Back to School
Geometric Typography Sketch, 2011
Last week, classes resumed at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This means my lovely summer of Swiss design workshops, European travel, reading in the park, long walks with the dog, and not quite enough days at the beach has come to a crashing end. Of course, I am also totally thrilled at the prospect of limited quantities of sleep, extreme critique of my every design move, and, hopefully, a lot of cool new projects!
My plan is to make every effort to keep this blog alive while I’m buried in projects, but we’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, here’s my first bit of homework: my reading response to Lev Manovich’s recent essay What is Visualization? I always find Manovich’s perspective interesting despite the fact that I often find his arguments flimsy or unconvincing. Nonetheless, the recent surge of interest in methods for visualizing the tremendous access we have to all kinds of data is surely not a passing trend but will continue to embed itself in a wide range of cultural practices. Lots of questions to ask and plenty of interesting work to consider. More to come (I hope!).
Quirky Ljubljana
in the city in the country, Ljubljana Castle on the hill
The last stop on our Eastern European trip was Ljubljana, Slovenia. I really fell in love with this quirky and unique little city. It’s an interesting and unexpected blend of Mediterranean and Slavic culture amidst a beautiful and charming Old World–meets–Art Nouveau city mixed with both stark and crumbling graffiti-covered signs of modernity. The leisurely pace of life here meant no big site-seeing trips, just simply strolling the city to see what’s around each next corner. The city is especially vibrant at night, when the banks of the Ljubljanica River are flooded with light, music, dancing, and most of the city chatting, eating, drinking, and whiling away the evening in such casual style.
One visit of particular interest was our trip to the Joze Plezik house and museum. In the 1890s, an earthquake destroyed most of Ljubljana. As the city’s most revered and beloved architect of the time, Plezik was responsible for designing most of the city’s civic buildings and public spaces, most of which define the city still today. Left as it was when he lived there, the house is a peek not only into one man’s vision of Slovenian life but also the quirky joyful cultural values of the people of Ljubljana.
Overlooking the city from Ljubljana Castle with the Julian Alps in the distance
boat trippin' on the Ljubljanica River
Vienna in Style
clock tower of the Wien Rathaus (city hall) at dusk
With only one evening in Vienna, it was difficult to decide how to spend our time. Rather than trying to race through some site-seeing, we decided instead to leisurely stroll the Innere Stadt neighborhood of our hotel and simply see what we could find. How Viennese!
This turned out to be the perfect way to spend our evening as we were able to self guide ourselves past several remarkable palaces, gardens, parks, and landmark. This meant making up our own stories of what we were seeing as we went along (including my guessing in the captions here). Eventually, we wound up at an outdoor festival near the Rathaus (city hall). This was supposedly a film festival, however, we saw no films being screened. What we did see was a huge variety of food and drinks being served up in a beautiful setting to a city of people who seem to really know how to relax and enjoy life in style.
putti outside a Habsburg Palace
There should be brief intervals of time for quiet reflection […]. But they are periods of genuine reflection only when they follow after times of more overt action and are used to organize what has been gained in periods of activity […].
John Dewey, Experience and Education
Remember that trip you took three years ago to that really amazing place? Remember how inspired you were by the different ways of living you saw and experienced? Remember how you told yourself, “I’m gong to start doing things differently”? Remember all those pictures you took but never looked at again? Whatever happened to all that?
An inspiring experience requires time for reflection to allow its significance to be meaningfully absorbed.
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Splash: A Design Philosophy
Visualization of my design philosophy, analog and digital collage, 10" x 10", 2011
While researching and writing my MFA thesis for graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I was assigned the task of writing and publishing a small book to describe my philosophy as a designer. A monumental order, no doubt—especially with only a week to pull it off!
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Regal Prague
Prague showing off with a rainbow, view from the Charles Bridge
Three days and three nights in Prague: a bustling mix of architecture (baroque to art nouveau to cubism to contemporary), cultural and political history, a young and vibrant contemporary culture and population, and TONS of kitschy tourist attractions. Not to mention, an overwhelming amount of Pilsner. This city made a lot of impressions, but I’ll let the images do the talking.
Prague Castle overlooking the city and Vltava River
Charming Little Colmar
Strolling along the canal in Colmar, France
Departing Basel, Amanda and I spent one day and night in little Colmar, France. About an hour north of Basel by train, Colmar resides in the Alsace region of France surrounded by rolling hills and vineyards. Given its location just west of the German border, the town offers a charming blend of traditional French and German cultural influences. The beer is cold, and the food is excellent, of course. Brightly colored timber-framed buildings hold each other up along the scenic canals, and just about everywhere you look people are strolling leisurely.
We spent the majority of our site-seeing via the small flat bottom boats that cruise up and down the canals. This offered a prime vista for taking in Colmar’s quiet scenery. We actually had to ask each other: Is this real or some kind of Disney set?
The colorful buildings of Colmar
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Last Days in Basel
Basel and Rhein River at night, view from Cargo Bar
After three weeks in the 2011 Basel Summer Design Workshops, my wife, Amanda, met me in Switzerland to see what I had been experiencing while she was at home working hard to pay all the bills I was running up in Europe. We spent two days in Basel together before shipping off to Prague and other points East—don’t worry, there are plenty of photos from those travels to come. In the meantime, here are some images from our last few days in Basel. I promise this is the last you’ll hear of Basel (at least for a little while!).
the view from our window at Hotel Rochat, Basel
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Vitra: Design and Architecture
Vitra's architecture campus: Petrol Station by Jean Pouvé, Dome by R. Buckminster Fuller, and VitraHaus by Herzog & de Meuron, and a crane—something new in the works?
Having just returned home from five weeks in the Old World—participating in the Basel Summer Design Workshops and two further weeks of travel with my wife—I am catching up on posting photos and impressions from the latter half of travels… starting now with these photos from the last field trip for participants in the Workshops.
HGK Basel 2011 Summer Design Workshop: Poster Design
Leander Eisenmann and participants in the Poster Design workshop
Yesterday was the final day of the concluding course of the 2011 Basel Summer Design Workshops at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst. Lead by Leander Eisenmann, a Zürich designer specializing in book and poster projects, the workshop provided an opportunity to experiment with the poster as a medium for communication and expression. The project brief was to design a poster for an exhibition on Type in Motion to be displayed at the Zürich Museum für Gestaltung. Additionally, Leander highly encouraged making objects by hand, by assembly of materials, or to consider other non-computer techniques as starting points to lead the investigation. Using the poster an application of the theoretical, formal, process-oriented ideas that accumulated over the three weeks of workshops seemed to me to be the perfect culmination. Personally, I found great potential and reward in letting the making of images and typographic expressions via cutting, slashing, bending, morphing, taping, and otherwise manually manipulating the materials of the poster. This approach, which is rare for my own process, certainly lead to unexpected results for me. It was a bittersweet end to an incredible three weeks in Basel.
Matthew Wizinsky with two poster compositions from the 2011 HGK Basel Poster Design workshop
