Alan Brooks

Professor at TCNJ

Brief Bio

• first place in an art contest
• SVA- School of VIsual arts, high school never gave him a lot of direction
• he was at first intimidated, but stuck through and was named best graphic design student
• advertising, not a fan, but he didn't know why.  Then he found graphic design, because it was art and not just business sketches.
• not just creating a concept
• all marker drawn.
• envelopes 

CBS TV

• typographic titles
• age 22 using all different services
• vendors were then catering to his needs. Lots of staff when working for a big company
• Movie ads, only a few hours to complete.
• training to work on your toes, work faster.

SHOWTIME

• literally the art department
• freedom and open to his ideas
• left after a short time, quit

FREELANCE WORK

• networking with other channels and old bosses
• took an office in mid town, with a person from showtime and a person from CBS

BROOKS CHAMPION INC.

• dont have 3 designers start a business, needed more diversity i.e. accounting or business
• computers were beginning to come into play
• Transition to the first macintosh 
• tutortials for his computer to learn how to use software.
• TV shows 

MOVES TO NJ

• Princeton NJ
• Allen Brooks Design
• different cliental 
• Transition to corporate, get in the middle so it looks different and not like ever other pharmaceutical annual report 
• Expand the business- partner who knows marketing and sales
• VERGE180
• every company is on the verge of something, failure, success, change. Help these people see the new marketing and advertising ideas.
• never to specialize in any area of design or any industry- because he never wanted to be pigeonholed.
• Branding Company
• What is a brand identity? Outward impression of the brand

register the brands and logos that we see everyday

When logos change.. the branding changes

CASE STUDY

• Tower Water Management
• new logo
• protects pipes and heating and cooling infrastructure through proper treatment of water
• Cut out management.. first
• every competitor uses blue
• Pipes and water make the best element
• not just the logo, give it an environment 
• 3- 6 logo designs

CREATIVE PROCESS

• Laborers 55
• green materials for old homes
• sketch 
• keep sketching because the ideas come out and just keep going. there is a lot of nothing but the more you work it out the better ideas can come
• look at references
• sketch more
• then hang on a wall and do further development
• you need a sense of where you want to go

DISCOVERY

• Do your research
• the project almost designs itself, so you learn what they like and what they dont want
• MESSAGE?
• BENEFITS?
• AUDIENCE?
• PERSONALITY?

McGraw- HIll Federal Credit Union

• Credit union, like a bank 
• financial services
• most ambitious of their logo

How do you build your cliental?

• word of moth or referrals, weekly networking group. events.
• cold calls- least effective 
• Linkedin- effective but tedious 

How to rework a logo without totally changing it, keep it new but referencing the old?

•  present it in a way that everyone is on the same page, then you expose it to the customers 
• nothing bad happened, its not that things are changed just an upgrade.

Uncanny projects beginnings

still more layers to do but im liking the diea, I took three photos of eyes filtered them then photoshopped them all on top of each other with different opacities.  The shading is ghost images underneath and the darkest portions are overlaps. 

status update on the cave.. third iteration

Tom Gebauer

Graduate of the Class of 2007 with a BFA in Graphic Design and Visual Communication

Sr. Director of User Experience & Design at Advanced Digital/ Advanced Publication Inc.

• How a person interacts with a given system --> Scientific -->quantitative measurement (User Experience.. Analytical side).
• How Something Looks--> part emotional --> artistic and visual communication (Design)

Making Life style brands, how to use areas of business, art and design, software engineering and cognitive technology. This all adds up to what User Experience is, how people interact and have a "connection" to what they use either digitally and physically.

User Experience is based on measurement 

• tangible business- profit or loss
• design
• bond

Exists Everywhere 

• Human Factors/ Human Computer Interactions (HCI)
• grounding interactions

All of the factors that help create a business to be more customer focused.  How the people or consumers interact with products and the company, making it more user friendly.

Agencies today are both in Traditional and Digital media, there is not limit to who needs help with consumer design and how they interact with the company.

Advanced Publications Inc.

• Largest privately owned company in the world- Owned by S.I Newhouse
• Highly diversified 
• Lots to do and improve on in this sector, because some view the company as "evil" for taking away jobs or limiting services or just having a bad experience with a website or telephone operators.  With the used of new technologies and new design to appease the public and get back on the good side of consumers by offering services that are user friendly.

His more current work has been for the NJ.com website, taking a confusing and poorly designed website and breaking it down to its most simple components.

1. Starting with the original website, heat trackers were focused on what was getting used the most on the site
2. A simple sketch of a new site was drawn up
3. Digital blue print- wire frame design
4. Then a test site is put up for the public to use and interact with
5. Second launchings to fix any bugs or tweaking of buttons.
6. Final website.

Never stop getting inspired, and dont be scared to work in different sectors, the more you learn the more possibilities you have.

