Line Art Components

The two images I used were of a samurai, a figure seen most often as a man, and of an assortment of ingredients for cooking. The samurai has thick, heavy, bold lines implying how men used to view themselves, as the dominant gender. The cooking supplies have a thinner line, though they still stand out because of the harsh contrast between black and white. The two items together create a rather noticeable contrast. These show that modern man has taken on a new role. As women have gained equality and taken on jobs that men once filled, the line between the genders has been somewhat blurred. There are now men filling the role of stay-at-home parent, as well as other jobs once thought to only belong to women.

Simple Pleasures

There are a lot of little things that I enjoy doing or seeing, not all of which are related to design. Listening to a song I haven’t heard in a long time, for instance, always brightens my day a little. Listening to the roar or subtle tones of drops hitting the roof or windows during a rain storm is nice, too. A peaceful walk on the way to the art building gives me a chance to focus before starting work. These things and more are simple pleasures to me.

Fixing a broken or jammed mechanical pencil is another little thing that does not register to many as something that would bring joy. It might not even register with me if not for the fact that I love to draw, and I carry a pencil with me anywhere I go. Sketching and doodling are simple pleasures I have known all my life. For as long as I can remember, I have been drawing better than average, and my imagination only spurs my need to be better.
Drawing in itself is a simple pleasure that could entertain me for hours. However, there are other uses for drawing that have become more apparent as I continue on through the graphic design program at UT Chattanooga. Using my ability to complete a design or just to help think can be very satisfying to me (especially when good ideas start to flow). Without a doubt, drawing is one of my greatest “simple pleasures,” and my life would actually be far different without this gift.

Banners

Let me start by saying it was pretty hard to find banners that weren’t just plain bad. Bad animation and unnecessary fonts ran rampant on the open fields of the internet, and to sort through and find some examples took longer than I thought. The best of the few I found was an Exxon ad for algae-based bio-fuels. It seems fairly simple with just a few bodies of copy that get the main point across and tell what company it is. One good idea for this banner is the “Learn More” button, instead of saying “click here.”

My other two examples are mostly examples of what not to do (bad animation and fonts). It looks like one of them has at least five different fonts, and the other has a very immature-looking font with a poorly done animation to the side. Another flaw is that the copy and animation are splitting the banner directly down the middle.

As far as well designed banners go, Beth and Sara both found some good ones. One, which I believe was for a designer or design company, particularly drew my attention. It was so simple and well done that I could not help but look at it. It only had two colors, which made a design for the background, and the name of the company (that was pretty much it).

The well designed banner that Beth found was also very simple. It paid special attention to typography and used the little space it had sparingly. There was actually white space left over, which was part of its appeal.

In summary, keeping a banner design simple and to-the-point seems to be the way to go.

Proc/Mat: Poster, Shirt, Handout, Presentation

This project has been a tough one. It is not so much that the actual work to be done is hard as it is the amount of time we had to do it. With finals in other classes, it was hard for me to get organized or even started. I originally had the same term as another classmate, so mine was changed to die cutting. Once I got a moment to think straight, I began trying to think of a clever way to portray die cutting, and I almost immediately came up with what I used for my final solution. I started off by making some sketches of just dice by themselves (nothing different about them). I looked at the form of a die (a cube), and decided there was a fairly limited way I could handle “cutting” the die. I cut it in half and played with that for a while to come up with some interesting compositions. I then drew some sketches of the die on shirt templates to see how I might want to treat the two. After I came up with a shirt I liked, I used that to subsequently form my other pieces.

The poster was second. I used the same lower right corner to place the image in, but I made a new image that I feel is better solely for its texture. I think that was the main problem that I had with my images up to that point. The handout was basically a smaller, differently oriented version of the poster. The keynotes slides were tricky, thought, because I could not decide if I wanted to use the same format or to make a new image. The deciding factor ended up being how little time I had left.

CSS Zengarden

The CSS Zengarden project originally started out as a project to design and create a website to submit to csszengarden.com. However, due to time constraints, the criteria had to be changed a little so that we have to make a Photoshop mock-up instead. With this in mind, I decided I could throw out whether or not I knew how to do something and just focus on the looks. I could figure out the technical parts later.

I started by looking through the various designs on csszengarden.com and happened upon a few that I liked. I used those to create some rough ideas and then thumbnails. I eventually decided that I did not have any truly unique ideas, so I made some more thumbnails with certain themes in mind: Celtic, Egyptian, coupons, etc.

I used the grey box method to try and make some rough layouts of the ideas I thought were the best. I then decided the coupon look would be best suited to the CSS site, since few designs used cultural references, if any. After coming up with an idea, I used some of the pictures I found to start building the site’s look and feel. I used things like dotted lines, patterns, and a fairly strict grid to position each element and start to work on the feeling. The feeling would not be complete, though, until I added fonts (more than I am used to). I tried to embody a feeling of having a few coupons from different places, but in interest of keeping the site legible, I kept one font for the all the body text.

