Operator

Contributed to The Orange County Register, Hyphen Magazine, The Swaggie Newspaper, and others. For now, Ramon Solis writes in a blog called

[ramonsolis]

at the San Francisco Public Library

[ramonsolis]

Bombed. 16th and Carolina Street, San Francisco.

I think this is an exercise in "pushing it further". One of my professors told me to do just that with something from my first art class. In retrospect, it seems I took a page out of MVRDV or Mosha Safdie with those boxes. I can see now that working on a larger scale, among other things, would have made the piece (below) much more powerful.

I wonder if similar projects like this bombed building have been done on a block-wide or regional level. Note that the building uses multiple tags. Check out the Google Street View to get a sense of this part of the Potrero Hill district.

[ramonsolis]

Week 7 of 52 Update. Figure drawing. First time using pastel. I'm trying to avoid drawing scrunched up faces such as that which you would find in most editorial cartoons.

Drawing faces is hard.

[ramonsolis]

A brief update

2. Forget about good.

Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

-Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, 1998

I am still getting settled in San Francisco. Eking a living and devoting my time to my martial arts have taken the lion's share of my time. When things are less in flux, say, by week's end, I will be contributing and documenting at least one creative act a week in this blog. By creative act I mean one of the following likely scenarios: a piece of written work, likely on the environment or design, even more likely both; a built work of art; a series of sketches or drawings; or, if the stars are right, a musical composition.

I see this website less as portfolio and more as laboratory. My goal here is  to develop my own style, but neither you nor I should expect to be impressed or be witness to my growth in a directional sense.

[ramonsolis]

UC Davis Design Professors reflect on the UC monogram

Well, that was fast.

The University of California Office of the President has suspended the new monogram. Daniel M. Dooley, senior vice president for external relations at UCOP largely attributed the suspension to an “unfortunate and false narrative” – that the new monogram would completely replace the traditional seal.

The logo design, evidently a huge livewire, offered a unique opportunity for design to once again enter the dinner table conversation and remind us how much design matters. Surprisingly, few if any media outlets included a response from the UC Davis Design Department at UC Davis, the only one of its kind in the UC system.

For the record, according to UCD design department head Tim McNeil, no one in the UC Davis design department was consulted or asked for input on the new logo. That credit goes to four in-house designers at UCOP in Oakland.

When asked whether James Housefield, a UC Davis design professor, liked the new logo, he replied, “My feeling is that it is immaterial whether any of us ‘like’ the logo,” said Housefield.

“Speaking with our grad students and undergrads about design criticism I urge them to quickly acknowledge, and then move away from, initial feelings of ‘liking’ a work of art or design. 

“In our society we are so often urged to register our feelings as if they were a verdict; is the online "like" so far from "thumbs down" in the ancient Roman arena? I'd like to hope that the next generation of designers will imagine a more complex form of interaction design [than the 'like' system].”

Housefield, who was interviewed prior to the monogram’s suspension, also made another point about giving a nod to precedent.

“It's intriguing to consider the UC monogram in comparison to (Shepard Fairey) OBEY's rebranding of the Rolling Stones for their 50th anniversary celebrations. The Stones chose a design largely based upon John Pasche's "lips" logo from the 1971 album Sticky Fingers. The UCOP design team similarly looked to tradition as they imagined how the seal might form the basis of a systematic approach to identity and communications. Unlike the Stones, UC has had its seal but no logo until now.”

Shepard Fairey's redesigned Rolling Stones logo

Simon Sadler, an architectural history professor in the design department and author of  “A Culture of Connection: How Design Makes Us All Californian” from Boom! magazine, was available for comment after the logo suspension.

Here are his thoughts on the suspension in its entirety:

 “First, the logo reminded people of capitalist corporations. But history contains all sorts of other corporate models. Nations, nobilities, religions. And universities, which are one of the great survivors, far older than capitalist corporations. Their mission is different, even where it involves profit. They’re about the long term of discovery, not the short term of markets. Ultimately, they’re about the top line (“Let there be light!”), not the bottom line. With an identity that storied, opponents of the new monogram were puzzled why UC would want to look anything like a capitalist brand.”

