Essay #4

Cairo Montgomery
English 111
Essay 4

The Process of Design

    Everything is in this world needs a process. True, we can sometimes start things without guidelines and be blessed with a substantial end result. Though, with a proper outline and form of process set prior to a project, you will always have an overall better sense of  progress. If you ever find yourself designing something you should always keep such a process in mind. Every now and then an artist may feel inspired enough to just, go at it head-first and the end result just fall into their lap. Unfortunately, we aren't always that fortune and we aren't always inspired. Following the right process will get you through your design or art peice effectively without leaving your audiance lost to what your point is.

    Before you jump into working you should make sure to have a clear understanding of what it is you are suppose to accomplish with your design. It's important to bring people into your peice and relate to your design. So if you're making a flyer for a football team, it wouldn't hurt to go to a game and get a feel for the sport itself. If you can look at the flyer and tell that its for a football team at first glance then you achieve your goal. This is how you develop your concept.

    Developing your concept is the most important part of the design process. Without a clear sense of concept anyone is liable to define your work from their own imagination, and this is not what you want as an artist unless your peice is abstract. You should be able to understand how without following this particular step your entire design could loose its substance. Artist come up with their own methods of establishing a good concept to maintain their connection with their work and their audiance.

    Before I started the art program at NOVA I was so uses to just jumping in front of the computer, starting a design and finishing it within a matter of hours without taking much into consideration but visual appeal. That worked for me. I felt as though as long as my end result was compelling that was enough. Although there was so much foundation lacking in my work and that I wasn't able to notice it until I learned various theories of art. I was so pissed off when my art instructors would require a process book with our projects. Process books are basically a step by step analysis of how and why you created your final design for a project. Say you were creating a logo. To start off the book you might have a set of ten small black and white thumbnail sized designs. Then out out those ten designs you would choose the best three you would want to use and redesign them on a larger scale, referred to as "comps", and out of the three you would choose the strongest design to go with for your final result. You would then sketch this final design, being mindful to of design elements such as hierarchy and composition. Everything should be well balanced and your center of interest should be obvious. You can no start to take into consideration an effect swatch pallet (assortment of colors) that will compliment your design. It would benefit you gravely to be conscious of color theory and different combinations of color such as primary color, secondary color and tertiary color and different color compliments while doing this. Keeping a good sense of colors helps to no clash colors together. Sometimes color and speak louder than the message of your design and can take away from the integrity of your design.

    Having a colored rough draft isn't always enough to make an effective design. Knowing when you're finished can be difficult sometimes. You might not when enough is enough or if all you have will suffice. Every now and then you might reach the end of a project with the feeling that something is missing. This might be my favorite part of the project. This pretty much means that you forgot your creativity. This is now your opportunity to throw your own style into the design and make it speak for you as an artist. You achieve this simply by playing around with your design until you're satisfied.

    There is no right or wrong way to create art. One might come up with their own process of design totally different from mine but at the end of the day a process is required and the design is nothing without a good concept.

Essay #3

Cairo Montgomery
English 111
Essay 3

Keeping In Touch

    I have noticed throughout my years one of the things that seem to change most drastically and frequently are the actions of the phrase "keep in touch". The whole aspect of communication seems to develop and evolve every few years within itself. With new social networks and cell phone features beings created every few months, older forms of communication either seem to become obsolete or have completely changed. With the average teenager spending 31 hours on the internet per week, what does that mean is in store for the future of "keeping in Touch" when if you can't feel anything online?

    Listing to stories from my grandpatents about how life was when they were my age can be so stressful sometimes. It almost seems impossible that they would be able to maintain any relationship outside of their house hold. No cell phones, no internet, no gps. Like, how did they find anyone back then? I used to wonder sometimes, how did my grandfather approach my grandmother if it wasn't to get her phone number?  How did you plan on keeping in touch if neither of them could text each other? Comes to find out, what they would do after meeting someone they really liked was to either wait around until you bump into them again, or immediately plan to meet somewhere else. Now a days if you were to make plans right after an introduction it would come off as too forward or creepy. Although, in their time there seemed to be a much stronger energy behind meeting and getting to know people than we have now. They didn't have the luxury of being able to maintain distant relationships instantly and at a moments desire as we do now but relationships still seemed to have picked up right where they left off. Without the technology that we have today it was still possible to reach out to distant family and friends. The postal system was booming. I myself can remember back around my earlier years before everyone had an email address and a computer in every house. We would get so much mail. From, Christmas cards and pictures from family across the country, to post cards from traveling loved ones. Mail was the old fashioned way of updating your status, of course not as instant and frequent Twitter post, letters and post cards were a lot more heart felt and personal.