Synopsis for Zombocalypse

This project, over all, was kind of fun. The technical parts of the execution were annoying at times, but the thought of coming up with an idea and seeing it through with your own images and copy was the part that made me happy to work on this project. Almost immediately upon hearing the assignment, I knew what I wanted to work with, in terms of subject matter. A zombie guide would be something interesting enough for me to write about and to draw for. After pitching my idea to the class, I got some positive feedback and began work on a cover. When doing a mini-critique on the covers, there was some confusion on what my book topic was. After a brief discussion, it was decided by the class that I should do the guide from the zombie’s point of view, instead of the survivor’s. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as I came up with some humorous pictures that mostly worked because they were from the zombie’s point of view. The process from then on was just to think of a rule, sketch out an idea, draw it to a larger scale, ink it, scan it into the computer, and put some color in. I wanted to keep a manual feel while having the focus on any zombies in the pictures, so I only put color on the zombies, leaving everything else black and white. The copy was kept short and to the point, since it was “for zombies.” The cover was kept fairly simple, and used desaturated colors to have some unity with the zombie’s color and provide a sort of bleak feeling. Over all, I am pleased with the final product, though I feel it may have been better without certain requirements. However, I did my best to place those requirements strategically, so they wouldn’t feel too out of place.

Class 23: Proc/Mats

This was an interesting class in that we took a semi-unexpected field trip to Paper Plus. We were told about it a class or two before we went, but before that, we thought we were done with trips for this semester. It was a nice surprise. There were some interesting facts, not only about the paper they sold, but also about Paper Plus themselves. I didn’t catch everything that was said because our contact, Alex, was going over everything quickly, although thoroughly. The first thing we talked about was skids of paper, which is just another way of referring to the larger pieces I think. The skids we saw were able to be cut down into eight sheets of 8.5″ x 11″, which Alex said could be cheaper to do (in some cases) than getting stacks of actual 8.5″ x 11″. There were various other facts I gathered from the trip like each paper company having its own “house sheet,” a brand of paper that a certain store uses regularly. Also, watermarks have always been a pretty cool detail to me. It’s a great way to at least look official and important. Unions have “union bugs” which are just watermarks for the union. Tons of companies use them, too. One thing I thought was interested to learn was that some places might jack up prices for an individual buyer if they were shopping around for a lower price than a partner printing company had. This makes perfect sense since you would be making your highest source of income angry if you lowered the price for individual buyers. We also learned about a micrometer (which measures the thickness of paper, I believe), cotton and acid-free paper (which lasts a little longer than usual), coated and uncoated sheets, how coated sheets can make colors pop, long and short grain paper, and more. Like I said, I didn’t quite catch everything that was said.

One thing that was especially cool about the trip was that we spent the last minutes there climbing over each other for books of free paper samples. It was definitely a generous supply since many people left having to hold their loot with both hands. Thanks a lot to Alex and Paper Plus for letting us visit.

Class 18: Web Media

I believe our speakers for this class were Alex and Josiah, who I think were both from Tubatomic. I think that George was supposed to show up, too, but did not this class. The class was mostly spent going over any loose ends and questions that we had about the web design field. It started off a little bit slow because no students could think of questions at first, but it soon picked up pace after Alex and Josiah began to talk about things they felt we probably didn’t go over in detail or at all. Some things they went over were that consistency is key in building a site, so we should always use a grid system. It makes things easier for everyone involved, including the rest of your team and the clients. There was also a bit of information on things like content management systems (CMS) and the “long tail” effect, which I think was when a company continues to hire you to do small fixes on web sites (even thought it should be easy for them to do, since there is a CMS in place).

From this point, we started getting into some typical habits  of clients, good habits for us to learn, and tips for getting a job (things they look for, good qualities you have, resume tips, etc). The list is on the long side; but some things covered were interns updating pages, contacting clients quickly, not giving them false expectations, getting content before designing, the “in-box zero” idea, etc. Some other tips they gave us were to be familiar with software (knowing how to use some can go a long way), have a willingness to figure things out yourself, self-promote (having a personal site and things like that), have a specific resume (something too unfocused doesn’t look as good), be engaged in the field, and have some mock-ups of redesigned sites (how you would make them look, etc).

This class will definately help with my getting a job, and that’s something I appreciate a lot. So thanks, Alex and Josiah, for talking with us.

