Lee's Artlog

2008- Alice In Chains is a heavy metal rock acoustic band that was formed in 1987 by Jerry Cantrell and Layne Staley. Largely associated with the Seattle grunge movement that struck in the early 90′s, Alice In Chains rose to fame on their distinctive style, which embodied a wide range of harmonic melodies and lyrics. Topics of their music covered issues such as relationships, suicide, and drug use, to more political realms like free speech, such as in their most popular song “Man In the Box”. The band has 6 Grammy nominations,19 top 40 songs to their credit and 2 number one albums under their belt and includes such other hits as “Rooster”, “Them Bones” and “Would”. In 2002, Layne Staley died of a drug overdose, and the band went on hiatus, but rumors continue to persist of a reconstituted band (sans Staley) working on a new album perhaps as early as Q4 2008.

I went through a multitude of stages to get to this point for this piece for my expressive type class. I began with a word list that I wanted to explore that explained the duality of the band, not only in name but also in the sound and subjects that they covered. Few bands are able to scream chaotically and plead compositional music of grace in the same sentence, – to which Alice In Chains always seemed to do this for me and I wanted to explore this further. Hand drawing the “Alice” I decided to break it up more and more shifting the stem of the letterforms, and then added the curves on. I then went through numerous iterations of “In Chains” before deciding on its current letterform, which complimented the “Alice” and held its own in almost a small caps fashion while being broken, grown off, and enveloped by the curves.

Scanning the logo into the computer, I then used Illustrator to give the line weights equal strength, and added the slight embossment.  After the logo had been completed, I worked in Photoshop where eventually I settled on the parchment look because I wanted something classy, yet haunting, with a trace of human presence about the page. The final touches were the ink blots, slight indications of musical notes, and cloudy resonance to achieve the final look. I went through 10 versions where this one made the cut for the final that was put on display at Art Center.

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2008-  I find it annoyingly aggrandizing, when I attempt to seek out an artist or teacher’s work and more or less the majority of what I find is press releases and smiling facebook-esque photos.  Cults of personality are wonderful things for artists, and creating a buzz seems easier than ever with the power of Google and the internet. It seems en vogue to pop your name at the top of an invisible corporation and sell your face as being a ‘graphic designer’, than being an artist who dreams about things. A consumerist, narcissistic society bent on feeding its own twisted ideals through entertainment -and nothing shown for it- has emerged in the past few years. Glistening, cherry picked information from tabloids and sensationalism is the rage for a cracked out society.  As much as this is aggrivating, it is almost as such that the traditional way of rewarding the ‘worthy’ was never as such. Any artist can work incredibly hard but never be recognized for their talents and skills, rather it seems that more apt- that which sells, that which is currently ‘cool’, or how the artist kissed somebody’s ass, gets them where they are.

Total Recall was a science-fiction Academy Award winning epic tour de force starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and directed by Paul Verhovven. It was released in 1990 and went on to gross over $250 million worldwide setting box office records and confirming Schwarzenegger’s viability as an action megastar. Based on the Philip K. Dick story “We Will Remember You For Wholesale”, Total Recall in itself is quite perplexing. It is about a construction worker named Quaid (Schwarzenegger) who has a boring life in 2084 and decides to go ahead and get an implanted memory of a trip to Mars against the advice of his best friend and his wife (-played by Sharon Stone), who claim that he will be lobotomized by the experience. When he arrives at the ‘implant store’ named Rekall, Quaid has an apparent schitzoidembolism, and thereafter everything that he was told he would receive in his dream package from Rekall comes true. This is compounded by a trip to Mars where he is then given a ’last chance’ to ’return to reality’ confusing the assured viewer of the reality of the situation. (It should be noted that by the end of the film, even the scenario name “Blue Skies On Mars” that would be his implant, also comes true.) A perplexing film, that questions the state of reality and pushed science-fiction to its limits at its time, it still remains a classic in 2008.

After building a wordlist, I decided on a Constructivist based type for Total Recall, remembering in the film how controlled yet dystopian Mars was in the movie. I wanted the typeface to have an alien feeling to it as well and this was accomplished by modifying the legibility and altering the strengths of the letterforms through its lowercase power and objective grouping. I probably went through about 5 or so designs for the letterforms, realizing that the T’s in total matched with the L would create a natural trinity. From there I tweaked it on paper and then brought it into Illustrator, and finally Photoshop for the background and final piece layout.