I had the pleasure to be surrounded with people as exited as I am when it comes to creating good work. I saw my friends and now colleagues evolve and hone their skills. To see their work ethic and their creativity combined it was just uplifting. I loved the environment and community the Corcoran has, from the faculty to the alumni; they all made it that much easier to pull-off all those all-nighters and still have the energy to get your work critic day after day. For me, and for many others I am sure, it was a challenge I was glad I took.
NEXT is around the corner and I am wrapping up the last details for the exhibit. I finished printing my posters, thanks Epson Stylus Pro 9880. I got to finish my videos. One video is a short minute and a half info-graphic that talks about design and music; very brief, simple, and with no sound. The other video is the opposite because is song after song for 16 minutes. As the two most approachable things in my space I tried to make them simple and and brief, so in this way people can stop listen some good music and learn a little bit about the role of design in music.
Is spring break already. Now time has passed faster that I would like to and I have to show some progress. I am happy to say things seem to be falling into place, in this break I ought to finish the exhibition. In the school we were told that in our return we should start putting our stuff up in the gallery. This below is an sketch of the first concept for my posters for the exhibit:
NEXT is an annual exhibit in which the work of graduating students of the Corcoran College is on display, so the works in this exhibit are part of a semester long thesis project from students of all majors. My project is about graphic design in popular music.
Since NEXT is a large project for senior students at my school, this has been divided in two parts. The first one consist in writing the thesis paper. My essay talks about the role of design when depicting our pop culture, especially through its music. In it I discuss that if we look back at the history of pop music, we can distinguish a particular aesthetic for almost any given time. Design is one of those things that is expected to be part of the vernacular that distinguish a period of time, and thanks to the work of designers today we have a visual clue of how these different periods of time looked aesthetically. I chose to talk about this topic because music is something almost anybody can relate to. Who does not remember the cover of his/her favorite music album? Graphic design in a figurative way has given and continues to construct the visual, the image; the aesthetic side of our popular culture. In my thesis paper I talked a lot more about this topic, and I use several album covers as examples of this link between design and culture. Fortunately I chose a topic I have enjoyed learning more about; which made the extensive writing not so daunting. The other part of this project, after finishing the thesis paper, consist of turning our writing into a publication; digital and print. For now we are only in the beginning states of the publication, so these below are some pictures of my paper and thumbnails of some possible design layouts.
Peter Verastegui 