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BROWSE
AIGA Chicago Voices
Production Method
Digital
Design
Hexanine
Concept, Design and Art Direction: Tim Lapetino
Concept and Copywriting: Mike Peart and Ryan Schulz of AIGA Chicago
Printing
Rider Dickerson
Often times in design, and in life, the simplest ideas are the hardest to actually carry out. Hexanine had a delightfully simple concept to promote the 23rd annual Unisource Paper Show in Chicago and AIGA Chicago simultaneously with layered visualizations of unique voices, so naturally the execution had to be tedious and time consuming. Happily, the outcome was clearly worth the extra effort.
Dimensions (Width × Height × Depth)
12.5 × 6 in
Page Count
3
Paper Stock
Mohawk / Carnival, Via / Red, Vellum Cyan and Rhodamine / 80T
Number of Colors
7 (4C Process + 3 hits white ink)
Varnishes
–
Binding
–
Typography
Gotham
Project Description
To celebrate the 23rd annual Unisource Paper Show in Chicago, we worked alongside AIGA Chicago to create a set of three art prints that would highlight the creativity of printing and paper, while also serving as a unique marketing piece for the chapter. The pieces are meant to be kept and displayed, while also playing on the relevant theme of unique voices coming together. The waveforms on the pieces are visual representations of unique voices paired in unlikely ways, like Neil Armstrong’s famous “one small step for man” utterance mashed up with Lady Gaga proclaiming “let’s dance,” or Ronald Reagan calling out Gorbachev, combined with the band Oasis. Printed on striking colored paper stocks with seven hits of ink, the waveform combinations yielded beautiful patterns and challenged audiences to add their own voices to the conversation surrounding design and its future.We wanted a piece that could work as something "frame-worthy" and also had an interesting spin on using paper, content-wise. Great shout outs to Rider Dickerson and Mohawk for donating printing and paper, respectively, to get us to a great piece that everyone can show off.
Production Lesson(s)
We learned that registering the Indigo presses with multiple inks isn't too bad if you have a great printer. They did an excellent job registering 7 hits of inks, and it looked great.We also were reminded that simple ideas aren't always easy to execute. This was a relatively straightforward concept, but to create unique-looking audio waveform artwork, we had to find the appropriate sound clips, edit them down in an audio program, and then export those visually. From there, we used those as the basis for our own waveform visuals, made up of hundreds of .75 pt line segments. The exported audio visualizations were our starting point and reference, but the final art was made up of hundreds of hand-manipulated points in Illustrator, which was incredibly time-consuming. It took us many hours just to get to a proof-of-concept that we could be sure would look good and print well. That's a scary investment of time on an evenings-and-weekends project, but in the end it worked out. Hand-manipulating hundreds of line segments was, at times, mind-numbingly boring, but some of it was done while half-watching playoff baseball and American Pickers. :)
Post Author
Duncan Robertson
Former intern at UnderConsideration LLC.
More: Online / On Twitter
Date Published
May 8, 2013
Filed Under
Digital
Postcard
Tagged with
AIGA
audio visual
layers
mohawk
seven inks
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FPO (For Print Only), is a division of UnderConsideration, celebrating the reality that print is not dead by showcasing the most compelling printed projects.
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About UnderConsideration
UnderConsideration is a graphic design firm generating its own projects, initiatives, and content while taking on limited client work. Run by Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit in Bloomington, IN. More…
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