Day 100 “Terminus” is the end of the line. You may pay your respects here. The full nature of this work shall remain undisclosed and unissued until the time of completion for the full catalogue.

DAY 100: “TERMINUS”

Unclassifiable/mixed media
Podcast Title: “Terminus”

Description: The last word from Day For Night on its diverse global, multimedia concerns
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I guess I have these “paranoid” moments where I realize I’m not doing any broadcasting, and that is a perfect opportunity to grandstand a little bit, and to step back, to examine the body of work, and to look at the Oeuvre of the Day For Night catalogue, the body of graphic work, and so on… And some times I’ll find myself a little bit restless, and I’ll sit back and, in one case, during one project in particular, I wasn’t’ terribly satisfied with what was going on, I found myself beginning to procrastinate a great deal, which is a really bad sign about the kind of work I find myself involved in, basically, as I wasn’t happy with any of the results, I was trying not to “delve” too deeply into the project, and what I suddnely found myself doing in its place, was examining, and cataloguing instead, what I call “beautiful work.”

I was seeking out a reference point for beauty, in the work of others. Just looking for exceptionally beautiful images, with clean, concise, intelligent design. Just making sure that every moment was spent enjoying the fruits of other quality designers’ results. And trying to cultivate, through this, a greater sense of “Intolerance”, whereby I might reject the ugly, because I probably felt that the requests being made of me by this particular client and project were somewhat ugly and unrefined, not really suitable. I knew I wasn’t going to put the Day For Night signature on any of what I was making for them, and this was demoralizing. At this point, I found myself already quite frustrated. Because I really don’t ever make something that I can’t also add my name to.

And here was one exception where I felt a little bit disgraced, by an unworkable and seemingly untenable position I found myself in where the client wanted something that I had to deliver for contractual reasons but couldn’t justify it by any other means.

 

So, I’m staring of course at all of the “fetish” images which are, these hoardable images of beauity by all these great designers, like Saville, Vaughn Oliver, and just trying to do a retrospective, in my own way, of –actually with the case of Peter Saville, I began gathering everything I had on him, from his book Designed by Peter Saville, to CD covers, actual packaging, LP covers. And I started “archiving” and scanning in images, because I felt that it was necessary to organize something – I couldn’t exactly pinpoint why I was doing it… but I knew it was critically important that I cget  through this project. And I found myself scanning in images and taking the best of his output, and even, somehow, the “worst” of his output, while covering the full scope of his career, was really remarkable. And by trying to make an archival project, out of something that I sort of had my hands on, which was this vast body of physical product, trhying to digitize it and come to terms of course with what one does when presenting a portfolio online – curating – and the critical issue with portfolios and certainly showing a catalogue is that there’s the “virtual” of digital design, and there’s the physicality/”real world” of print design, and when you’re dealing with print, it’s to do with all of the extra beauty variables, quality of paper stock, quality of inks, luminescence from stocks of paper and aqueous coatings and spot varnishes. And with the virtual design, you’re color correcting for a set of monitors and displays as the variables; various RGB colorspaces as opposed to CMYK; projected light as opposed to reflected light. You know more of less that there’s a greater tolerance for that within the same set of choices. So there’s a lot of things you don’t agonize over as a virtual designer, but you feel compelled to notice do drag on with print design. And therefore, those points, becoming guidelines that govern the aesthetics of design, for the beauty principles, means exactly that.