NEW YEAR’S

RESOLUTION:

30 DPI

FEATURING:

SABA SOBHANI

CALVIN FENNELL

EMMA HERLICK

ROSS ZUROWSKI

NATHAN GRIMBERG

MELANIE WONG

BRIAN KALL

CLAUDIA KONOPKO

WRITERS:

MICHAEL MIFSUD-SWEENEY

GILLIE NATRA

JACOB COLOSI

ILLUSTRATION:

AARON THADATHIL

SADDLERS:

ANGELINA TJHUNG

HYOJUNG JULIA SEO

YSDN SADDLE

ISSUE 03 / JAN ’15

TABLE OF AWESOME CONTENT

LetterVery this, so that. / Hyojung Julia Seo

About this featureCan you feel it? / Michael Mifsud-Sweeney

30 dpi of:Saba SobhaniCalvin FennellEmma HerlickRoss ZurowskiNathan GrimbergMelanie WongBrian KallClaudia Konopko

ColumnsThink in Style / Gillie NatraMy Aesthetic / Jacob Colosi

8-bit Vomit / Aaron Thadathil

The next saddle

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3

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1011

1213

14-15

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LETTER

Very this, so that.The initial reaction collection

Ugh, so minimal and so simple.That’s so trippy, how does one even?Aww that's SO cute, SO you.Is that glitch for real?I think I’ve seen that before on Tumblr...or was it Pinterest?Of course you would do that, of course.Ooh those pastel colours, so yummy.Daang, did you draw this?That flat UI!Hey, you did this one right?This is so something you’d do.

Come on, you’ve all heard these phrases before.Let’s get more creative when we speak our thoughts.Oh and, where has our grammar gone?Ah, who cares.

Our peers analyze the repetitive styles that consis-tently appear in our work. Isn’t it funny how we don't recognize our own styles until someone points it out for us? Well, that is usually the case for me. I love it when that happens because with it comes this good feeling of being recognized for something unique. Come on, admit it, what design student doesn’t like being unique? Go compliment your crush in YSDN by saying, “Hey, your style is so, just so,

different.”

Hyojung Julia SeoWith unique love,

2

ABOUT THIS FEATURE

Can You Feel it?I can.

pants at the thought of finding an internship. Some-thing that I think everyone should be reminded of is to find an internship that speaks to you. As we develop our visual language, it’s important to remember that these are just test drives. Crash courses in various languages of design. There is no optimal studio for YSDN. We are not the same people. We are not the same designers. We all have different needs. Some people would love Facebook. Some people would love a small studio.

The sound of 100 YSDN third years internally/externally crapping their

Some people

just want

cash

to paytuition

$.

Michael Mifsud-Sweeney

30 dpi of Saba Sobhani / first year.

4

30 dpi of Calvin Fennell / third year.

30 dpi of Emma Herlick / fourth year.

6

30 dpi of Ross Zurowski / third year.

30 dpi of Nathan Grimberg / third year.

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30 dpi of Melanie Wong / third year.

30 dpi of Brian Kall / second year.

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30 dpi of Claudia Konopko / second year.

GILLIE NATRA / THIRD YEAR

Think in StyleHerbs and Spices of Design. Yum

Almost every time I start a new project I find myself on Pinterest or the like, looking for a suitable style with which to dress my unborn bebe. But it never seems to work quite this way, as in the end my work feels to me characteristically mine. Looking back and observing the end result to understand what went missing in the process of reinventing my style, I wonder what is a personal style? What is the value of originality and innovation? And what is stopping us from cultivating our very own herbs and spices garden in one of the labs?

The more I think about the cultural notion of the personal style (and I can only speak on my own ac-count), I think of it as an intricately woven network of personal thoughts and ideas that are individualized, rather than a mere visual stimuli. Sure, thoughts tran-scend into visual stimuli and thus they are endlessly interconnected in the process of creation, but what makes the fruit of our hands “feel” ours? Because surely not everything we produce looks the same. But rather, we might approach our tasks with the same problem solving mentality that yields a similar process of creation. I would argue that our style is in essence our very own thought process, the way in which one envisions solutions to the problems one is faced with as a designer and as a human being. It is the way we implement our thoughts into our design, our way of connecting concepts and ideas, and what we make as we do so.

Our thoughts are conjured, among others, as a result of years of arbitrary (or preplanned, depending on your world view) experiences that we accumu-late and that belong to us alone. Although they are caused by external factors, experiences only become memorable experiences once they are interpreted by someone, and the interpretation process is a person-al one. An important question arises then: how can we communicate ideas to others through our style,

through our own thought process? What ensures that our designs reach an audience?

