Kismet Arts Tangent

Art Collective

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  • Users and Task Flows

    Post-critique:

    Calendars in people’s presentations made Tim comment. Each calendar (online and off) requires a certain kind of engagement from the user. Will they mark x for days passed? It doesn’t stop at the calendar phase, the user finds a date he likes, perhaps an event he plans on attending and then acquires more information. Planning is the key and when you think about the user planning for fun or business, the outcome is organization. It’s about keeping all your information, concise, clear and standardized. A calendar mis-design is often to blame for missed fun. It’s our duty as designers to protect people’s fun, at least in this small way.

    During the class, Tim discussed how to control the user’s experience. There are considerations such as word choice (don’t put “crime” as a tab on your newspapers homepage). He discussed how flyaway menus are dying out due to the mobile device and the use of the finger as an interface manipulator. You don’t want the user to leave the site where you can’t control the experience. Give them enough information.

    He noted that one of the students had a “submit” page which is pretty standard for blog-y sites and felt it was a cold word to use for a Newspaper site. I never connected submit and submission before, but now I can’t get it out of my head.

    (Earlier Post Relating to This Project)

  • IT video Rough Cut


    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfj3fQ_PE1o

    Project overview: produce video about 90 seconds long, in teams of three, PSA for an assigned Seattle Central Community College department, the video to be screened at a fundraiser, projected on a wall,  other music will be playing. (read: convey story without audio!) , 1 day to concept, 1 week to storyboard,  1 week to shoot a rough cut, 1 week to polish (three week time frame) We are at rough cut stage


    The team (Tim E., Erika– thanks for the brilliant footage!) gathered our video last night and I took it home to be the editor. (It is a lot faster when there’s only one person at the helm.) I sifted through all of the clips finding the little gem that makes a person go “oh!” the reason why the clip was taken in the first place, but sometimes just a lovely moment of honesty or a quick twitch that was interesting and unexpected. Then I strung all of those together and put the longer and more thematic clips on top, set to multiply, and almost there.

    To continue with the metaphor of systems administration being a city, I wanted to include lyrical sentences that would flash on the screen throughout the video, but I wanted to get this rough cut done, so I just made a long crawl of text. (Note: rough in my mind, means rough. At a certain hour in the night, credits, titles, and text in general are slapped together to form a concept and not necessarily a grammar-correct story.)

    Post Critique:

    Today it was just Marc. It was kind of a shame because I wanted to show Tim and Jill the progress (not much of what we had lined up with the storyboards we showed them, but the concept was planted in our minds during our critique with them.)

    Marc said that he liked it. He was impressed with the number of shots that we got and the music (when done right, it makes a POW!) he liked the music. I will have to email The Crystal Method to ask for permission to use their song (and put them in the credits).

    Improvements to make: get the crawl to interact, layer and vary. Let the crawl reflect the theme of connections and information flow. Let them read the thought in a whole chunk. The first two sentences are strong; stay with that structure. Perhaps recaps at the end of some summarily approach. I’m going to tweak some of the overlay effects. Next Friday is going to be fun to watch all of these.

    (Earlier Post Relating to This Project)

  • The Evolution of a Sauce Label

    Post Critique:

    Tom said that my label had too many saturated colors and the font left something to be desired. Set the scene, he said. Tell a story. So, after some edits and the use of a varying size san serif font, I will submit a different version.

    Update: 4-23

    New Version. Simplified and colored differently.

    Update: 5-4-12

    Post-critique:

    Notes: eliminate photo of flames, reduce stroke, and bump up presence of the brand, contrast

    Today, Tom invited his friend and packaging veteran Frank to help with the critiques. Frank said “You gotta solve with what ya’ got.” Even though the assignment involves a made up brand that you can alter at whim, as designers, we shouldn’t. The skill comes in the problem solving. If the bottle doesn’t seem to have enough room for more, perhaps it’s not that bottle that needs to change size. Likewise with the brandname.

    To said complimented a label in saying that the treatment “gives it a feeling like it’s from some place.” All of these touches, playing with the edge of the label, the font looking like it has a light source, those dynamic touches that make your product shout “please take me home, I’m so cool!” or quirky or with some delicious attitude.

    Tom gave a little schpeal about how retail characters are more difficult than meets the eye. You can’t just draw a figure and that’s it. Character is the game. The exaggerations, the specific motivations, the emotion. I want to make something that is engaging and compelling. I want to make characters that people love.

  • Vancouver Waterfall

    vancouver waterfall painting
    vancouver waterfall painting

    Capilano Suspension Bridge is one of Vancouver’s top attractions. I went a few weekends ago and took a photograph of a lovely waterfall. Here’s my painting version of it. I feel like I am going to go back and add more detail, but I like the spontaneous strokes.