Over all I thought the talk was great. Tim started off with telling us who he was and what he likes to do, its a departure from what we normally see and it made it easier to connect with him as he spoke to us.  Digital isn't my discipline but he made it exciting for me to listen to and understand.  He has a wealth of knowledge and highly engaging.

Uncanny

The theory of uncanny is based on a feeling, an uneasy and fearful feeling.  It is not just the aesthetics of beauty.

What excites fear; how to use these fears to put people into this state of feeling. using peoples experiences and memories (using what it familiar) to excite a feeling.

But we want to move past the notion of the uncanny as unfamiliar, because in a definition stand point; it is seen as gloomy, scary, ghastly, daemonic, or gruesome. These things are something that is visible and known to us.

Manifestation of insanity

We know from psycho-analytic experience, however, that the fear of damaging or losing one’s eyes is a terrible one in children. Many adults retain their apprehensiveness in this respect, and no physical injury is so much dreaded by them as an injury to the eye. We are accustomed to say, too, that we will treasure a thing as the apple of our eye. A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated. 

The notion of the double, the fascination with another. A shadow, mirrors, with guardian spirits, the soul.

The double has become a thing of terror, the notion of gods being turned into demons.

Uncanny- the feeling of helplessness experienced in dream states, like nightmares or repetitive dreams, you know what is going to happen but you cannot stop it.

Superstitions make us have the feeling of uncanny because we have been taught to know how coincidences could have negative connotation. Like repetition, of a number or name or event.

The fairy tales, how wishes could become true. or if they are just a coincidences. How magic is viewed, how is it translated? Is it baised off of belief that just believing in something and it happens, so then its magic? How does reality play a role in this happening.

Something familiar that has been repressed

The evil eye- the feeling of not only being watched but being disliked and despised and looked down upon for some reason.

Something that should have remained hidden but had come to light, like a myth or legend. Speaking of evil brings about evil?

Humans will never be free from this feeling

Modernity

The gaze- the look of affection, awe, wonder, or fascination.  How do artists use this in their works to draw the viewer into a dialog with the piece.

The gaze plays a central role in theories of looking and spectatorship in modernity

The Subject in Modernity

Modernity- historical, cultural, political, and economic conditions related to the Enlightenment; the rise of industrial society and scientific rationalism; and to the idea of controlling nature through technology science and rationalism.

Each culture has its own ideology when it comes to progress in economy, the United States views it much differently then someone in Russia or someone in China.

Marx speaking out against industrial capitalism and exploitation of and social alienation of workers.

There were major changes made in the early twentieth century, radical political and technological change began to generate significant cultural anxiety.

Spectatorship

1. The roles of the unconscious and desire in viewing practices.
2. the role of looking in the formation of the human subject as such
3. the ways that looking is always a relational activity and not simply a mental activity engaged in by someone who forms internal mental representation that stand for a passive image object "out there"

Meaning of the individual human subject is not universal but is both historically and culturally contingent.

When we describe the gaze as a field rather then an individual act of looking.

Discourse and Power

Foucault's concept of discourse is helpful to understanding how power systems work to define how things are understood and spoken about( and, by implication, represented in images) in a given society.

Discourse- usually used to talk about passages of writing or speech, the act of talking about something.

Foucault was interested in the rules and practices that produce meaningful statements and regulate what can be spoken in different historical periods

Discourse is a body of knowledge that both defines and limits what can be said about something.

The relation of image and power: panopticism (everything visible in one view), power/knowledge, and biopower (A term originally coined by French philosopher Michel Foucault to refer to the practice of modern states and their regulation of their subjects through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations).

The Gaze and the Other

The gaze helps establish relationships of power.  the act of looking is awarding more power to the person who is looking then to who is the object of the look.

All function to varying degrees to represent codes of dominance and subjection, difference and otherness.

the appropriation of the figure to fit into new contexts of today, in an ad, and also by the Guerilla Girls.

The Gaze in Psychoanalysis

There are fantasy structures that are set up when viewing a movie. The camera position to the actors and how the audience views them in the situation, this creates a relationship. 

the concept of the unconscious is crucial in the theories of cinematic spectatorship.

Gender and the Gaze

The understanding of the female nude as the project and possession by the male artist. 

• the woman is posed as objects of an active or "male" gaze.

"Rear Window" (1954)- is a movie that focuses on the gaze and how the possession of the gaze is valuable.

• when he gets caught looking he becomes vulnerable and trapped; the murder comes looking for him. Clearly, male looking is not without limitations and its consequences 

Changing Concepts of the Gaze

Changing the traditional gender codes

changing the way the masculinity is viewed in consumer culture




 

The cave pt.2

The second iteration of the cave, instillation piece, also the use of moth balls to create a repelling odor.