Let’s imagine our personal styles as languages, and recall that some languages share common ancestors. For example Latin, which birthed numerous languag-es that are somewhat similar to one another, and that can be mildly understood with knowledge of another sister Latin language. Speakers of those languages will still be able to communicate at a rudimentary lev-el, and could sharpen their linguistic skills of the other Latin language to further improve communication. It is of course also possible for us all to learn new languages altogether, but none will probably be as expressive as our native tongue, our original personal style. I think this process of learning other languages is similar to becoming accustomed to stimuli of styles in popular culture and design trends.

Which raises the questions: what is the chance for universal design? Who are we designing for? If our personal style is a one of a kind language, the way in which only we think, to what extent can we trans-communicate, if at all? I have no answer for these questions, but I want to reiterate that we all come from a different background and with a style that is special to just us, and so do the people we are designing for.

And we should plant some mint and

throw

a design tea party!

JACOB COLOSI / THIRD YEAR

My AestheticA confused woman with mushrooms.

How do we define ourselves through our work, if our work is the culmination of inspirations, influences and frameworks that we encounter in our lives? Do we have a specific aesthetic that enables us to identi-fy ourselves within our products? Our contemporary visual culture is dominated through the rehash of symbols and iconography. Visual style is not devel-oped, but appropriated, borrowed and published as manifesto. The ideals of the aesthetic permeate into our practice and influence our decisions. The authen-ticity of our work, as a product of popular culture (the culture of the people), is drawn into question when it is rooted in a cycle of endless quotation. How does my aesthetic originate from me, if it only develops from cutting and pasting snippets of what I’ve already encountered? Is it even possible to make anything new? In essence, what is the value of my aesthetic, in a digital age where style is proliferated and “inspiration” is only a click away?

While I do not pretend to have any answers over the nature of the authenticity of art and design in the contemporary age, I would like to encourage a shift in the framework used to think it. The word aesthetic is strange. We think of it as a set of rules that govern whether something is beautiful or not, or a visual language that we can use to understand a certain set of visual work. Through thirty thumbnails, we can es-tablish a visual representation of the rules a designer follows, and potentially formulate them into mini manifesto. Our aesthetic is white backgrounds with sans-serif type, or dark moody scenes with flashes of bright pink. But why do we care if something is beautiful or not—and more so, make decisions based off of it’s beauty? It’s because aesthetics is not about how pretty an object is, but the sensation that you have when encountering it—we want beautiful things because they “feel” better. The original mean-ing of the word relates to the nature of sensation (not

beauty). In this case, is the aesthetic still visual? By that I mean, does it relate to our visual rules, or the way we are shaping the experience with any cultural text? Perhaps our visual style is only the product of a series of influences, but the ways we create our own meanings (through rehashing, rearranging and interpreting) and pass those meanings onto others is, in it’s self, an original aesthetic.

The aesthetic of the new designer is not rooted in the visual, but in the frameworks of cultural production. We will develop dynamic languages to re-examine, re-discover and re-experience a cultural landscape that is tired of the post-modern rehash. If my aesthetic is a stock photo of a confused woman with mushrooms, it is because this image has created a language for me to build experiences off of. Or perhaps my aesthetic is the McDonalds salsa packet that changes the established meanings of my current paradigm. In an age where we are constantly striving to create something original, our aesthetic can be a tool to uncover new struc-tures and patterns in what already exists, without just cutting and pasting. Com-menting without the satirical edge of the postmodernist. We can expose forgotten corners of the cultural land-scape, constantly rearrange the order of our thought processes and constantly challenge meaning.

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8-BIT VOMIT

Illustration by Aaron Thadathil / third year.

26boake.psd

THE NEXT SADDLE

26boake.psdA Japanese game showbrought to you bySaddle-Japan Inc.

This past semester, 6 third-year YSDN students lived together under one roof. That roof is addressed at 26 Boake St. in The Village of York U. Now, let’s play a game. Get all of them to enter their names in a hat. Next, get each of them to draw a name out of the hat. Then, give them a full page in the saddle to write and design about the person that was drawn. What will they create? I guess we’ll see.

Read what they have to reveal about their YSDN family members and learn about how being a design student has changed their daily habits in and outside of the house.

For more information about the Sadde,and/or if you are interested in getting involved,contact the horse at:

ysdnsaddle@gmail.comfacebook.com/ysdnsaddle~

16

NEW YEAR’S

RESOLUTION:

30 DPI

FEATURING:

SABA SOBHANI

CALVIN FENNELL

EMMA HERLICK

ROSS ZUROWSKI

NATHAN GRIMBERG

MELANIE WONG

BRIAN KALL

CLAUDIA KONOPKO

WRITERS:

MICHAEL MIFSUD-SWEENEY

GILLIE NATRA

JACOB COLOSI

ILLUSTRATION:

AARON THADATHIL

SADDLERS:

ANGELINA TJHUNG

HYOJUNG JULIA SEO

YSDN SADDLE

ISSUE 03 / JAN ’15