“Maybe UC didn’t want to look anything like a capitalist brand. I certainly hope not. Which leads to a second possible source of identity crisis. UC’s destiny is intertwined with that of California, which is not (yet) a capitalist corporation. California is a much more complex phenomenon. A state, a body politic, and also an idea, almost a utopian one. The larger identity rolled out for UC tries (it hasn’t yet been canceled) to capture Californian “spirit” — let there be light. It pushes back careless visual communication to better portray UC as a sublime unity, optimistic and Enlightening, a source of life in California.

“A couple of things haven’t been getting communicated, though [emphasis added]. The scheme was drawing on Californian New Wave design from the 80s, but people maybe aren’t quite ready for an 80s revival just yet, and so they’re associating the colors with beach culture. The monogram’s buffering C tried to convey animation, yes, but the life of California doesn’t come down to one thing, one icon. A bear in the flag, maybe, but that’s about the thrill of having your camping gear eaten. The Golden Gate Bridge? Yes, but it’s about the place, the drive, the connection, the scale. A surfboard, perhaps, but surfing is all about the ride along the edge of the world, not the board itself.  

“The controversy around the monogram may in the end be because UC is irreducible. An historic, public, plural institution for wisdom at the world’s center of the now and the soon. It couldn’t be captured in this or any monogram. No wonder creating an identity for UC created so much controversy. That’s the business of great universities.”

Here is a copy of Wet Magazine, an instance of the 80s new wave design that Simon Sadler mentions.

But wait, folks. Successful online university emblems do and can exist. Massachusetts Institute of Technology introduced a new logo and graphic identity website. “The reason we created a logo separate from the seal was, well, when you have a lineup of seals, you see a series of circles with hard to read words and it was difficult to distinguish MIT's seal from every other university's,” said Bara Blender, communications strategist for MIT. "The MIT logo is a distinct mark that is easily recognizable. We reached out to key departments and explained to them the value of the new logo and how using it would reinforce their connection to MIT."

MIT's simplified logo, introduced almost a decade ago.

MIT, however, does not face the same set of challenges a multi-campus university has. “I think the process was simpler than what the University of California went through only because we have one campus with all the key decision makers in one location,” said Blender. 

So in the meantime, please, put down your pitchforks. Maybe the issue the bigger issue is about education funding. Whatever it is, the best thing to do now is talk to a friend about what does make good design for the UC or for California. Who knows, maybe UCOP will listen.

[ramonsolis]

Book Review - Edge by Koji Suzuki

Koji Suzuki is the writer of Ringu, adapted for American audiences as The Ring, a briefly popular horror flick in 2002. I was eager to read and to review books that weren't already established. I mean, do book critics do such a good job that every other unreviewed book is rubbish? Anyway, I had never read horror fiction before (does non-fiction horror even exist as a literary genre?), and the book jacket looked pretty cool, so I took my chances. 

I think it takes a certain person to suspend disbelief when it comes to warping scientific laws. The basic premise of the novel is that people begin to disappear as a result of minor shifts in the natural world. A writer in Japan notices these disappearances and a series of uncanny occurrences ensue. I couldn't believe the premise, so I didn't finish it. The first chapter was fast-paced and provided brief snippets of people either disappearing or noticing something wrong with the world. I really enjoyed the first chapter, but I think Edge slowed down once Suzuki introduces Saeko, the protagonist.

One thing I did notice is that Japan seems to have a large presence of religious cults. There's probably a singular word for "religious cult" in Japan because I have seen that phrase several times in translated Japanese novels, namely in Haruki Murakami's work.

I don't know what the worth is in reviewing a mildly entertaining book. It seems that book reviews are either raving or a product of a successful public relations campaign. I recommend Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills if you're looking for something similar and also better.

[ramonsolis]

I am always fascinated by workspaces. Here is mine: