Drive: 102-106
Mies: 6

I need to decide on one more picture as well.

Why Do We Sketch with Tangible Media?

1. Faster ideas.

2. More control (for some people).

3. You may not have a computer with you.

4. It looks too done on a computer. With a pencil, it's "fuzzy" and not as definite.

We are sketching out the brochure before we finally realize it onto the computer in Quark. It's useful because it's approximate. You need something to start with.

OTHER NOTES:

A picture is a box with an X going from corner to corner.

Text is a bunch of horizontal lines.

Dividing text into two collumns looks nice. The space between them is called the gutter.

Printing to the edge of the page is called bleeding.

Monday, February 4, 2008

DONE.

LIFE:

Mies Van Der Rohe was born in 1886 in Aachen, Germany with the name Maria Ludwig Michael Mies. While his early years and youth were not well recorded, his life following and including his entry into the world of architecture was. In 1905, Mies left Aachen and moved to Berlin to begin a job that he was promised. He served as a studio apprentice to Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912. In this time, he was discovered as a new talent and was commissioned for projects that he would take on alone. Uniquely, Mies had no formal education in architecture but was still well desired. Eventually, he opened his own office in 1914 which would bring him international recognition as one of the greatest modern minds in architecture. After a largely successful career, Mies became director in the Bauhaus school in Germany from 1930 until its closure in 1933. Due to the Nazi regime, Mies moved to the United States and continued his career in education, taking over the architecture program for the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago. Mies continued to design very near his final years. In 1969, he died leaving his unique style to decay and eventually become unpracticed due to its difficulty to imitate.

WORK:
Mies’ work includes a range of projects. In his early years, he designed and built houses in Berlin. However, these early works would become completely absent from his later, more praised designs. Two notable works that gained him international recognition were the German Pavillion from 1929 and the Villa Tugendhat from 1930. Both are considered to be masterworks of Mies and are very important to modern architecture. The German Pavilion was praised for its simplistic and elegant design and its use of marble and travertine. The Villa Tugendhat was praised for its functionalism and iron structure. By 1930, Mies had gained worldwide fame for visionary projects which he developed. From 1949 to 1951, Mies designed and built the 860 - 880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, which are considered to be one of his most important designs. Their structure was from painted black steel and aluminum framed windows. The signifigance of the towers is credited with their placement in a "trapezoidal site". The placement of the buildings functioned as a way for each building to have a maximum view of the lake. As well, the buildings are connected by a "monolithic canopy".

IMPORTANCE:
To date, Mies is considered to be one of the major pioneers in modern architecture. In his work, he hoped to establish a new definitive style for the current era. As the gothic era had unique architecture, Mies hoped his style would be the same for his own era. While his style is rarely seen anymore due to its difficulty to recreate and high standards to maintain, there is no doubt that Mies work is vastly important to modern architechture. He was well known for using the phrases "less is more" and "god is in the details" when describing his style. As well, he achieved functionalism in his designs over his twenty years of work. Today, many of his projects are either being restored or rebuilt. As well, the 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and are a Chicago Landmark. Mies has certainly left his mark in the world of design.