From Logo Lecture

Open Arms

I thought that this movie poster was interesting.  First, the design is fairly simple.  We see the actor's name and the word 'YES' with an image of the actor with open arms.  We see in the bottom corner that the name of the movie is "Yes Man" so the poster is a kind of rebus puzzle.   The posture of Jim Carrey and the setting kind of reminds me of the "Sound of Music".   The colors are simple also. The warm and cool colors play on each other with the cool blue receding in the background and the warm green coming forward just as they do in nature.  The top and the bottom are fairly dark and toward the center, the background is low key.  The font used is a sans serif font and is simple and to the point. 

I think what caught my eye with this poster is a recent experience that my daughter told me about.  She was at a car dealership waiting for her car to be serviced.  In the showroom they were holding a salesman training session.  One of the main points that she got from it was that they were told to make sure that their arms were open when dealing with customers.  The body language of open arms makes people comfortable and they feel welcome.  From this poster we get the feeling he is feeling great and free but on another level, we feel like we could go up and talk to him because he is open.  His arm and leg that is pulled behind him also lead the eye to the upper corner and the bottom corner.  His pose tells and does a lot. 
http://www.reelmovienews.com/gallery/yes-man-poster/

Colors that pop!

 

I found this ad interesting because of the colors.  The cool blues and white recede into the background while the warm yellow that is saturated advances.  The blue also sends the message that it is high tech even though it is just a diner scene and the blue and yellow are directly across from each other on the color wheel.  The splash of red on both yellow areas draws your attention to the object.  I don't think that the font was appropriate however and it was not big enough to read even when the image was full size. 

The subject of the ad was a bit confusing however.  It took me awhile to figure out that the ad was for a book or magazine with 1000 cult objects.  That is not good.  However, the design caught my attention and made me stop and figure out what it was about. 

Canada Ad Uses Imagery to Lead the Eye

 

I found this ad interesting for several reasons.   As I was flipping through the magazine, this image caught my eye.  The statement in the middle of the photo is not very noticeable because it lacks significant contrast and size.  Instead the image leads the eye directly to the statement. In this size it is hard to see but there is a person standing at the top of the rock on uppermost rock.  Although I did not notice the person right away, I think it helped to lead my eye to the blurb. The image uses the rule of thirds.  The bottom left has content and the rocks send the eye around and up to the blurb which are also in the rule of thirds area.  I did not note the sun when I first viewed the image but I wonder if it helped to bring my eye down to the bottom left in order for my eye to float up and right.

Here is the low contrast, relatively small print statement:

 

 The Flat Earth Society? After I read the statement, I had to read the small print to figure out what it meant. 

 

It was only then that I discovered it was a tourism ad.  I thought it was quite clever because it forced the viewer to discover what it was about and relied on image to point to the blurb instead of large print with high contrast.  I also found it interesting that the blurb made me curious to read more.  

Source: Smithsonian Magazine. May 2011 pg. 29.

Sweet Grannies

I have been thinking about a lot of things lately.  The other day when I was visiting my grandfather, he told me and my sister about when he was married to our grandmother.  You see, my family tree has many branches because of divorce.  My grandfather and grandmother divorced when my father was 7 years old.  My grandfather is now 96 years old.  I saw him when I was little but when my parents divorced when I was 8 years old, I no longer saw him until a few years ago after his second wife passed away.
He mentioned his first wife, Madeline and we said that we knew her.  He told us that we were too young to be alive when he was married to her.  We had to explain that yes, we didn't know her when he was married to her but we knew her when we were kids - she was grandma!  I didn't know her well, but I did know her!
After that got straightened out he told us about how wonderful of a woman she was but she had a temper.  She was told that he had a girlfriend and she got so mad at him that she chased in through the neighborhood with a butcher knife.  After that incident and a few other instances of violence, her parents came to him and asked him to divorce her and he agreed. 
I don't know if he actually had a girlfriend but thinking about your grandmother chasing your grandfather with a butcher knife is quite a head trip.  I immediately thought that everyone's point of view made their own circumstances look better.  I talked to my mother and my father about it and they confirmed that she did have a terrible temper and she had thrown a gravy boat at my father's face when he was a young married man and she wouldn't speak to her son for several years after that.  What ever happened to sweet grandmas?  Is there such a thing?

Who Are The Cit'iots (city idiots)?

My husband and I have been considering buying a farm upstate while the real estate prices are low.  When my husband was reading the "Country Folks" (a weekly farmer newspaper that contains classifieds - we call it the farmer bible) he saw some farms up for auction.  We checked them out online and didn't like the area and I decided to check out farm auctions from the USDA.  There was one in Schoharie that was coming up for auction soon.  We checked it out using Google Maps and the found the property boundaries on the tax assessor's site.  We decided to take a ride and check it out.

As we drove north we started to notice more and more pickup trucks instead of cars.  We noticed junk in people's yards instead of pristine landscapes and we commented on it that we could never get away with that in our town anymore.  We felt as though we were driving through our town 30 years ago.  We found the road that the farm was on and we headed up the dirt road.  We were really excited because the road on our old dairy farm was dirt.  We were driving slow and a pick up truck came up behind us, so I pulled over the best that I could.  He went by us and gave us a dirty look.  We started driving the roads that surrounded the farm to get an idea of the area.   We saw a few Mc Mansions with pristine landscaping but overall there were mainly working farms. We were pleased to see real people with kids riding old bicycles in the driveways. At the same time though, we were pleased to see a few Mc Mansions because that meant that if you needed to sell off a lot, there was demand. We took pictures of neighboring farms and streams by the roads.  Several times we had pickup trucks go by us and again we got dirty looks. 

It took us awhile to realize that they had identified us as 'cit'iots' and we fit the profile.  We wished that we had put a bumper sticker on the car that said "My other vehicle is a Tractor".  We  realized that if we bought a farm up here we would have to put up with the local's dirty looks.  Maybe we would fit in our with our cows and older tractors but I think it would take quite awhile to be accepted because the truth is, we have become cit'iots.  We were looking at the farm with an eye for future subdivision, just like the cit'iots did in our neighborhood.  We were looking down at the locals wondering how they could make a living from just farming.  I guess it is a matter of your perspective. 

The Bull's Adventure

I think that the worst time that any of the cows ever got lose was when a bull a got loose.  We got a phone call that there was a couple of cows loose from the summer pasture at we rented at another farm.  When we went to look at the place of the last reported sighting, we ran into several police cars.
We were informed that the bull was running into cars on the highway.  Yes - running into cars, not the other way around.  They said that prior to this he had attacked a person and the person had called the police from his garage.  The bull had gored him and had attacked his car.  The man that had gotten hurt came over to us talking the police.  He said that it was the strangest thing!  He had been petting him and when he realized that it was a bull, he jumped back.  He also said he grabbed a pipe and that is when the bull went nuts.  That is when he got jabbed in the ribs by the bull.
The police were waiting for a tranquillizer gun to come from the county seat.  They were prepared though in case the vicious animal returned.  We were waiting and after another 1/2 hour or so passed, the police got a call and left.  We drove over to the farm and found the animal trying to get back in the fence.  He got shipped the next day and we ended up paying the man's medical bills.  We never heard anything about the cars that he supposedly attacked.