Today as an icebreaker for our new critique teams for the quarter-long project, we were assigned to make a list of five common items from around the room, then pick one, then make a poster together due four hours later. Roxy and Aaron are on my team and we came up with this poster. We started by writing out the steps then making some thumbnails then I drafted this layout (on the left). I drew the coffee cup. The character was drawn up in parts like a puppet and then put together by Roxy and duplicated in different poses.
A poster on how to use a coffee cup with no words.
This is the changing document to document what I am doing with my special project for Winter Quarter and what I think I am going to do. I won’t delete the timeline but rather reflect where I am veering and for what reasons.
Week 1 (1-7):
What I planned to do: Set-up Timeline Document. Think of ideas for special project and begin concepting.
What I ended up doing: Team Poster: How to Use a Coffee Cup
Week 2 (1-14):
What I plan to do this week: Brainstorm Components, flush out timeline and Polish concepts, write up timeline and proposal with moodboards for project. Meet with Matt Nyce (the contact for the band for the music video). Winter After Effects Quarter Mission Statement
What I ended up doing: See below post for brainstorm/storyboards. See above mind map for components. My goal is to expose myself to more music videos. Research on Music Videos
Week 3 (1-21):
What I plan to do this week: Finish Storyboards, get approval from Matt Nyce, video prep and shoot.
What I ended up doing: Brainstorm and Storyboards for Music Video.
Week 4 (1-28):
What I plan to do this week: make Ai file for after effects, Rough Draft
What I ended up doing: More Research for Winter Quarter Project. I haven’t finished shooting, so I am thinking I have to push everything forward a little. Meanwhile, I’m getting a feel for the possibilities of what video can be.
Week 5 (2-4):
What I plan to do this week: Final Execution, you tube video, links, logo at the end of the video
What I ended up doing: I’m a little bit behind. I finished shooting monday and I hope to get a rough for next week’s presentations. Nap Video: Editing Footage | Katablog. I also did more research: Ideas that Make a Music Video Special
Week 6 (2-11): Presentation Day
What I plan to do this week: Wrap-up project #1, presentation, brainstorm and research for Video Resume (project #2)
What I ended up doing: Nap – Rough Draft, A story about editing | Katablog. I presented a couple of rough drafts and had another meeting with Matt. He liked it and gave me some edits to make.
Week 7 (2-18):
What I plan to do this week: moodboard and shoot for Video Resume
What I ended up doing: After completing the edits, I decided to hold off on the idea of a Video resume and continue exploring animation. Adoption Video: A Storyboard
Week 8 (2-25):
What I plan to do this week: make Ai file for after effects, Rough Draft
What I ended up doing: No blog post this week. animatin – YouTube. I made this as part of figuring out how to animate this project.
Week 9 (3-4):
What I plan to do this week: Final video, Polish presentation for final presentation
What I ended up doing: yoks1 – YouTube. I have some footage for animating on.
Week 12 (3-11):
What I plan to do this week: Presentation
What I ended up doing:Whoops. Presentation is next week. I’m finishing up a small section of the footage. I call it episode 1. Here’s the rough draft. layout_1 – YouTube.
Today is the first day of Poster class. I think I’m going to like this quarter very much. My class time was spent exploring brainstorming techniques and sketching out a poster featuring the quote “True creativity often starts where language ends” by Arthur Koestler (great writer, by the way, if you get a chance you should read Insight and Outlook).
Jill went over some techniques of brainstorming. 1) Sketching symbols that capture the psychological state of subject (in this case, a quote) 2) Picture Associations– when drawing blanks, look to images (read: Google Image Search) and gather some inspiration and 3) Forced Connections– random words sometimes hold unique connections.
What I thought was very valuable was the notion of 20-minute sprints. Jill said that we can’t concentrate very well after that, so it’s good to take a break, get some coffee, surf the internet, walk around a bit before getting back into it. I think it worked really well for me. I went for a walk to a local thrift store and took some pictures of things that I found inspirational. There was a framed photograph of an iris with a starship at its pupil I wanted to have.
items I liked on a trip to a thrift store
Jill also talked about using a matrix to combine styles and mediums to get unique posters. Like doing a poster Dada style with mud as your medium. Etc. Endless fun, but I didn’t have time in class to really see what ideas that process could generate.
I sketched out the lion tamer, but I really like this one item that I saw at the thrift store that seemed perfectly beyond language in essence that I wanted to make this poster. (I spent some time doing selections in Photoshop but I know I could have spent a little more to get the mask perfect.) Yes. It’s a bejeweled teapot wind chime.
Today’s class is WordPress class. As usual for the first day of a new class, Erik Fadiman gave a lecture talking about wordpress, design and business. Firstly, he said that he’s no longer going to talk about responsive, quoting “if it’s not responsive– it’s not web design.”
WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org
The beast: Fadiman said if a client comes to you with a wordpress.com site, just stay away. It’s limited in many ways. Unlike wordpress.com, wordpress.org, the one we are going to be learning, can be customized, stylized and broken. You can change the file structure or style.css like any website. WordPress has a dashboard with widgets, themes and a thing called php. Essentially, it’s a birdcall to connect to SQL which is stored in some magic WordPress cave somewhere. The html is generated dynamically. Because it is an open source content management system, people are coding for it all the time, giving it new ways to interact with other applications like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc as well as giving it better plug-ins.
How to tame it: Purchased themes end up being more work to customize. Buy a theme only if you absolutely have to. Start with a good theme, like 1140 Fluid Starkers WordPress Theme | thedotmack. Download it and put it in your site in the themes folder. Remember that wordpress’ “html” structure is 4 buckets of delicious php: header, footer, index and sidebar. Treat it like a big document. In the head, within the header php, you can add your fonts, google metrics (Google Analytics Official Website – Web Analytics & Reporting – Google Analytics.), etc. and the opening tag for the container is in the header.php and the closing one is in the footer.php. (Which is rad when you are adding pages, you don’t need to copy-paste those sections.)
Today, I uploaded a new theme to my new project, a wordpress.org blog.
“When in doubt, consult the codex.” The nice part about open-source is that all of these people are coding for this. If you have a problem, one of these geeks will have solved it for you. Fadiman recommends WP super cache and contact form 7.
Your client: Before even starting a website for your client, ask them: How much you want to spend? Who is your audience? What are your goals with this website? Ask for analytics. Sometimes, their budget, audience or goals might indicate that they don’t really need/want one of these beasts you are about to tame. They just want a simple and limited wordpress.com blog that is free (not including domain costs) and you can send them on their way. Design is a job and you need to get paid for good work. A part of that job is to take on good clients.
The goal after creating the site is to be able to hand off the site to your client and confident that they are ready to take over the site and empowered to say things to their audience. Training your client to use the wordpress controls may take a long time and they might have some questions days, weeks after. Make sure to account for this in your invoice. As a wordpress designer, you are shaping the experience not only for your client’s audience, but for your client. If your client has a good experience with wordpress initially, it’s more likely your site will be put to good use. In fact, get the client familiar with the dashboard interface before you start styling.
Follow-up: Part of your job as a blog designer is maintenance. The best and worst thing about the Internet is that it changes so quickly. It will happen that your plug-ins are updated and new ones become more relevant. Put monthly maintainence meetings into your invoice as well. A good blog is a blog that’s updated regularly and often.
Web Presence Blogging is a corner of the trifecta of web presence (the other two being social media and graphic design). For my internship last summer, the company I worked for wanted me to explore social media (previous blog post). Social media is about broadcasting your brand. Blogging is about supporting your brand, giving it authority in the industry and attracting an audience with relevant information. When using WordPress, explore its social media widgets and get connected.
Today in Drawing club, we did the collaborative drawing exercise. On the left, are the drawings that we took turns drawing one line at a time until a vague picture formed then each of us reinterpreted the drawing. This is a great exercise when you don’t know what to draw. As Nathan put it, it’s “surrealism on your lap.” You don’t have to come up with symbolism or force anything. It just becomes something from some collective unconscious perhaps.
Today is the first day of the quarter and Tom is teaching Logo Design, Corporate Identity, and Pinterest. This is the first time that a class I’ve attended has used Pinterest for anything. Social media is starting to play a big role in education, classrooms using it to share relevant discoveries. Social media is especially important for designers. Tom said today ” You’re not geniuses You are not reinventing graphic design…. you are doing a job for a client. You are not creating the rules.” Social media helps us keep in touch with what the masses are liking, getting used to, industry conventions that blossom and become the norm, the new rules, in what seems like overnight.
Pinterest is an interesting app. Its customizable folders, its public nature. Looking at the way someone names their files is like looking into their mind, seeing their organization, chaos, associations, interests. Pinterest is more like people looking into my living room and seeing my taxidermied dog and I am feeling embarrassed because I am thinking that they don’t understand why I like it. And it’s even weirder when a teacher rents out a part of your living room for homework. Here’s my new board dedicated: Logos and Inspiration for Logos. (I am to pin 5 logos a week, found in the wild– no repinning– with taxonomic descriptions and implications.) It’s making me want to have a professional Pinterest where I can sound informed and relevant all of the time instead of pinning Arrested Development references.
In class, we briefly discussed the genres of logos and often, they are combination marks, hybrids of the following categories: letterform, pictorial, emblem and abstract. Logos are often simplified (if you want to sound extra-in-the-know: say “reductive design”). Logos have a different opportunity than most creations: identity. These creations are meant to last as long as the business and all businesses (enterprises, institutions, whathaveyou) hope to last a very long time. There’s a lot of pressure to communicate clearly and cleverly enough that the joke doesn’t fade with a couple of uses.
