Category Archive

In the course of my work, as a visual communicator, first, and communication design specialist, second, I observed that everything boils down to what someone wants to say; in short, the message. It comprises the whole point one wishes to convey. It is burdened with significance so that others may understand. Its end is the implications one has to benefit from or be warned of. It is charged with meanings one has to dig or merely digest. It is rich with ideas one may or may not accept.

So communication is enough power for everyone to exploit tremendously as a means to an end. The end referred to is action, execution or the effect that is intended to apply or be applied to any given situation. In any plan or procedure, communication is the very first and major step.

The second is, how should it be delivered? In designing image profiles for ads or public relations, the message is always in charge. The message
directs the flow, the agenda, and the design. How the message is presented or treated has just as much weight as the message itself. “I am here now,” can be expressed in multiple variations; but how do you want it to work so that it will achieve what you want? That is treatment.

So I ask a client, after all the elements he wants sensed from his message had been discussed and before I move on to the drawing board, “what do you really want to say?”Simply. It is also for the sake of confirming what the client previously laid down; because most of the time, in the course of the preliminary discussion, a client changes his or her mind in the middle or in the end. And this happens often. With that, trips back to the drawing board will be minimized.

The medium, on the other hand is the means through which a message is delivered. Is it through print or broadcast? And with the advent of the internet, one must also consider electronic media. Which medium will cover a wider area and a broader range of your targets or audiences? Media mix is possible. The message must be flexible enough to fit in any chosen medium, which is usually an amalgamation of two or three media.

I’ve been out for awhile because of works like this. People, not only firms, tend towards more visibility nowadays. I merely stole some minutes to get here.

Poetry in this country is pretty much more like gig these days than it was in yore. These gigs are mostly unannounced to the public and there is no way for the rest of us to know there is such venue to listen and share our poetic attempts. Seldom, too, do we hear of spontaneous poetry readings or read any about it in the papers if there ever was. There even is no poetry reading for public consumption (that I heard of), something like a regular community production that is included in the mayor’s agenda.

In Greco and Roman mythologies, the kings would always keep a poet in their courts because it is he who instills sanity in the kingdom, not the politicians, nor the senate, not even the medicine man. In what besets this country now, poets are greatly needed; but there is not much of them around that would remind us of levelheadedness.

Poetry is sharing. It is part of a nation’s oral traditions and we had a lot of them even before the Spaniards came and wreaked vast destruction in our ancestors’ psyche. The balangays (archaic term for a small community) then are educated by the experiences other community members shared. Pilosopong Tasyo in Jose Rizal’s novel, Noli Me Tangere, on the other hand, though not a poet, is the only sane character in the story — unaffected and one who is above the situation. Rizal was the poet.

There are but a few weekly magazines that include poetry in their pages and that is the last you’d hear about it. There are also a lot of good poetry books by local poets that are accessible to students, other poets, and poetry lovers; but the poems in those books are there archived, unless recited in an intermediate class in a barrio (small community), or in a high school in a quiet town somewhere in these islands. Poetry, though usually confined within the walls of learning, has still to break out of its seeming bondage. You won’t hear of it regularly in cafés, nor in the mayor’s boardroom, nor out there in a town plaza.

We lack occasions to hear poetry as they should be. So we lack the auditory experience of words and the mental digestion of ideas whereby we can formulate other ideas. We lack that mental exercise to try out our motivations. We lack that touch. We do not have venues to learn directly from other people: their pleas, their dreams, and their feats. No wonder there is such great shortage of reason among us. We are like a bunch of crazy people going around doing our jobs but are as empty shells, made hollow still by consumerism. Besides, the poetry books are within reach only to those who can include a book of poems in their budget. Where does that leave Mang Pandoy and his family or his community?

I remember getting into the enclaves of the Inner Sanctum in Intramuros where poetry readings are a regular treat during the weekends. It was a spontaneous reading of poetry by anyone who was there with something to share. It was a good experience and if it can be duplicated in other places, I thought, it could have been better. Better for those who need the experience but could not have it. But the Inner Sanctum was short-lived. The place closed down to give way to something else.

I have also heard of Club Dredd in EDSA (Epifanio de los Santios Avenue), which regularly featured poetry readings, but before I could drop by, it has closed down, too.

Where has reason gone?

I just finished a book project on poetry this week and it is on its way to the Solidaridad Publishing House on Taft Avenue. The book is titled The
Occasions of Air, Fire, Water. This is E. M. Cordevilla’s second book of poems — of experiences, he said. I designed the book from cover to cover, contents included, so it is not just by chance that I came across the poems in his collection.

The collection has five sections, namely: The Secret Horn; The Phoenix Collection; Sleepers’ Eyes; Moments in Neverness; and Words Without End. I asked the author’s permission to include some excerpts here.

From the Secret Horn, titled Vermiliion:

Come to think of it, blood is redful
In the spitting gutter kiss, so much for the ways
Of death, bathing the acid bosom,
Or as the ancients say:
Memory is one’s secret horn.

This one is fast becoming my favorite, titled, No Returning, from Moments in Neverness:

It’s been three days since you left.
The wind is still and the heart is heavy with longing,
I know you will return no more.
It was perfect, but you must start
To live your life now
Without me.

And still another one from Words Without End, We Derive:

we derive from each other
light the warmth in the lightning
of doves. after our individual
voyages we gather in this place

A culmination of almost two decades of poetic journey, The Occasions of Air, Fire, Water, is a treat of varied experiences. Felt are the many influences of the others who have gone ahead and have left their marks. Find out for yourself when they reach the book stands.

