Project 1

My category was stationery and pens.  I thought a pen would be easier to show visually.  I also figured if I was going to be stuck with this object the entire semester that I had better choose carefully.  While I love how fountain pens look, so elegant, my experiences with them has been that they always leak and make a mess.  Since high school, I've always had a Parker Jotter, so that was it.

My next step was to research and brainstorm about pens, with a slight emphasis on the Jotter.  Being a retractable ballpoint created in 1954 and is still in production seemed interesting.  The history of pens in general also seemed worthy of exploration.  I included images of historical pens to reflect that the Jotter has come a long way since the reed pens of ancient Egypt.  I faded those images in the background so that the focus would be on the Jotter, today, right now in the present. 

The retractable part is a good functional feature, so I showed the parts that make that happen.  That image is also small and faded to de-emphasize it.

The handwritten word "pen" looking like the Jotter image of the pen had actually written the word was for anyone that needed to be beaten over the head with the obvious. 

Because the product was a postcard, it seemed like a no-brainer to mount it on an actual postcard.  I collect postcards and looked through a couple hundred to find one that was the proper size, and one that I didn't mind sacrificing.  The one that fit my parameters happened to have my mother-in-law's beautiful penmanship.  It made me think about the connection that young people today don't write in cursive and really don't write if they don't have to. 

For me, one the wondrous thing about good design is that it can be meaningful on lots of different levels for different people at differing times.  Like a good book or movie, where you get treated with something you missed before that has meaning for you every time you experience it.  I have a special wine bottle opener.  If I take the time to really look at it, I am still surprised with an element that makes it beautiful or beautifully functional. 

With the postcard project, while I talked about all the possible meanings and elements that I thought of, I felt it was more important for the viewer to come to their own conclusions. However, the execution of the final image was muddy and all my references were pretty obvious, and didn't have that "spark" to make it exceptional, so if I were grading it, I would also have given it a grade of "B."