_i exist by implication_

Screenshot capture of the Social Studies Conference’s website.

A typical scene in my life…

April 2008… I decide to submit a draft for the Social Studies Conference: Educating Designers in a Connected World to be held at MICA this upcoming October. Deadline for submissions… July 15th. Yup, I got time.

July 14th: 6:00pm… Dammit! It’s been raining all day, internet connection has been down, and I have to submit the abstract! Tic, tock… Tic, toc…

hehehe

I submitted the abstract on time (see below)(and I even got a happy confirmation e-mail from the conference).
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My father and I many times mused about graphic design and architecture. We conversed about the disciplines’ similitudes and differences. We evaluated how each of us could use our fields to impact the other.

Architecture can aid my understanding of balance (specially when it comes to grid work and the alignment of elements), it can fuel my understanding of the different ways my work will affect others, and it can be a catalyst for three dimensional explorations of a basically two dimensional area of study. Graphic design can influence him by improving his communications, by opening a space to create strategical standpoint for the conceptual exploration of aesthetic representations, and in providing a typographical groundwork on which to develop a new layer of expressive meaning.
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The third in a series of articles published in Mangrove magazine in 2004. These are not deep in academic research, but a fun read.

Photo chop

Fast-food restaurants promote indigestion in more than one way. Customarily, visual references used to advertise the menu –that is, photographs– are more than often fake. Most of the products showcased as value meals were never photographed as a group, but instead “stitched” from different sources. Not only clients save in buying a soda, sandwich and fries. Owners also play cheap by resorting to digital compositions that ultimately deceive the public. To add to the debate about the nutritional attributes of fast food, we can certify it can also endanger visual health.
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The second in a series of articles published in Mangrove magazine in 2004. These are not deep in academic research, but a fun read.

Missing pictures

Movie subtitles, intended to facilitate the enjoyment of foreign films, often hinder more than help the purported aesthetic experience. Who decides on the type, placement, and contents of these words on the big screen? Most people have no idea, and those who do it don’t seem to either.
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The first in a series of articles published in Mangrove magazine in 2004. These are not deep in academic research, but a fun read.

Landscape Muggers

What USA publicists call a junior page advertisement is known in Puerto Rico, more informally, as a “robapágina”, or page mugger. Reference to the “illegality” of a fake full page has less to do with the crime problems currently affecting the island than with the aggressiveness that permeates most advertising endeavors all over the world.

A case in point: Newspaper A1 design vis a vis front page advertising.
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