    I feel its safe to say that these days keeping in contact with someone is an extremely easy task. Assuming that the person you wish to contact is keeping up with the times, there should be a number of digital addresses that allow you to be able to reach them. It all starts with one Email address and the rest is history. In this day and age with out an email address you can't own a phone, get a job or even take a class at nova without one. We now have the luxury of sending messages to distant loved ones instantly with this creation, unlike the olden days where we waited around all week for letters to be delivered. These days sending and receiving messages through the mail is much more of a formal matter. The only messages being sent though mail are wedding invitations, holiday cards and money. With blogs, microblogging and social networking giants such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr, we now have the ability to share daily moments of our lives, opinions & ideas, and even play scrabble with a whole entire international network of friends, family and strangers. As tables and smart phones are acquired, portability plays a huge role in our ability to communicate instantly at every waking second. With cameras and videos being at our disposal following someone's life online can have a cinimatic feel to it.

    With the ability to communicate to a large range of followers instantly at our fingertips, updating everyone on our daily voyage through life eventually feels and becomes routine to us. Friends we haven't seen in months have the option of checking up on us as they please, and we do the same. Are we losing grasp of the genuine struggle of getting to know getting each other by following people? Maybe just before we part ways with long distant friends and family, instead of saying "keep in touch" we should just say "follow me". 

Essay #2 writing without prescribing

Cairo Montgomery
English 111
Isha Barnoy
Essay 2: writing without prescribing

Is rap music influentialy detrmemtial?

I remember growing up, one of the only things my parents wound never buy me was a CD player. I would ask every Christmas and birthday and get the same answer every time. "We don't want you blocking out everyone and listening to those raps and watching those [music] videos over and over agin." My parents would say. "The devil will be in your head all day!" Irritated I would respond back to them "I dont even plan on listening to the devil, I'll play Snoop dogg instead." They would always criticized the "foul language" in the music I would play and for the longest wouldn't even let me watch music videos. On tv sometimes I would catch on the news a group of women protesting against rap music in front of record stores as they would destroy new copies of Eminem's latest CD. Some with picket signs that had the word "Bitch" crossed out in a circle. Most older people talking about how the music we listened to would destroy our entire generation, and I always wondered to myself how that would even work. Could something as simple as music actually 'destroy' my generation? Perhaps there's something more to it than that.

Rap music is known to be one of those genres of music that you have prepare yourself to listen to before you hear it. It contains lyrical imagery of a life style that includes crime, drugs, violence, and loose sex. A lot of material that would make the average soccer mom shiver, and in my opinion that's a half of the reason why most kids like it so much. On the front of every popular rap CDs there is a parental advisory sticker that brings attention to the fact that this music is reserved for a certain audiance however of course, young kids still seem to gain access to the music. When they do so they often interpret the overall message of a song the wrong way. I believe music its self is a form of artistic expression and sense that's the case the over all message of a simple rap song cant always be understood on your first listen. You might need to fight though the curse words and tough talk to acquire the more important motivational message almost buried in the lyrics. The more you listen to this music the easier it is to decipher the concealed inspirational message. It's extremely easy however to pick up some head phones, hear the catchy hook and jump to most shallow conclusion of what a song is about. This is what most people do although I can't say I blame them. The beats, the catchy hooks, and the overall deliverance of the song can easily distract someone who doesn't listen to rap music often from grasping the desired concept. Much like surrealist art, where if you look at it it my seem random and senseless but there is actually logic to the art peice. Artist are fine with this. At the same time many people take the lyrics and run with it disregarding the intended message. Some fall victim to the allure of rap culture, they worship the persona of these rap artist, idolise their life styles, and adopt the negative habits of their culture and simply because its easy to.

It has been assumed by many people that the influence of the Rap/Hip-hop culture is responsible for the a number of flaws in this country ranging from teen pregnancies, gang violence, school shootings and the list goes on. Some might also refer to situations like Tyler Hadley's,  a 17 year old boy from Florida who was on trial for two murder charges for killing his parents last year. He was reported having beaten them to death with a hammer, then throwing a house party via Facebook invites  while their bodies remained in their bedroom. He was said to have popped three extacy tablets prior to the party. When caught Tyler confessed that rap music and the devil influenced him to do such a malicious act. Many people vaguely familiar with rap music might read a story like this and start to instantly think of ways to disconnect them and their children from such a negatively influenced genre of music. If there are rap songs about killing people, doing extacy, and having parties then surly there must be a connection. I however don't believe it to be that simple. At what point does personal responsibility come into account? Extacy tablets don't just come package inside of rap albums, you have to take it upon yourself to disregard everything you've ever heard about extacy being harmful to you, find who has it and buy it.

Is Tyler Hadley and others like him being influenced by something from more detrimental than their iPods on an everyday basis? Some my think If this was not the case then everyone with a radio would be a manic. Perhaps it isn't what these people are listening to, but rather what they haven't heard that effects them. At the end of the day, I feel as though anyone without a strong moral foundation is liable to be negatively influenced by, well, anything.