I am making a sample of a magazine (cover and feature article). Today, I made a mood board, or as I want to refer to it Magazine Style Tile.
Style Tile version 1Style Tile version 2
I created version 2 after the critique. I changed the Color spectrum to be more proportionate to use of the colors. The headlines should be somewhat expressive. I added pull-quote and caption styles.
Font list:
Masthead… Trajan Pro
date… arial regular all caps
caption… arial regular
author… Garamond italic
body… ITC Garamond std Book
pull quote… ITC Tieplo Std
Screengrab. (Cropped a little off. I am beat.) There’s something about Start-up weekend. Wine and a kegger at the presentation and a following happy hour sponsored by AngelHack (that meant another two free drinks). After all of that stress and caffeine intake, I was ready for a little unwinding (so note: I’m very happy with my experience of Start-up Weekend.) It was great to get to know my team mates and feel really connected with them in this unique challenge.
Today’s activities: website development, presentation overseeing and supplying components for development of the demo for the presentation (dividing the interface into layers for After Effects import). I stitched together the .movs of the 3D animation into one for the website. (That’s my hand on the website demo picture (thanks Mr.Hoppe for showing me how to do selections.) We did the demo using after effects, a 3d modeling program and photoshop then I uploaded it to youtube then took their embed code into dreamweaver then published a responsive website that functioned on smart phones. I felt on top of my game. (Even though some of the links on the website do not have a page to go to. They might never have a place to go to unless we get a developer to work on this 3D game, which is the next step.)
The winner of the Start-up “Battle” was Corki, a wine-rating app. Post-presentation, we had some discussions with the judges and learned that a great deal of our “failure” was that we didn’t articulate our intention, our target audience, our users, how and who would use our product, but they were inspired by the idea of a simpler (gameified and integrated with real world principles) interface for 3d modeling and printing.
After all of that, I feel like I am a contributing member of a team, good ideas, understanding, flexibility (a must in a Start-up environment) and I feel prepared for a career ahead of me in this kind of role. I want to be that person who designs these things, helps lead brainstorms and bounce name ideas. I am interested in this kind of pace where we are committed to making something that we are inspired by that we can believe in and feel passionate and motivated by. I’m excited for my next Start-up Weekend. Maybe I’ll pitch an idea of my own.
And this piece of advice “We encourage you to work in an agile methodology, assign a scrum master, check with the everyone on the team once an hour. Identify all the tasts you need to do, create three columns on your white board: to-do, doing, and done and move tasks as they progress. Ask for help if you don’t know how.”
Day 2. I am in a group with no developers. Needless to say, when I said “scrum” I got a lot of shrugs. (I’ve been dying to try that process out.) We were productive anyways.
Today was a busy day. We hashed out what exactly our product is and who it is for. All I will say for now that it’s a game. I’ve learned that your product at this stage is not set in stone and it might be molded to fit its perceived audience.
Branding is a little difficult when you don’t know the name of the product. I didn’t know what to play up. I kept my files simple and editable and didn’t get attached to ideas or work when it changed. In the middle of the day we had a breakthrough in the components of the game and I had to dump a few icons I designed. No big. For most of the day, I had kept the growing list of possible names in the back of my mind. It had to be something that resonated with the team. We had word association and I used Nameboy to augment my name generation. During another brainstorm round at 3pm for a name, I had gestured with my hands trying to feel for the right words. “It has to sound something like…” and I had said a phrase that made our leader, Martin turn and look at me for a second. After getting over the initial silliness (many building-related phrases turn out to sound a little phallic) we realized that it had a ring to it.
I went into designing the logo for it on the computer. One of my team members suggested that we thumbnail first. (Always have a person around to encourage you to do the right thing like start designs with pencil.) Everyone gathered around and agreed on the logo, but in the computer it came out more like an IBM logo than a game logo. Still needs work, but I was inspired by video game logos. They always have type that nests into itself a little, letters that extend out in an exaggerated way, sometimes a stroke, even. I want it to be a logo that evokes feelings of fun and structure (how to do that?)
I got input from the head designer about the interface which I mostly designed myself– icons in illustrator, beveled edges in Photoshop. We are going to simulate gameplay, so my few After Effects skills were needed to make precomps to flash the depressed states of the buttons.
There’s an option to get a url for cheaps and a place for a url for the product. When we discussed this potential opportunity, we kind of looked at each other and I realized that now was my big chance to develop a website for an actual thing. (Up until now, it’s been school projects, websites for imaginary brands.)
