More Herb's!
A follow-up to last week with more insight
Thanks for the great response and think I am going to wrap this up but start to use this concept on some current projects.
I mentioned before that I started Herb as a templated system but eventually, I started using Herb to get out ideas. It’s natural to guard your time/ideas but the quickest path is setting free ideas or going straight to the best idea. Use ‘em if you got ‘em. If you don’t have a project to use them on, make something up, and occasionally ignore the scale. I feel like new ideas will always come and it keeps the creative flow going, we are not building dams.
One of the things I don’t think I have mentioned is that I work fast. I got this skill by having a job where I had to design a lot of projects in a short time. That was enough practice but I realized that if I swiftly finished the work that I didn’t enjoy, I could devote more time to the creative work. Once I hit creative I can explore my top ideas and test to see what works. This opens doors to new ideas as well. The hard truth is great work usually takes time and puts up challenges but getting to solid ideas quickly means more time for refinement.
For the Thomas Fehlmann project, I found some old experiments with emulsion laying around (looking for a place to be archived) and started messing with them over some analog type for around 30 minutes. This wasn’t working so I went straight to digital. I wanted something graphic, like Kompakt dots, so I used stripes and had a lot of fun with that setup.
After printing for the emulsion, I had a couple of unused sheets of type laying around and some oil crayons, so I started doodling over that type and also took the stripes in another direction.
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Jacques Greene has a long history of great design, I knew I had to come correct. Having pressure to perform before a project isn’t a healthy mindset to do great work. Nothing was coming to me (open-ended/no direction blues) so I set an unreleased font I made long ago into a coin and laid some other type in the center as an afterthought. When in doubt, I print it out, messed with it, scanned it back in (changing properties of the work from vector to pixels), and started getting more ideas that didn’t deliver great results but contributed to the final work.
I remembered a project I had worked on for Resident Advisor (bottom right image above) that I never got to use that I really liked a lot. When I was a child, I had these colored blocks and rods and I am positive that is where this work comes from.
The last thing I wanted to say was one of the reasons Herb “works” is because it’s a combination of things that I truly enjoy. I love to explore new ideas, music, and working with Sam is wonderful. It’s a great excuse to play and find new avenues.
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Links: Cina Associates, Cina Art, Public Type