Thanks for your input on my last posting on this issue.

The problem that's going on right now is that a small group of people (IE: the ACAD Students' Association) approved this poster, over a good other number of entries. There has been speculation that the winner is a friend of one of these SA representatives.

In any case, various individuals have come forward and tried to justify the choice stating that it pokes fun at a "super consumerist pseudo Christian bullshit money
grubbing holiday", "Maybe the other submissions for the S&S poster were more technically advanced than the one chosen, but obviously it was chosen for a reason. Don't dumb down the public and think they just want to see a generic VC commercial poster." (This, from our VP Internal).

There have been various other responses to the image, anywhere from liking it to despising it.

All in all, the work's not entirely *bad* depending on what sort of context it's to be presented in (IE: in the midst of an episode of Beavis and Butthead, perhaps?), but technically speaking, it's really, really bad. The pic I posted doesn't go very far at all in terms of describing just how poorly executed it is. In and around the grassy area, there's a whole lotta smudge tool going on, both logos are incredibly pixelated, and there's a hell of a lot of jpeg compression going on in there. The typography is amateurish and the actual printed colour basically is the same value as a mid-toned corkboard, which means it would be very, very easy for this poster to fade in to the background amongst other advertisements.

Like I said... depending on the context, the pic could possibly be effective... but it does not, in any way, represent the range and breadth of the artwork that is produced by our school. Moreover, I'm told the person who drew this is a 2nd year 'Drawing' student (I should note here that 'Drawing' at ACAD does not actually mean 'drawing' in the mark-making sense. The 'Drawing' program at ACAD is mostly a catch-all for people who don't want to - or couldn't get in to - do things in other departments.). I would speculate he's never had a class in typography in his life, and doesn't know the first thing about preparing print-ready graphics.

I do not in any way fault him for this. Lots of people have no idea what they're doing when they submit graphics for contests. What I DO find issue with is that the Students' Association 1)Approved this graphic as being representative of ACAD's artwork for an advertisement 2) Never bothered to check the graphics on this entry for pixelation, colour consistency, typography, etc.

In the space of my first post on this and this one, one of the entries has shown up on the ACAD LJ community, and I must say I'd much rather have that one than this one. The ongoing discussion on the ACAD internal email has also caused lots of debate over whether that is the best venue for this discussion, as every single person who subscribes to the acad.students mailing list gets a copy of every message. I don't have much problem with it, myself. Having dealt with mailing/discussion groups on Yahoo for years on end, this doesn't bother me in the least. It does highlight the need for a dedicated area for discussion for the school though, yet the IT people seem to be mostly noncommittal, citing cost and logistics as an issue.

But the way I see it, at the very least, they could set aside a little extra webspace and maybe allow for a little more bandwidth, and put up something as simple as a phpBB, and require all who post to it to post under their real names. And they'd need to have the Students' Association recognize it as a documented debate area for ACAD Students. Simple as that, really.

Anyhow. I think that's about as much as I'm gonna write on this topic tonight. There are a whole bunch of other scholastic and personal issues I need to deal with right now, so until next time, ttyl.

There's a bit of debate going on over ACAD's internal email groups right now, and I figured I'd post this to get an objective opinion from people who aren't involved with ACAD...

Here's the question:

If you were Regular Joe, and just happened to come across the below image either in postcard or poster format... would this image encourage you to visit the advertised event?

Yes? No? Why or why not?

Am taking some slower time to myself right now, from our busy week here at ACAD.

Wow... it's really been a week already!

We've classes so far in Typography, Design Fundamentals, Perspective, English Narrative and Human Anatomy, with lots of stuff to do for each class.

Last night, went off to Kinko's to finish off individual projects with Sean B. for the Typography assignment... This morning as crit came around, I was left wishing I'd considered my composition a bit more, since the word I was supposed to depict was 'unity', after all. Oh well.. all's well in hindsight.

Tomorrow, comprehensive roughs are due for a mechanical derivation project (Design Fundamentals). Am semi-ready, but need to put together a few more options so that my ideas don't get shot down at first mention :P essentially we are to take reference from mechanical objects and try to depict the object with a series of geometric shapes. The perspective class demands a simple 2D perspective design, approx 17x22", English requires some reading I've done already, and the anatomy class requires a completed skull chart... PLUS 3 pages of (5 each) skeleton and flesh of hands.

!!!

Anyhow, as a short breather, I'm writing from the Oolong teahouse, munching on yummy samosa, matcha cupcake and downing lychee tea before i go home for more work on the mechanical derivation project...

oy.

It's our first class in Typography, and the project is to portray a specific word with found, non-digital objects.

I have a fair idea of what I want to do, but it's going to take a lot of time with various new and recycled cut paper.

Aside from that, today has been pretty nice for meeting up with classmates, seeing people I haven't seen for a few months, etc, etc etc. I know a few people in my class already, so here's hoping the transition from my coursework last year to this year will be a bit easier.

The room is pretty sparse... which is usually the case with the design classrooms. Apparently this will be our classroom for almost all of our classes until the end of next term X_X

Anyhow... it's not so bad. At least it has wireless :P