Interview with Jun Velez @ whohub.com

What is your specialty?

I specialize in newspaper design. but i like designing all sorts of printed materials: books, brochures, magazines, tabloid, etc.

Where can we view your portfolio online?

My newspaper designs and blogs can be viewed in grafikcebu.blogspot.com

What made you interested in design?

i love shapes and colors and the play of text, space and visuals in design.

What has been your professional career path?

i was editor in chief of both my high school and college publications. after leaving school i designed for a magazine and later worked as art director of an ad agency before returning to publication work as newspaper designer

Have you received any awards for your work in the field of design?

it was the recognition best designed newspaper of a newspaper i just designed that i really cherish

What is your motivation? What makes you get up in the mornings?

it's the excitement each day brings. the dreams i have awake. if im busy with something, its the project i visualize in my head.

How would you define your design style?

I'd say it's post modern. i know modern design but it seems to be very predictable now.

How do you promote and move your work?

i post my works in my blog. i haven't updated my account though in a long time. i work with pdfs.

In which new areas would you like to experiment?

id like to experiment using our native writing, the alibata for my graphic designs.

Shapes, color, concept: where do you usually begin when conceiving a design?

usually it's shape. colors enhance the over-all effect and identity of the work.

What are your sources for documentation and to generate ideas?

google helps. but the main part are the images i retain in my mind from all sorts of inspiration: nature, life experience, philosophy, etc.

Which festivals or awards in your field do you find most interesting?

i attended an IFRA seminar in manila once. id like to go to another one if i have the money

What is your favourite type of customer?

my favorite customer is one who trusts and gives me room to do my creative work.

To a certain point, is copying justifiable?

copying is just cutting corners. its not advised. none of the great and really creative work comes from it.

List some things you dislike seeing in design.

i have a very open mind in design. usually i try to see where the designer is coming from. as long as it makes sense, i wouldn't dislike it. what i dislike is philosophically incoherent work.

Do you believe the newer generations are better at designing?

not necessarily

With which type of client would you decline in working for?

overbearing clients who breathe down your neck.

© jun velez

Web address for this interview:http://www.whohub.com/junvelez

Sinulog in Japan

Towards an indigenous design. Design as signifier of the signified truth about one's culture and a symbolic shaper and definer of a people's identity.

complic8d

I face the computer everyday. That may conjure the image of a computer whiz kid or a geek which I am far from or of someone who belongs to a whole new generation brought up and bred on the ubiquitous presence of the internet and other electronic wonders.

I am none of those. But neither am I a typewriter-hugging, sentimental, old world lifestyle lover. I’ll always be interested in things past, mine or that of my people. But the past will always be in the past no matter how many times you turn it over, flip it upside down, burn it sideways, do whatever you want with it. (Whew! For someone who’s so stuck in the past, that was refreshing!)

I face the computer every day and I write about historical stuff. That sure is quite an unlikely mix. But somehow things past and new complement each other. Just like writing and graphic design.

I do graphic design. It’s an art form that gives one a certain high quite different from writing. Just like in painting, one expresses oneself in graphic design through symbols, forms, and spaces.

If a modernist painter had to come up with abstract expressionism to reveal the unexpressed, intangible truths inside him, the graphic designer has only recourse to symbols in order to communicate. The content (as in publications) being the domain of the writer.

Western writing is unlike other forms of writing where symbols like pictographs are part of the writing process. There can be a whole lot of story why a stroke or symbol is applied to this or that kind of writing.

You don’t look at the alphabet and imagine what image they suggest. They simply have assigned meanings already.

One graphic designer made a breakthrough when he simply declared “print is dead,” and in its wake, numbers and the alphabet are freed from their function and assigned meanings. Suddenly a flipped number 3 can stand for letter E, or 5 for S. His name is David Carson.

With the popularity of text messaging nowadays, Carson seems prophetic with his repurposed graphic symbols. We type Gr8t when we mean great. That’s quite even more radical than what Carson first experimented.

What we’re seeing, I’d like to think, are more than lazy shortcuts but maybe of writing itself evolving. Language as recorded in writing is never static. It’s always dynamic.

