Letterpress Triptych Series

Ask me what I would do with 1 million dollars, and I wouldn’t even hesitate to tell you that I would travel everywhere and anywhere. Experiencing other cultures and environments, even if it is only a couple states away, is something that I have so enjoyed ever since I was little. The list of places that I have gone so far is not the most impressive, but it is growing little by little with each year that passes. The interconnected relationship between time, places I’ve been, and places that I hope to someday go is the essence of my letterpress triptych series.  The visual depiction of a life’s journey and the pieces of places that are woven in as time goes by is something that I wanted to capture in these three compositions, and the integration of different forms of media is something that I feel adds to this layered effect of time and place.

The process of creating this triptych involved designing the digital image and adding a layer of letterpress. The digital image is a Photoshop manipulated panoramic shot of my roommate driving her car. The bright rays of light add a sense of environmental ambiguity that goes hand in hand with my concept of travel and the journey of the unknown into the future. At the bottom of each composition is a timeline starting from the year I was born and extending through the years that follow. Small notches denote milestone times in my life, many of which involved traveling to another place. Surrounding the timeline, there is a list of all of the 50 states and various cities/countries, some that I have visited and many more that I have yet to see.  As I continue to travel, I would like to circle the places that I have visited and use this triptych as a visual means to display this history. Lastly, the bright yellow letterpress words “THEN & NOW,” are printed incrementally on the three pieces. The “then” refers to my past travels and the “now” refers to my journeys in process right now and soon to come.

My hope is that this letterpress triptych series evokes a sense of closure and connectivity through the timeline passing through each of the elements. I love the different feel that the letterpress words add to the overall composition as I feel this medium evokes a more permanent, engraved aesthetic. Overall I very much enjoyed creating this triptych series. 

Final Rock Star Campaign

The above two images are the final ticket designs that I created for our group's "White Noise" media campaign for the Rock Star Co. Twin Cities concert in February. From what was posted previously, these final tickets went through minimal changes as myself and my group felt that the design was a successful component in our series. Instead of place-holder text, sample band names were inserted into the itinerary section of the ticket on the back to more closely resemble what the real ticket might look like. While an over all positive response was given for the design of this item, a few changes were suggested to improve the overall aesthetic. One critique suggested that the diagonal lines on the top of ticket (the first image) would match the diagonal lines shown on the back-side of the ticket (the second image). This is a small change, but I feel that it is one worth considering to keep the layout cohesive and unified. Other suggestions were made for the other elements of our series as well, and additional comments about some of these changes can be found on Elliot Matson's blog (http://elliotmatson.posterous.com/) and Joy Hong's blog (http://joyhong89.blogspot.com/). After completing this project for Rock Star Co., I feel like our group was fairly happy with our final review and have appreciated the process of designing for a real organization and event. 

Rock Star Concert Ticket [in Process]

After working with my group members to push our Rock Star design concepts further, we decided to make some adjustments to each of the four graphic media pieces. As you can see, the ticket above is a little bit different than the ticket shown for the last progress critique. We felt that while we wanted to use the vibrant blue as a dominant feature of the ticket, having it entirely blue was a tad overwhelming and it seemed to separate from the other pieces in our design series. We added black space in the corners and city sky-lines to help balance the bright blue background, and I feel this change helped a great deal in making our series more cohesive. We still have a couple of refinement processes to go through, but I feel that our group as a whole is excited to see where these designs are headed. If you would like to see the other elements of our Rock Star Concert campaign, you can go to Elliot Matson's blog (http://elliotmatson.posterous.com/) and Joy Hong's blog (http://joyhong89.blogspot.com/) to see more. 

Rock Star Concert Event

For this next project, our GD1 class has teamed up with a great non-profit volunteer organization called "Rock Star Supply Co." This organization's volunteers are committed to helping students succeed in schools that are over populated and understaffed. To help raise awareness of this growing problem in America's schools, Rock Star Supply Co. has decided to put on a free concert event in the St. Paul area and our class (as you may have guessed) is helping to design some of the graphics to promote the event. The four components our group is being commissioned to design are a poster, a landing page for the concert event, a palm card, and tickets for the concert as well. While a more complete explanation of our group's design rationale can be found on Elliot Matson's blog (http://elliotmatson.posterous.com/), the above images show my personal progress for my portion of the project, the ticket stub. Our designs combine black, white, tangerine and teal blue in varying amounts throughout each of the four components. To evoke a feeling of increased excitement and energy as the user draws closer to the concert event, our components progress from dominantly dark features (the poster) to dominantly more vibrant features (the ticket stubs seen above). We felt that this progression added variety to the series while still remaining cohesive. 

