Graphic Design:
Emerson's Quote on Power
In a "Graphics Design: Page Layout" class at Foothill College (1994), Kent Manske
gave out quotations and asked students to illustrate them using Adobe Illustrator.
After selecting Emerson's "Power" quote, Medici Script was used as the font to reflect
the renaissance of "music, poetry, and art" that is reborn in our heart whenever
the heavenly power visits us. Trajan Bold was used as the font for the capital letters
to refect the imperial power of Rome. The letters "POWER" were exuded in
Adobe Dimensions, and Emerson's quote was made
to pour out of the letter "O" as a cone of light. For the backgroud,
a circular gradient was used blending colors from cyan, magenta, and yellow.
The paper's texture created the snowlike effect when scanned in Adobe Photoshop.
This quote appeared in Ralph Waldo Emerson's
"Love" from his
Essays: First Series (1841). Here's the quote in its context.
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For though the celestial rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon those of tender age,
and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparison and putting us quite beside
ourselves we can seldom see after thirty years, yet the remembrance of these visions outlasts
all other remembrances, and is a wreath of flowers on the oldest brows. But here is a strange
fact; it may seem to many men, in revising their experience, that they have no fairer page
in their life's book than the delicious memory of some passages wherein affection contrived
to give a witchcraft, surpassing the deep attraction of its own truth, to a parcel of
accidental and trivial circumstances. In looking backward they may find that several
things which were not the charm have more reality to this groping memory than the charm
itself which embalmed them. But be our experience in particulars what it may, no man
ever forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which created all
things anew; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art; which made the face
of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied enchantments;
when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, and the most trivial
circumstance associated with one form is put in the amber of memory; when he became
all eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone; when the youth becomes
a watcher of windows and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage;
when no place is too solitary and none too silent, for him who has richer company and sweeter
conversation in his new thoughts than any old friends, though best and purest, can give him;
for the figures, the motions, the words of the beloved object are not like other images
written in water, but, as Plutarch said, "enamelled in fire," and make the study of midnight:
"Thou art not gone being gone, where'er thou art,
Thou leav'st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy
loving heart."
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