There has always been a dichotomy between writing and meaning. We say so much when we mean so little. It’s like paying a stack of devalued paper bills for a t-shirt.

For the graphic designer, it’s both exciting and alarming. It’s like stealing fire from the gods or eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge. The medium is now the message. Modernist dichotomy is replaced with deconstruction’s chaos and primordial creativity (Carson’s work sometimes seem primordial with their originality). It’s either Carson simply broke down all the rules or really started quite something new.

This morning, I’m facing the computer as a writer. Tonight, I’ll face it as a graphic designer. I would want a synthesis myself. Life as it is, is complc8d enough.

Postmod display

Art nouveau makes a comeback in graphic design's floral and nature-inspired decorations

Playful modernism

Reacting to criticisms, Modernism began to become more playful. Here's a take at playful modernism

Urban blight

The photo used in this print ad won for Alex Badayos a photojournalism award. The slum area in the city's North Reclamation Project, long ago seized by the national govt from the city of Cebu, contrasts with the Radisson Blue hotel building in the background. The special report advertised here would reap numerous awards. Distorted font was used for the title to dramatize urban decay.

How Chinese can this get?

Red and the brush stroke. You can't get more Chinese than this. On the occasion of the Beijing Olympics, I made this print ad as requested by one of the company's stockholders. Modern lay-out of grid and white space married with culturally significant elements of the Chinese artistic tradition.

Ode to bloggers

A print ad I made for a forum that had Manolo Quezon for a main speaker. Manolo Quezon had high hopes for today's bloggers as the future of journalism. I agree with him. Print like other traditional forms of mass communication is a one-way street. It is hegemonic, controlling what the mass in mass communication sees, feels and thinks like one sitting duck of an audience. Mass Communication shouldn't be mass but a social, interactive one where people can react and argue what media dishes out. Like other hegemonic regimes of the 20th century, one-way street media like radio, print and TV are going to be eased out, reduced to their mere entertainment value to give way for a more "participatative" kind of media, as it is already happening in other parts of the globe.

Giving the TQ poster a postmodern facelift

I made some changes to my friend Franzty's modern design of Treasure Quest poster to give it a more contemporary, post-modern touch.

Deconstructing the poster

As early as 2004, we made strides in the direction of postmodernism and its more philosophically cohesive offspring - deconstruction. Here, function as modernists would interpret it, took a backseat. It's much more intellectually stimulating, philosophically provocative and visually stunning. The design reflects a world in transition from staid, rational, universalistic, form-follows-function visual philosophy to one of non-rational, emotional, culturally-relative creative perspective. The design is indicative of artists' wariness with modernity's promise of improving the lives of men contradicted by a planet on the precipice of a destructive global warming and climatic changes. Modernity which sees the planet as an object, an inanimate thing to be exploited, harnessed, mined, quarried, harvested beyond its capacity to replenish and reproduce now faces the consequence of its over-reliance on mere materialist view of the world. Artists are among those who first make a return to the worldview of the ancients and the more affective side of our humanity.

Blurring the Center: The Sun.Star Redesign

Must art mirror philosophical shifts? Must it influence newspaper design? Actually, it already has. The present modular design adopted by newspapers worldwide is inspired by Piet Mondrian’s modern art.

Mondrian’s influence is everywhere in modern graphic design. However, the long reign of modernism in the 20th century is fading.

In this postmodern age there is strong distrust for grand narratives and for that matter, any worldview. So in designing the Sun.Star paper in the year 2007, one is left with the methods of deconstructive criticism.

Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction has expanded from purely literary criticism to contemporary philosophy influencing art, architecture and almost every facet of human activity.

Decentering design

Must there always be the center? The center has always been preferred to the periphery. It has always been considered superior to the marginal. Must it always be so?

This center-periphery contradiction is just among the many binary oppositions questioned by Derrida.

In art, where philosophical theses often reverberate, decentering found graphic expression.
There can be a design other than that which converges at the center as shown above. In many American and European newspapers the center is disappearing. In its stead are decentered designs of section heads, headlines, photo layouts etc.

Marginal or peripheral placements take importance over the center where traditionally the significant elements converge.

