Public Art in the Taipei Metro System

After discussing public art installations in class, I was curious to find out what public art installations I could find in Taipei, especially since I’m lucky enough to be in a city where COVID-19 isn’t a danger and I can physically visit these installations in person over winter break! I found this article about the…

Rad Lines

I thought this open source project Rad Lines was pretty cool and relates to how we’re looking at the power of code/math in making designs this week! The man behind it is a design technologist named Maks Surguy, and his idea behind the project was really simple: “generate a curve, copy that curve and enlarge…

Animating After Effects inside After Effects

After trying out (and struggling with) After Effects myself, I was really impressed when I stumbled on this animation: an animation of the animating process in AE! It included a couple of the techniques that we learned, such as importing files from Illustrator (and remembering to keep layers separate, which I often forgot to do)…

Chinese Typographic Design

After learning about typography in class, I was curious about how typography works for East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, which are character-based. I found this article that discusses some of the challenges that graphic designers faced when they want to use Chinese characters. For example, compared to English fonts, there are…

“Waiting Art”: living with uncertainty

After looking through the Waiting Paintings linked on our Loading Gif project for inspo, I wanted to see if I could find more art relating to the concept of waiting, and this article caught my eye in my search results. It’s about an artist Tehching Hsieh (who is from Taiwan, where I’m from!) and his…

UN COVID-19 Response Creative Content Hub

Back in the spring, the UN sent a global call out to creatives all around the world to design PSA-style images, videos, and audio about COVID-19, including messages such as reminders to wash your hands and keep social distance, information about symptoms and ways to donate, and more. The selected submissions can be found on…

Color Wheel by Pat Steir

I found this article about an exhibit called Color Wheel, where canvases with different background and accent colors are arranged in a circular gallery, forming a physical “color wheel”. This reminded me of how we’re starting to explore the use of color in Illustrator, and how we learned how to use the swatches and color…

TikTok users get “Gen Z” tattoo but it’s a Nazi symbol

I saw this article earlier this week, and thought it related really well to our reading and our discussion about symbols. I feel like these teenagers probably got the tattoo thinking that it looks cool–so just thinking about the aesthetic function of the design–without knowing about the cultural attachments to the symbol. This is just…

CALENDAR by Xinyue Song

After we took a brief look at 2020 design trends in class, I wanted to look at more examples of design that fit into the category “Motion Design & Animations”, which Behance awarded the main trend for 2020. I found this series of animations created by Xinyue Song, who wanted to document the dates during…

The Making of Abstract Assembly by Donna Wilson

This article features a collection of chairs inspired by abstract watercolor paintings. The designer behind the project, Donna Wilson, used her 2D watercolor paintings of colorful, abstract shapes, and transformed them into 3D forms by using wood. These chairs caught my eye because of the colorful and playful vibe of the shapes, and it reminded…