It’s 12:31am and I just finished working on the website. (It’s not up yet. Checking with the team before a great unveiling.) It will be a simple website with an intro to the project, some bios and a video. I picked out patterns and developed the logo. I will have to check with my business person and my idea person as to the exact content. I set up a responsive site using the 1140px grid framework and some of my web teacher’s code. I haven’t built up a trusty library of code, yet. (I really should get on that.)
This weekend, I will be busy with Start-up Weekend. We met at the Zillow offices on the 31st floor of the Russel Investment Office Building downtown Seattle. We had pizza and beer and played a game of “Half Baked.” It’s a business game where you divide into teams, choose a team leader, get assigned two random words and come up with a start-up idea in 15 minutes then pitch it to the room in 60 seconds. Props are allowed but no slides. My favorite was Wiggle-Skulls, a headset that plays music (the soundwaves massages the inside of your head) while the headband massages your temples.
We sat through an hour and a half of actual pitches that people have been thinking about. Lots of apps. A few specialized social dating sites. We voted on which ideas would be made into projects then joined teams. I’m in a team with an entrepreneur/material scientist, a motion graphics designer and a marketer/business guy. We met up, exchanged contacts, established ideas further and we’re now developing some rough sketches of the business model, value proposition, etc. We spent a little time looking through a book brought by our business guy, Trevor. Business Model Generation. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.
My assignment for advertising class: creating an ad campaign for Square One Bistro, an eatery put on by the students of the Seattle Central Culinary Academy. My deliverables 3 tabloid-sized (11″X17″ posters).
A big improvement over my thumbnails last week. I started this campaign with the idea of drawing parallels between academics and food–thanks for the idea, brainstorm group! What I am to end up with are comps. Comps are polished drafts– exact proportions. These have placeholder photographs that I took in Square One Bistro. They were really friendly and let me photograph. I used Century Schoolbook font on my poster. When it came to dealing with their “logo”–they don’t really have one. I struggled on where to put it. I put it top and centered like a menu or a penguin book. In critique, Tom noted that it competes with the headline. I used adobe photoshop to create the posters. Everything has a hue/saturation layer. The biggest comment in the critique was the color– and the border. I chose yellowy hues to give the feeling of an aged poster, something of nostalgia and a warm institution. The comment was that “yellow backdrops make anything in front of it less delicious.” They are probably picking up on the idea of “aged” paper and therefore this must be really old food. The hand-drawn type–I did myself with a highlighter marker– gives it a little attitude like the editorial graffiti on a propaganda poster. I isolated the pictures to create that 50’s cut out ad look. In critique, there were some typographical issues, leading and my first typo. It’s PRErequisite. I was so disappointed in myself. It’s a bad friday when I submit a typo for Tom to point out to the whole class– nothing gets by him!
square one bistro ad campaign comps at critiquesquare one bistro ad campaign comps after making changes using suggestions form critique
I love seeing this drastic improvement. It looks more contemporary and the items really pop.
Naming Schemes. I came across this website when I was thinking about how to organize my files for my visual/audio project when I saw this factoid and I had to typeset it.
Today, I conducted a study. It was very loosely coordinated. I printed sheets of paper with rectangles and asked the students in my class to visualize the sounds. We are not motion graphic designers (just regular two-year program graphic designers). Their conventions for conveying motion are not trained (at least, not most of them). I told them to fill in the left box first to show the state of the beginning and the right box to show the state of the end. The middle box is used to help show the transition. I played the samples and gave them time to complete each round. It was very successful. I collected 21 sets of 9 frames.
I’m intrigued by visual language. Some sets are unified by a motif (like a circle) and the same thing is warped depending on the sample.
I’m not sure how to share my data. A challenge I faced was naming conventions. Using names like a1-1.jpg (first author, number of sample, first unit) was successful. Here’s a version of Sample 1. Every three frames belong to one sequence to the sample imagined by one designer.
This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams. Today in drawing club, we illustrated a poem. After considering Edgar Allen Poe’s Raven, we decided to go for a simpler poem and Emily suggested this lovely little poem. We parsed up the phrases and gave each person a bit of the poem to work on for an hour, thumbnailing and presenting our ideas to each other and then ink drawing. ( I will add to this as I get more drawings, some were not done in the duration of the meeting.)
Kismet Arts Tangent 