We cannot, however, totally eliminate the center alignment as can be noticed in the issues of Sun.Star. We have, however, limited it on certain pages that can stand alone like the front page.

Postmodern playfulness

Modern modular layout inspired by Mondrian remains the foremost influence in newspaper design. Yet the introduction of new features not consistent with rational, logical design is a sign of shifting directions.

Instead of typographic formality, Sun.Star’s new design takes on a postmodern twist.
Except for the front page which retains the font Impact, all headlines are in the normal serif font Charter. Section flags, on the other hand, use the san serif font Aksidenz.

Charter’s straightforwardness and seeming lack of flamboyance gives it both functional and elegant appearance like its modern predecessor Bodoni. And in the Sun.Star design, is utilized to hold the paper together.

Used in lower case for the section flags, Aksidenz has the informal effect that tones down the seriousness of the page. In the sports page, the letter O is replaced by a ball depending on the sport bannered by the section. This adds to the playfulness of the section flag evocative of the section’s content.

Serif is reminiscent of how newspapers traditionally look. Yet its combination with the design’s modular format, decentered layout and less formal section flags give the paper a postmodern touch.

Doing away with serifs would be parting completely with tradition. The serif is the last vestige of classical tradition we marry with the modern modular format. This eclecticism results in the present design.

Neither tabloid nor broadsheet

A recent trend—the compact— made quite a stir in the newspapering world. Neither a tabloid nor a broadsheet, it can be said to be a cross between the two. A compact can either be more tabloid or more broadsheet depending on the preference of the publisher.

Popularized by Mario Garcia, this design concept in a way, freed newspapers, including Sun.Star, from the limitation of being either a tabloid or broadsheet-like.

Basically, what Garcia proposed is radical and in tune with this postmodern time of crossovers and merging genres. He helped us redefine our traditional notions of what is and what is not a newspaper.

Sun.Star’s latest redesign is hard to classify using the old conventions as it is neither all-out tabloid nor broadsheet-inspired.

The redesign retains most of the principles adopted by Sun.Star in its previous design but with greater flexibility. Like before, the paper’s tabloid size allows for closer interaction with the reader as compared to the smug appearance of the broadsheet yet minus the sensationalism of big bold typography.

Adding to the tabloid and broadsheet mix is magazine design crossing over to newspapers, and with great results.

Design philosophy

Arbitrariness may be an initial characteristic of postmodernism. Seemingly pointless pastiche, cross influences and eclecticism may not mean anything at first. But postmodernism signifies an attempt at doing away with the dualism and dichotomy in western philosophy.

In my view, there ought to be no dichotomy. There is no conflict because there need not be. The subjective and the rational are not in conflict and that’s what the Sun.Star design stands for.
Derrida was right in denouncing western philosophy’s logocentrism.

However, deconstruction’s avoidance of offering any worldview (doing so would be contradicting itself) succeeds only in placing marginal perspectives in the same footing with that of the center which has long dominated human thought. Unintentionally, this results in several “truths,” several “realities.”

To some extent, this is a positive development as it ends western ethnocentrism.

My non-dualist view on the matter, for example, is characteristic of Filipino philosophy.

In the postmodern world, marginalized voices are getting attention and respect.

We have to get rid of worldviews, the deconstructionists would say. Yet, historicity can’t be ignored and neither can reality.

Identity

Ultimately, we return to the basic purpose of design––to help define the paper’s identity, its character and soul.

Going back to Derrida, the Sun.Star design is the form/signifier of the journalistic signified tradition. The decentered form only reflects the journalistic truth.

The serif retention signifies rootedness in tradition and historicity, the paper being part of the community. In the future, we may, however, eventually part completely from tradition and dissociate from the past. We hope to do this without losing sensitivity to the public’s taste.

The blurring of the center gives focus to the peripheral elements on a page. In Sun.Star, society’s marginalized and powerless find equal attention, fair and objective coverage with the centers of power. This is a global phenomenon with the world’s marginalized getting academic and artistic glare shifting focus from the traditional centers of power and culture.

another award for sunstar

More pages from the new Sun.Star design