Spotlight on // Richard Lewis
MFA Graphic Design
Richard Lewis hails from Lancaster, California—a fast growing city outside of Los Angeles. He came to South Florida by way of Seattle, Washington where he has already worked as a professor of the graphic arts. "I was teaching at the Art Institute of Seattle," he relates, "And due to changing faculty requirements and the fact that I did not have a Masters degree, was cut back on class load. While on vacation I visited my parents in Pompano, Florida." Needing to find work, Richard applied at Palm Beach Media Associates, Inc.—a Boca Raton-based boutique advertising agency. "I applied and started work within the week," he says "So I stayed in Florida and said goodbye to teaching for a while." But the Art Institute would soon come back into Richard's picture when a client of his recommended him to the chair of the Interactive Media Department, "Best part of it was that they would pay for the Masters degree that was soon to be required." Graphic Design graduate program at DMAC proved to be the perfect choice.
Music played a big part in informing Richard's aesthetic growing up. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall had a "great impact" on him during grade school. "I really miss the LP. I always appreciated the art on album covers.", laments Richard. "Album art is the music industry's equivalent to the movie poster. It's the ultimate form of promotional design. Bonus materials like mini books extended the magic of the music held within." Richard takes every oppurtunity he can get to create package design for bands, "The design can be iconic and full of symbolism, so it's challenging. I think thats why I design, because its challenging."
Richard looks to popular musician/designer Tara McPherson as an "example that visual artists can work with audio artists. Visual design supports the musician in a symbiotic relationship. Video and audio are inseperable yet seldom given the chance to really spend time together. I think this is the direction of the music video, a renaissance of image and sound." He also explores this audio/visual relationship fully in-depth in his personal multimedia project,
Toward Z, and that process can get quite technical. "It's actually rendered on the fly by Flash," he explains, "I had to program a scaling engine in actionscript that simulated the motion of a camera traveling along the z axis. I matched the illusion to an After Effects render and created an almost identical sequence. I also needed Flash for the other interactivity with the soundtrack. In the end it became both an interactive piece and a music video. I created all of the music in Apple Logic."
So what does this audio/visual futurist think the future holds for the next generation of graphic designers? "Everything is about the idea. The field of design is full of problems and solutions. If you are creative, the future only holds more and more challenges to fuel your designs."
And that's as classic an answer you're likely to find.