Lobsters, fine art and me....What an interesting trio. Last night's graphic design class was by far the most enjoyable - I am beginning to get into the "graphic designer" mood, and the only thing I am lacking is the skills :). I think the moment I decided I liked the class was when I realized we were all girls in a class of 20, and everyone looked unique in their own relaxed and creative way. I was so alien to this whole graphic design thing that when I enrolled, I had never heard of something called print design, and assumed all graphic design is digital and computerized. So imagine my surprize when in the first five minutes the instructor told us we would have drawing assignments - using liners, transparent paper etc. I was slightly disappointed because what I wanted to learn was not The Fine Art of Graphic Design (this was indeed the title of the class on the syllabus, apparently I had not paid much attention to it), but software programs used by graphic designers. Something like a class teaching Illustrator for Idiots. This never happened as we started the session discussing typography, the art of creating intelligent visual appeal through the use of letters, fonts, etc. It turns out, mastering the art of typography will help us design brochures and logos. To make sure I understood correctly, I asked the instructor at the end of the first class, and she confirmed this was "print design", and we were going to learn the basics of it. Now that I am in the middle of the course, I made a few friends and one of them told me she was equally surprized, but then a very good graphic designer/instructor told her that the class taught the essentials of true graphic design - the classic approach, if you will. Knowing how to be visually critical and alert is more important than knowing how to use Illustrator, and if you know all fonts from memory and where to use what font, then Illustrator will only be your tool, he said to her.
The next thing we will learn is colour codes, page layout and the print process. For now, I am busy drawing a logo consisting of the letters of a lobster. This is the last assignment our instructor handed out, and it tells all about visual creativity and fun: draw a lobster out of its letters, L,O,B,S,T,E,R. And if this is too difficult for some of us, we are allowed to use all letters in the alphabet. I picked the second option and the lobster is nowhere in sight yet.

I usually do not feel like writing about hollywood movies such as Spiderman, or King Kong for that matter; let alone write raving reviews on them! But ahem, today I will make an exception. For King Kong. No I did not fall in love with the giant beast. And no, I found the part with the giant animated dinosours, insects and what not totally lacking in mystery, no intelligent design there as far as I could see, only huge parts of teeth, gaping jaws as big as a garage entrance...So, given all this, I must say I was surprized by how delightfully Feminine Mystique the movie was! I was nagged at least several times during the movie by a feeling that the script had been written by a critical theorist - the kind I dont usually see in movies, and imagine my surprize to find it in, of all places, King Kong; and it wasn't even subtle. The beautiful woman who was initially and deliberately portrayet as helpless, jobless and optionless (I had resigned to the fact that I would watch something of the type of Spiderman, so it did not bug me that she would be the heroine to play the mindless happy victim, see, it was a late night and I had nothing to do) is transformed within half an hour into something I had not expected from this movie - a funny, intelligent, self-confident, and VERY powerful woman. More powerful, in fact than the gorilla, which, while male and giant and strong, turns out to be the weakest character in the movie. And the society is portrayed as this unthinking, cheap, cruel place which makes you want to go back to the horrifying, terrible Skull Island, a piece of undiscovered land, full of the most horrifying natives I have seen, they looked like dead people but were alive. This is where the first half of the movie takes place, and it is interesting how both worlds at the end appear so similar, in fact, Skull Island might even be better - with the sunsets, ocean view, uncomplicated and pretenseless cruelty, assuming we are not going to meet the dead looking living skull tribe. Beauty and strenght are interesting concepts, and this movie played them out beautifully.