The ticket stub's main purpose is to give each member of the audience something they can take away from the event with hopes that they will get more involved with the Rock Star Supply Co. organization. To further accomplish this goal, we included a perforated section of the ticket that enables the audience to write down their contact information for future involvement with this volunteer group. Boxes for these perforated pieces will be set up in multiple places at the concert event so that the audience can submit their information at any point during the event. The above images are two ticket ideas that I brought to my group to critique, and I think we have been leaning more towards the blue ticket as orange and black correlates to Halloween a bit too close for our liking. Still in the draft phases, but I will keep the blog updated as our group keeps moving forward! 

Final Persuasive Series Products

The above images show the final products of the persuasive series that I began to design in October. As some of the process critiques have shown, the final series includes two versions of cards, a packaging box for small chocolates, and wrappers that would contain small squares of chocolate to fit inside the cards. Each element of this series was designed to fit the contextual setting of a small boutique or similar marketing settings, and with this in mind I photographed the final products in an environment similar to such a place.

Since the last critique, I conducted extensive trial and error in an effort to refine the pattern found on the back of the cards and on the papers inside the chocolate boxes. After following the advice of a fellow classmate, I decided to cut out the business of the organic leaf-shapes and instead use a randomized pattern of the small hearts to cover the backs of the cards. I felt much more confident about this choice as I feel it made the clean, minimalistic theme of the rest of the products a cohesive theme for the pattern as well. I had some issues with attaining accurate colors when printing these final designs, however I know this is an area I can continue to experiment with in the future if I choose to reprint.

Overall, I enjoyed the concept and process of this persuasive series very much and feel fairly happy with the final designs. Small changes (such as checking my spelling, oops!) definitely need to be made to refine the series further. The chocolate wrapper in particular could be simplified further to remain more cohesive with the overall feel of the series, possibly taking out the transparent bar running horizontally across the symbols. With these changes in mind, I feel that the above series works well together and it is my hope that my audience would like to buy chocolate (or at least these designs) as a result! 

Persuasive Series Initial Critique

Card 1

Card 2

Card 3

Card 4

Chocolate

Chocolate Box

The above images show the first round of concepts created for this Persuasive Series on Chocolate. I decided to create a post-breakup campaign that caters chocolate as a remedy for those rough times for girls (sorry guys, your series might come later!) The three media I chose were (1) a sympathy post-breakup card for friends/family to buy and give to the one in need of a little encouragement, (2) a small square chocolate that caters to people needing a little pick-me-up for their rough days, and (3) a small horizontal box of chocolates for people to either buy for themselves or others who are having a heart-ache or bad break-up. 

Though numerous cards were developed, cards 1-4 were my personal choice for the most effective designs and color combinations based off of the red-orange spot color I chose for this series. The first card reads, "His Loss...Your Gain" with a small space for the buyer to place a piece of chocolate when they send the card. Simple symbolism is used along with this text and a creative pattern covers the back of the card. The second card shows that chocolate is greater than guys, then on the inside reads "I always preferred chocolate anyways" and shows similar symbolism and layout. 

The chocolate bar label shows the same symbolism and sayings on it with a small four-piece chocolate bar that has the symbols imprinted on each square. It is meant to be a small, quick piece of chocolate that is enticing and inviting to the buyer as it is just the right size to not feel too guilty. This chocolate piece is also the perfect size to fit into the space provided in each of the cards and a display stand for these chocolates can be placed next to these cards for more cohesive marketing. 

The last box of chocolates also carries similar text and symbolism. The inside of the box shown above is meant to depict an empty tray of chocolates that has a symbol of the series on the bottom of each chocolate space. The buyer has a progressive interaction with the packaging and this helps to reinforce the branding of this campaign for chocolate. 

The suggestions that my classmates gave me were very useful: (1) to keep the card-back-pattern simple or even making the designs themselves smaller to make the pattern less dominant in relation to the text. Also, the white and warm orange-red cards seemed to be viewed as more effective; (2) the small chocolate bar should also refine the patterned design behind the label's front symbols in order to make the small design less busy. (3) the box pattern should also stay away from patterns that are too bold and dominant, however the concept itself works well. Overall, the feedback received was fairly positive and encouraged me to push the concepts further and work on formulating a plan for crafting the final products of this series. 

Persuasive Series Preliminary Concepts

The above images are the preliminary sketches for the Persuasive Series assignment. This project is a series of three forms of media that focus on the subject matter of the previous persuasive poster project. This series needed to be cohesive yet display variations as well, all the while still persuading our audience that our food of choice was the best/worst thing in the world. As you can probably see above, I chose to stay with promoting chocolate. I wanted simplicity to define my designs, and as a result I came up with the above preliminary sketches. The last five sketches focus on using simple symbols to convey a message, one that compares chocolate to guys. The others are slightly based on this theme as well, however these last 5 seem to be the most promising. 