  • Storyboarding Hello Operator

    My New Media team of three (including me) worked on our storyboards for the video about Information Technology. (See last week’s post for details.)

    Today would be the second time I almost cried from a critique. The first time Jill looked at some underdeveloped thumbnails and called them useless and said that if I wanted to talk my way through a critique I should go to art school. I confirmed today that “artist” is a dirty word.

    When we presented our idea to Jill (we could have presented it to the jolly Robbie and Marc but they were just a little occupied and I shuddered when Jill sat in front of us.)

    I was already stumbling over my words, referring to my team as Team Puffinstuff, for no reason at all. Everything came out as a jumble, though I got through some of the story boards.

    She called me on the fact that we didn’t do as much research as we could have, but there were parts where she questioned the storyboard and I wondered how I should have done it. I argued with her assessment that I should have found out if they even use textbooks in the program. (I’m like of course they do! This is community college, we are as cutting edge as that can be, but that doesn’t mean that textbooks are gone forever.) She had said that they don’t do web design in the program on the third floor and the team and I knew this to be a falsity, but perhaps she was talking about web Design with a capital D.

    She criticized a part of the storyboard where we had talked about comparing visually grabbing a book from a shelf and grabbing a server and she thought that the audience wouldn’t get it and it should be gone from the storyboard. She said that she didn’t want us to waste our time filming it if we could work it out on paper first. I wanted to scream. I felt my eyes burning half rage half tears. That’s not what the storyboard is for, I thought. It’s for forming ideas not the other way around. She said that she didn’t want us to waste our time. What happened to “make it work”? I told my team right then and there that we are not going to throw away an idea just because Jill didn’t get it but we can always delete the footage later. She took offense to that. I tried to explain that I meant no disrespect, but to be fully honest I don’t always trust her judgment. In my heart I firmly believe that as designers we are supposed to question authority and try to make something that people didn’t know that they could get. I think she thinks I am a rebel. She said that it wasn’t right to not edit for understandability to maintain “my artistic vision” (she said that with strong disdain) and I couldn’t help but boil. I am not that inflexible, but I do have a vision and I see in my mind how it will work.

    I think storyboards are kind of like dancing about architecture. You can’t see how mesmerizing video can be, how accessible it can be with pencil drawings, static and unfinished. But, I suppose her point made in a derogatory way was the lesson I will have etched in my brain because of this program: Graphic designers can never be free. They are forever handicapped because they must make sense.

    My team, especially Tim E. and I have struggled with how much of this movie is artistic dribble versus informative.

    Considering that it will be projected on a wall at a fundraiser gala with their music blasting, we are robbed of audio and their formal attention. What else are we do to other than play the artist card and make something conflated but beautiful?

    We revised our storyboard and we will again because a lot of what Jill said was true. We injected our research into the Storyboard, the Second, and it turned out better. More concise and related to the Information Technology department’s three branches, web design, applications support and network design and administration. As a point to revise for the shoot, we unified the overlaying metaphors for the various technological processes.

    I often eat my words about my assessments of teachers. When the experience is less than perfect, everyone says that real life is like that, so that’s great experience to solve problems. If I could handle the real world, I wouldn’t be in school. I admit I have been rude and unnecessarily insistent. I haven’t understood where the line is between a designer’s conviction and a student’s naiveté. I miss nap time, progress reports and smiley stickers.

    (Earlier Post Relating to This Project)

  • Daily Astorian User-Centered Considerations

    Daily Astorian User Centered Considerations

    View more presentations from basementcat

    Above is my presentation regarding the users of The Daily Astorian’s Online Interface.

    There are many aspects to consider when designing an interface and Tim will continue to emphasize research. Ask the people. He says that these people will tell you something very surprising. We are researching for a small town’s online newspaper, and he said that his parents are from and live in a small town. When he visits them, their police scanner goes off; they turn off the telly and get their breaking news that way. Fascinating. There might be no current equivalent for the web right now.

    Everyone presented their research today which made for a fairly boring class time, but it was insightful to hear how many students went lengths, contacted people, got the scoop, or tried to. In every good designer, there’s a journalist getting the story and finding an angle. If you find information that no other designer is finding, you are ahead of your competitors, considering factors that they didn’t have insight.

    This class is teaching me that there’s always a way to go deeper and go farther and submerge into the thing you are trying to innovate. Tim always seems to have a question for you. Did you ask people? Did you find the numbers on mobile usage in small cities? What kinds of questions would get a more accurate response?

