Blog for 1-19

Using the Wordle application is something that I've always used to create unique word poems and visual designs, but to use it for an advertisement is something that is completely new to me. Text design is something that I've been working on the entire time that I've been in the English Department, but most people only look at things that have been made digitally. Digital design is the new frontier for advertisements and for visual designs and as we saw there are ways to make something that is supposed to be completely non-creative (such as Excel) to design something that is visually appealing, but this is something that has been around for years. While studying the progression of media and our use of media through time, there are so many different ways to use technology to create something that other people would've never thought to be art or to be creative in any way. For example, in 1967 Steve McCaffery started using a typewriter (which was a very common technology) to create panels of artwork that no one would've thought possible with just the use of a common typewriter. He started a movement towards taking technologies that we use all the time to create works of art or to make us change our perception of what technology is actually capable of doing. Here is a picture of his entire second panel that he made between the years of 1970 and 1975 and then a close up of one of the sections.

To create a picture or a completely separate image from just the use of text is something that people tend to shy away from. It's so easy to add a picture or a graphic image to an advertisement to convey the meaning of your advertisement. As a graphic designer we take classes that teach us the difference that we can make to help convey our images and texts in the way that we want them to. For example if the text is red and the background is white, the message comes across as urgent. Something we must read right now, but if the text color is changed to say blue or green, the message comes across completely differently. We are trained to think in a very singular way, red means stop, blue is calming, yellow is happy, but by using digital media and placing contradicting ideas together we can start to expand what media can do and how media interacts with us as consumers. We limit ourselves by thinking that certain media's can only be used for one specific purpose, but when we start to push those boundaries and push those limitations we can see the true potential of what each individual media can do.