The previous design’s been archived.

As always, the previous design has been archived.

I can now hold in my hands the physical result of half a year of work, the freshly printed book for children called Jugosa cocina para niños (juicy cooking for kids) that, in addition to containing plenty of recipes meant for them to prepare by themselves (with an adult’s helping hand), includes all sorts of trivia about ingredients and the culinary art, and which, the author says, is meant to help the children recognize the value in the food that they eat, think about nutrition, and put their creativity into practice. It was a fun project, in which I was involved as an art director and layout designer.

The author is Mónica Pardo Blum, who once got an award for another book of hers, called Cocina chilena (Chilean cuisine). The illustrations were made by visual artist Cecilia Andrews, and the photographs taken by Eduardo Banderas. Truth is, being fresh out of university, I wouldn’t have been able to get the position I got if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s a family project; my dad served as an editor, since the author is his mother-in-law, and, in turn, the illustrator is her daughter-in-law. Working like this was bound to cause some problems, but we managed to finish it, after some delays. I’m quite fond of the result.

Below, the cover of the book. Here’s two pages, and a couple more.

It was a pleasure to do this sort of project, because I like working on educational stuff. It’s difficult for me to give my best when my work’s ultimate purpose is to make some fat rich guy get richer. I will hopefully do more of this kind of thing in the future.

The whole class took a trip to the Museo Naval y Marítimo de Valparaíso (Valparaíso Sea and Navy Museum), where we took a look at their exhibitions, and were asked to conceptualize one new exhibition space. Two classmates, Natalia and Juan Pablo, and I, spent all those months butting heads and working overnight. I’m pretty sure we were on the brink of hating eachother. I’ve never been very good at teamwork, but the three of us ended up quite invested in our work and in our chosen subject, so we had long arguments. While most of our classmates’ proposals were about showing the underwater fauna of Chile, we arrived at the idea of displaying the ugly side; that is, all the damage that us humans are causing the underwater fauna and flora, with statistics and shocking images.

It all started with a brainstorming session we had one day, after we got our butts kicked in class. We were taking a very conservative approach, so we were asked to be bold and completely rethink our stance. During this brainstorm we came up with four radical concepts, two of which I sketched: the ones we called ‘clinical’ and ‘house of horrors’.

These concepts were radical enough that we were told to tone them down. They focused on aesthetics, particularly of the gut-wrenching kind. We wanted to deliver a horrific message, and we wanted to do it through the senses first.

What we finally arrived at was much a more sobered-down take on the subject. We narrowed down our message to: over exploitation of marine resources, contamination, climate changes, introduction of species to non-native habitats, and human invasion of natural habitats. We conceptualized five ‘corridors’ in the exhibition, for each of these subjects, each of which would follow the same structure: a ‘cover’, which was a 4 meters-tall projection; a question on its feet, inviting the visitor to discover what it’s about; an introduction to the subject, in the form of data related directly to Chile and its inhabitants, anchoring the to-be-discussed issues in the local reality; raising the problem, showing some basic data in visual form; further developing the problem, with more data and shocking pictures; wrapping up the problem, by portraying the ways in which the problem in the seas affects the human race; and finally, an ‘epilogue’ in the form of a video that exhibits some initiatives to tackle the problem. Of course, this wasn’t necessarily going to be the way the visitor would want to go about the exhibition, so we still accomodated free exploration, by jumping from corridor to corridor.

Above, a crudely realized tour of the space of the exhibition, which we called Ojo al pez (Eye on the fish). Here is the poster board that was exhibited at the end of the semester (in Spanish), detailing much of the ideas, and our approach. Also, here are some more preliminary sketches, and one poster with data for the exhibition.

In 2006, for my workshop course in that year’s first semester, I created a graphic work that ironized technology and how the Monkey King (humanity) wreaks havoc on Earth through its lack of restraint and its egocentrism. The next semester I was to base an animation on that work.

This was a semester-long project (it kind of doesn’t show, due to a long preliminary process) for Sebastián Skoknic and Bryan Phillips’s course. Other than being my longest animation since, it marks the first time I ever did anything resembling sound design; I even splashed a bit in the tub to get some water sounds. The most interesting part was using the Game Boy Camera (thus the Game Boy sound hardware) for the electronic noise, which I think worked very well.

The subject of this piece remains the same as the one it’s based on, though I didn’t make any specific references to video games this once, just computers.

The previous design has been archived.

There is something I still don’t understand, which happened in the old design too, and that is some Firefox rendering glitches when it first loads the page. After refreshing, it goes away. My guess is that it’s a bug related to blocks with the CSS display property set to ‘none’, which is how I make the popup effect. Well, nevermind the jargon, but the point is that it somehow screws up the design.

Chile has a rather rich mythology, particularly from the island of Chiloé, from where the better recognized mythical figures, such as the Trauco and the Pincoya, originated from. That was the subject for the final exam of my workshop class, the second semester of 2007, with Jennifer King and Ximena Undurraga. What we created was a (loosely termed) dictionary of local mythological beings, a full book of them—since we were around 20, and everyone had to create ten, the result was around 200 pages worth of illustrations.

That was the final cover, I’m not sure whose design it is, but it showcases some unfinished illustrations pinned to a cork board. I created two concepts, but they were not selected (one, two).

And that is how the book looks on the inside. The page on the left is my own work. Some are better than others, but here are all of them:

• El balsero
• Brujo tonto
• Cahuelche
• Chinifilu
• Deñ
• Haucella
• Huala
• Piruquina
• Sietecolores
• La voladora