I hope the poems will not remain on the pages of the book but be read aloud in some enclave, classroom, or plaza where people may share their inner sanctum
or dread. For what is the true benefit of poetry but that it would reach someone’s sensibility through that act of sharing.

The book launch is tentatively set this December. Will let you know of the final date and venue.

My long silence is un-forgiveable, I know. The excuse: My head was so deep into work for almost a month since the last time I was here.

Whoever said find something you love to do and you won’t work a single day for the rest of your life must have deliberately failed to include that when you have to bury your head so deep in it, it would still smell like work. So imagine where I just came from.

To give you a peek at what I do, I will let you in to my little shop of pixies some other time. It is something I really love to do for, besides poetry and wordplay, I find images so visually conversant, too. With images, I instantly turn into a creative force — a magnanimous anonymous (absolutely not just big talk), with limitless powers (a lá StarCraft with the power overwhelming cheat that makes one so invincible, for those who have used it) thanks to an equally very powerful
software, the god of all image manipulators, who want nothing less than the perfect output: (tada!) Adobe CS2. It’s a conglomeration of killer apps!

I started using Adobe Photoshop when its icon was the eye, that was version
5.5 while its accompanying Adobe Illustrator application had for its icon Venus standing on a large shell sailing on Neptune’s sea (was that Venus?) And after a series of version updates that I also got hooked into, the Creative Suite (CS) versions came, and I just couldn’t wait to get my hands on one of them. I got the CS2 and life became so bearable! The Adobe CS3 Master Collection offers more features but the price is so steep. I decided to include that in my wish list.

As to my work, which has become my life, I guess, I do designs: designs in
communication, meaning text with appropriate visuals whose outputs are print and billboard advertisements, magazines, books, media kits, etc.; graphic designs and I also do designs for the web (mostly interfaces or the page as you see them) sans the technicalities of making them run, another guy does that. I recently purchased a new software to help me with those technicalities in the web engine (so I can get rid of that guy somehow — the quicker, the better. Hehehe and the Flash Bible for making what I do interactive, animated, and visually entertaining. Although I had some snippets of background knowledge on Flash and Dreamweaver when they were
still under Macromedia, bundling these applications (Adobe finally bought Macromedia!) with the new Adobe Creative Suite3 (here’s a review from Macworld) make them more fluid from platform to platform. That’s why the price got so prohibitive; all the lethal and inhumane apps are in there!

It is in my spare time that I do a lot of photo manipulations. The practice alone keeps me discovering new techniques on handling photos. My subjects are children — my niece and my daughter, and I’m planning to expand this to include the street kids and create a gallery about them (a civic thing, you may say). I would scan or download photos from a digicam, use Adobe Photoshop’s filters and other features, and I’m on to creating frameables, which can be stretched up to any desired size without breaking up. Photo resolution, as differentiated from size, is the key
here: the higher the resolution, the bigger it can go. I have a lot of these frameables already framed and are displayed in the living room. Some outputs I give away as gifts and the receivers always love them.

Photographs are the only frozen memories we usually have, especially when we are so lazy to put them down on a journal. Our brains are not that reliable even, as they fail us as we get so distanced from the exact moment we had experienced them. Time has a way of blurring some parts of our precious memories; but photographs are the blueprints, the hard copies, and the de factos of a particular memory. And I play with them. In a positive sense, that is.

One of the outputs I did for my niece was a charcoal rendition of her photo (that one up there) which I also took during my daughter’s graduation party. The picture is somewhat blurry that’s why I looked for ways to make it appear sharp without using the sharp filter in Photoshop. I came up with that charcoal on the left. I framed one for our copy in the house and gave the other print to her mom, who is a pre-school teacher in one of the PAREF schools. She brought that charcoal photo to school and placed it flat on her desk, under a glass top. The principal took notice of it and the next thing I knew was I had signed a contract with her to produce charcoal renditions of all pre-school students in PAREF for one of their special events.

Knowing that I would be doing a lot, I went back to that old file of my niece, which, to my
dismay, was already flattened. Flattening is combining/uniting all the layers
into one complete layer and losing all the information on the other layers. This is usually done for proofing before the final print. The proofers will not
print an un-flattened file because not only will it take so much time to load, it is also very raw.

So there was no way for me to see how I did my niece’s photo before. That’s one of the problems with me, I do not record the actions I do in a project and worse, I immediately flatten the work — leaving me no trace of the processes I applied. So I got back to the original photo and used filters on it but I couldn’t get it right. I did research on the internet on charcoal presentation using all the Adobe Photoshop versions but nothing came close
to my work. I labored on doing it all over again from scratch with the original photo.

After two weeks of sleepless nights and a lot of Red Alert2 (I just love this game!) in between until four in the morning, I got it! So I recorded four sets of actions in Adobe Photoshop CS2 in varying degrees of blackness, just in case some photos would lack some aspects for a good charcoal output. True enough, when the digital photos from the school came, I was more than prepared.

Only a handful of the photos were good shots. This was where I was buried alive. There was not enough time for a re-shoot so I had to make do with what I had in hand. I had to, at least, digitally compensate for the lighting, re-draw some head parts that were chopped off during the shoot, groom some kids who were not, and endlessly tweak a lot of the actions.

Here are the results on some of them:

You would notice that these renditions did not actually match the first one I did with my niece (I remember I did the first charcoal in an older Photoshop version. The girl on the left side of the bottom photo is my niece, the same girl in the first ever charcoal output I did above); but they got better! As for the bottom photos, I tried a softer touch since most of the photos did not meet my requirements regarding lighting (and a lot of other aspects, too).

Oh, but the principal loved them all and that’s good enough for me.