Synopsis for WitW

This project had a very long life span, most of which was necessary to get to the point I am at now. The idea of this portion was to create a working logo for a fictional web conference called Web in the Wild. This conference has three “tracks” to it: web education, web design, and the newest technology. The way I started with this project is the way I start with any other: thumbnails. It was, however, a bit different for me, since I have never attempted a logo before. I made some very rough, and honestly horrible, thumbnails and sketches at first. But after seeing some of my classmates’ ideas, having a group discussion, and finding some inspiration online, I ended up making two interesting and contrasting logos. They both dealt solely with the letter “W,” but one was abstracted with blocks of white, and the other had dandelion-esque, floating away effect; except the “seeds were pixels of the W. The second of the two was my favorite, but someone pointed out that it resembled an old Windows logo, so I had to scrap it. During that critique, it was brought up that we could use type by itself to create our logo, so I decided to experiment with that idea. Using the “WE Rock standee as my inspiration, I found a distressed font to work with and made a rough. I added a tagline at this point, which is very similar to the one I have now (“Inspire. Innovate. Invent.”), and gave it a legible sans serif to make it a little more noticeable. The problem with this one was in minimizing it and its color treatment. I decided it was better for me to stick with my original idea of going bold with a single letter, so I scrapped this logo, too.

Finally, after a bit of a drought, I found inspiration on the door of a bathroom in the form of a small metal plate with a simplified picture of a man on it. His arm gave me the idea for my final logo. The tagline stayed under the logo, but I ended up bringing “Web in the Wild” into the rounded “W” I made. After experimenting with several different fonts, I decided a clean sans serif was the best fit for the job. Picking the colors was more of an intuitive process, where I had to try several palettes to get an idea of what might work well for print and for the website.

Class 17: Proc/Mats

Our field trip this time was to Williams Visual Solutions. This is a family owned company based in Chattanooga, but one that extends its reach across the world via partnerships with other companies. When we got to Williams, we all were running a little behind, both us and our guides. There are so many addons  there that it’s a bit of a task just finding one’s way around at first. We started off by taking a look at the place where the designers worked. Williams has an nice business model that says they can and will help a customer from concept to completion for print or for the web. Sometimes customers will come in knowing exactly what they want to say, but they might not have a look for it. That’s one instance where the designers come in, though it’s not what they are limited to. Next we went to the place where they house their printers. The first one we saw was lightjet (I think it was called), and it was described as basically being a giant camera that would output onto photographic material. Then, before going to the next printer, we were told about how Williams does do digital and non-digital prepress, but more than 90% of it was digital. The Indigo Press 5000  was our next stop, where we found out that this press actually uses liquid ink instead of toner. It’s a 6-color press at 818 dpi and 70 pages per minute. Another unique feature of the Indigo 5000 was that you could changes to the job on the fly, in case something was wrong. There were limitations on it, though, in the forms of paper size (12×18 max, I think) and the size of the job (2000 sheets or less). All of its features and the range of synthetics it can print on more than atone for those downfalls, though, I guess.

The CTP (computer to print) machine was next, and it used lasers to etch things onto plates used for printing. There was also a big Mitsubishi printer that did static cling items, vinyl, spot varnish, etc. Of course, they had cutters, gluers, and folders, but the saddle gatherer was a new machine to me. It automated the process of folding, cutting, and stitching books to get them ready to be mailed. Unfortunately, that was pretty much all we got to see of the facility before we went to get some Q&A time in. It would actually be worth another trip to get to see the other three areas we didn’t get a chance to cover.

It was a good and informative experience. Thanks to Bubba, David, and Jennifer for taking us on a tour of your facility.

These are pictures of the liquid ink canisters, the Indigo Press 5000, and the big Mitsubishi press.

Class 17: Web Media

This was an interesting, albeit somewhat confusing class we had. Our speakers, Jason from Tubatomic, and Stephen and Noah from Medium didn’t really come in knowing what to talk about. Through a little back-and-forth with the class, they decided to just cover some of the basics for programming a website (html, css, etc). It started out with just telling us a few simple commands like <head> </head> for titles/headers, <body> for bodies of text, <h1> for sub-headers (the number changes with what header you’re on), <div> for blocks of text and things, <span>, the command for links, the command for inserting images, and a few more things. It’s definitely a lot of information to learn, but they kick it out like it’s nothing (which I’m sure it’s not to them). They also told us a few commands for css.

After a little break, we came back to find that we were going to get some hands-on training. The guys had a file for us to download, and they told us to open it in Textwrangler and Firefox. We didn’t have the cord to make the projector work, but they patrolled the room to make sure everyone did things right, so that was pretty cool. The class ended up messing around with that website for the rest of the time, basically. We did a some stuff with positioning content, changing text, changing colors, etc. It was really basic, but it was still just as confusing for me. This visit definitely gave me some appreciation for the work that programmers do and the kinds of things they know, but I’m pretty sure I would never want to be a programmer of any kind. It doesn’t seem to suit me well.

Thanks to Jason, Stephen, and Noah for showing us about html and whatnot, and thanks for giving us a few resources that will be helpful.