Persuasive Poster Final

After taking into consideration the comments and suggestions given from the last progressive critique, I printed off 6 or so smaller variations of my poster with some of these changes. The image above is the final 2ft. x 3ft. design that I chose as a result of these comparisons. As you can see, the final design does not deviate very far from the design and layout of the progressive critique posters. However, some small changes can be pointed out. The "DARK" displayed at the top of the poster was enlarged and extended out to the right edge of the space which I think helps to eliminate the vertical column of blank white space that was there before. There is still a lot of open white space in the poster, but extending the "DARK" type out further helps to break this large area up.

Some other changes that were made include: (1) increasing the weight of the word "indulgence" in order to increase the contrast in relation to "guiltless," (2) eliminating the smaller group of words that described the benefits of dark chocolate as this text proved excessive and unnecessary in the overall design, and (3) making the extended chocolate drip hang above the baseline of the poster in order to add a sense of tension to the image. Some of these changes were minor, but I think that they helped the final design to be more simplified and clean, which was definitely an objective I wanted to achieve for this project. One thing that I would like to go back in and change is to make the transition between the letter "R" and the chocolate drip more smooth and gradual. This would help to make the image and the text more fluid and natural looking. In general, I really enjoyed doing this project and appreciated the process of refinement that I used to get to this final product.

Persuasive Poster Initial Critique

The initial critique of the persuasive poster was meant to see how the design, layout, and clarity of the concept was being conveyed at full scale size. The above images are three versions of my 2 ft. x 3 ft. persuasive poster promoting dark chocolate (note that the PDF format made some of the letters look thicker than they are in the original file). The first image reads "guiltless indulgence" with four lines of smaller type reading: 

antioxidant rich. 

endorphin stimulant. 

serotonin booster. 

need we say more? 

The second image has the same copy as just listed only it is placed at the base of the poster, and the third image omits the four lines of descriptives and only reads "guiltless indulgence." After receiving feedback  from my fellow classmates about how to best improve the design of this poster, I feel like there was a general consensus that "less is more" in reference to the copy. I also felt this way going into the critique and was glad to have my initial thoughts confirmed about leaving out the four lines listed above. Saying that, the third image above was viewed as the most successful of the three. I will continue to push the design of this third poster to enhance the design and the layout, for example it was suggested to have the end of the drip be visible above the base of the poster to encourage a sense of tension with the image. Other suggestions about the weight of the type and the spacing of the letters were given as well, and the final poster will definitely use these critiques to enhance the final design. 

Dark Chocolate: The Best Food in the World

The second GD1 project assigned for this course is a black and white persuasive poster meant featuring our favorite food. The poster is meant to convince the public audience that the food being portrayed is nothing less than the best. After reading the initial description of the assignment, it did not take me long to decipher which food I would choose to feature in my design: chocolate. Dark chocolate, to be exact. I am not exaggerating the slightest bit when I say that chocolate is the most delectable, savory morsel of sweetness that you could ever put in your mouth!

After choosing the subject matter of my designs, began to draw thumbnail sketches of potential ideas for this persuasive poster. The images posted above are the initial ideas I have come up with for this design project, and I plan to use the statistical health benefits of dark chocolate in conjunction with text and image to make the final product irresistible for the viewer to deny. These four thumbnails will be the starting foundation for the final poster and will most likely implement elements of both logos and pathos to draw the viewer in.

GD1 Book Review

The GD1 Book Review was the first project assigned for the semester and was meant to teach the importance of designing quality powerpoint presentations for our clients/audience. For this project, we were each to choose a design book that we felt would be a useful tool for brainstorming and skill-building over the semester. I chose a book written by Rob Ford on web design called "Guidelines for Online Success" and focused my powerpoint around this book's rich content and design. Each of my slides were formatted to look as the book did. Bright colorful tabs divided the chapters and sub-categories, and typographic designs helped to frame the content on each page. Over all, this book did a wonderful job organizing the wide range of content, tips, and sample imagery in a way that engaged, taught, and enticed the reader to look further. It was my aim to design this powerpoint in a similar way, hence why the designs of the book and my presentation shared numerous fundamental similarities. 

Upon completing and presenting my final project for this book review, I was fairly pleased with how it turned out. I enjoyed emulating the designs of the book in my powerpoint and I felt that the information presented was enough to convince my audience that they will want to check out this book. However, as with any project, there are improvements that can be made. One unexpected issue with my presentation was the fact that the projector made the colors and images much darker than what I had initially designed on my computer. Because of that, some of the slides and sample images were slightly too dark and some of the text was not as readable as it should have been. Another improvement that I would have liked to have made it to elaborate further on the examples shown in the book. I feel that this could have drawn in my audience further and overall would have shown some of the best features that the book has. However, I enjoyed doing this project and feel that I have a much better sense about the importance of designing presentations that are up to par with the level of designs I hope to be making.