  • No.17 Sauce Label Thumbnails

    series of painted thumbnails of logo sketches for number 17 garlic habanero sauce

    Today Tom briefly outlined the history of package design starting from Egyptian amphorae and ending on Wonder bread. He mentioned how church interiors blow people’s minds, making a connection with the aesthetic of luxury—gold plated scepters and high vaulted ceilings—and authority. When making your designs, show that you are the authority on it. Make it ornate, commanding and detailed. Oh, are you friendly and accessible? Keep it graphically simple. (See Wonder Bread Logo)

    We made thumbnails in class to present for a Tom-critiquing. He emphasized if you haven’t thumbnailed, you’re doing it wrong. Yes, I am one of those students who started on the pen tooling of what I thought would be a good label design and since my thumbnailing session I can confidently slide that file into the trash icon on my desktop.

    During critique, Tom had a first declaration of paper pads for sketches that will be put up for critique. He loathes the feathered edge that comes with ripping something out of a spiral bound note book. And something that he detests even more is when students just bring up their notebook. It falls down, it falls down and scatters its inner loose papers, and it falls down and causes a minor distraction and lag during the critique.

    When Tom came to my project, I was nervous. I have gone confidently to critiques before only to have all my sketches to be denounced as useless and there’s no talking your way out of useless sketches (though God knows I try).

    It’s third quarter now and still the teachers make me a little nervous. Tom asked about “No.17” and if it was my idea (he totally dug it) and I was relieved to hear him say nice things about it that I said yes to his question without realizing I was taking credit for the brilliant and sentimental idea of a friend. Saying yes was a lot less syllables than saying that a friend and student in the culinary arts department makes sauces and I wanted to take the easy way out and make a label for an existing sauce instead of inventing a company and a sauce for this class project.

    This class project is to make a sauce label that contains all the things that a good label should include, from the right tone, the nutrition facts and the brand’s logo and what not.

    Tom said that I could go in any of these directions. The next step: What does my client think?

    No.17 Sauce

    Project: Make a sauce label fitting an existing bottle (we are not industrial designers and really don’t have the resources to come up with a bottle prototype as well)

    Step 1) Concept: A garlic habanero sauce for fun and energetic people

    Step 2) Thumbnail

    Step 3) Go to Illustrator

  • Good Menu, OK Design

    I took the above picture last Sunday. I keep having software dreams. Last week I had a dream about text wrap. Today we learned how to make multiples in InDesign using the arrows and  polygon tool (command if you want to give them more room—yay for gutters), and it made me think I’ll have a dream where I want more boats on the other side, so I do a reflection option click (in my dreams they never duplicate properly).

     

    It’s funny how much I like Hoppe’s class. I remember the first day, I thought each class would be like a dental appointment—I should go, but it hurts too much and they always scold me. But, Hoppe’s funny. I think some of the students think he’s too sarcastic and it’s true. Someone will ask if he should align right (or something innocent like that) and he says, sure… and then you can use periods instead of leading, stretch the type and then add a stroke and a drop shadow. (Whenever he adds the “drop shadow” part, you know he’s joking, until then, I’m always thinking, “yeah! That would look so cool!”) But, at the end of the day, he’s a type geek like the rest of us ought to be, laughing at the hideous awful created by people that think they know what they’re doing, but they’re using Microsoft Word, so they really don’t.

    Today the class brought in menus that were examples of good menus and bad ones. (Yes, just like show and tell. We did self-portraits last quarter. This teacher’s classes have been the most flash-backy experience of my life.) And we applauded and guffawed at the alignments, the way that someone thought that they should have one column span the whole width of the page! Man, that’s rich.

    Part of menu design is thinking about your audience. Are they at your restaurant because of the value? Maybe you should align all your prices then, make ‘em bold—customer’s love that, zero in on the cheapest one. If you’re a classy establishment, tuck in those prices, make them almost disappear. Yeah, getting rid of the dollar signs helps.

    He talked about how menus are part design, part psychology. You are selling something to hungry people; they act differently than normal design-loving people. Hungry people like fast information (pretty pictures with accurate captions). They scan a page haphazardly, hoping delicious catches their eye. And it’s up to us designers to make them feel good about what they order. A special? Slap a box around it. Ooh nice. A recommended item or some exotic flavors. It’s a collaboration with the restaurant, to say “hey, we need something really expensive,” so the rest of the menu seems rather affordable. Little tricks like that make a good menu great. Some menus that are over designed alienate the customer. What they want is something that conveys information elegantly, simply and quickly. Something that was designed in a way that even someone a little tipsy from looking at the wine list can pick from the main dishes.

    It’s a designing tenet that when you design for the most challenged (elderly, kids, people with poor vision or bad attention) then you have something very accessible, very commercial and very easy to use. Which is what creativity is all about: making something new and useful.