oh, the simple pleasures.

alright, so…..we all do it. take things that mean the most to us for granted. design and the arts in general mean a great deal to me and have shaped who I am today – maybe even more than I realize ( of course you too, mom, dad, and friends). Anyway, I find it important to take a pause from the busy, sometimes stressful build up that may start accumulating in life and just think…calm down. Remember how beautiful all those simple things are! What simple things you ask? I love how I know (or at least feel) that I am in the right place, that is design. I’m doing the thing that suits myself, mentally and physically, better than anything else would. I’ve always been a fan of creativity, spacial relationships, and making things look ‘good’. More importantly, making them look their best. I kind of have a love for all parts of the spectrum including graphic design, photography, fashion, painting, and drawing…even 3-D. There are things however that I can relate throughout these mediums that I instinctively practice and enjoy. Composition is a must. I love it. Love. Putting things where they need to go while being sure that it is aesthetically pleasing. I can never really pin point what it is, but it feels right. And when it feels right, so do I. I also like seeing and using parellels within the fields of design. Specifically fashion, interior, and graphic. Like wallpaper. Patterns. Fabrics. Textures. All so beautiful (well, mostly). Being inspired by these and being able to use elements interchangeably outside their ‘designated category’ is a wonderful thing. I recently noticed that I’m getting flash instances where I’ll be looking at an image and instead of registering the subject matter first, I see the negative spaces and have to stare longer just to figure out what the f is going on. I guess normally all of these things may seem kind of complicated and even bothersome. But it is these kinds of things that make me feel the most refreshed and inspired to dig in even more. I guess what I’m getting at is that I don’t want to compromise one medium for another. typography and positive+negative spaces are where it’s at. but beautiful patterns and fabric, the act of painting or drawing with a pencil, and making beautiful images by looking through the lense of my camera and shooting all mean a lot to me. I kind of want to always keep these thoughts with me and use it as inspiration for where ever the wind blows. Oh, and package design is looking really promising now by the way. Watch out world. package design is the fashion design of graphic design…sounds perfect.  I’ll leave you with that.

banner world

To kick off the new semester we have begun with scouting out the classic web banner, except one that are both eye-catching and well designed. Ones that are actually “good” are harder to come by, but I’ve selected a couple examples that are working better than most may come by. Ones that generally hold a stronger, more effective design than other share similar qualities. I found myself drawn to those that use simplicity in clever ways with imagery and typography. Using short and easily understood words or phrases that gives you enough information to get that idea and want to know more. The whole idea is to get the viewer to click through the banner to the advertised web address. People typically give their attention to banners for anymore than 10 seconds so the banner must strategically utilize that small rectangle and time frame. To be successful, heres a list of some design elements that should be considered:

a simple, harmonized color scheme. (but of course you don’t have to limit yourself to dull or boring colors)

getting the main point across in short words or phrases

animation or a shift in display present

interesting and engaging imagery

clever play on words or imagery

simplicity in composition

The Livestrong banner caught my eye first because of the animation and the short, sweet, and to the point quality. Nothing too hectic or chaotic is going on and they have gotten their main message across to the viewer in a matter of seconds. Each sequence has very little wording that gives the viewer a sense of ease and convenience while taking their time.

Here’s a take on a display of the classic horizontal banner layout. Action Method being an application has also been short and concise with the imagery and point needed to get across for this banners purpose. The viewer can easily figure out that first, this is something for the iPhone and next, that it’s an application that they could be interested in. The category of the application that Action Method falls into is the only solid information given. For a banner though, that’s really enough in this instance. The imagery is reduced down to a simple portion of the product in action and provides a nice, higher resolution snap shot. The only thing I can really say for improvement would be that there is a bit more movement such as scrolling to show the rest of the app view, or rotating with the word/phrases to provide more information on what other features are to be expected if downloaded.

printing term series

For processes and materials for graphic design we were all given a printing term to go on designing a poster, handout, t-shirt, and keynote presentation. Theses designs were to demonstrate visually and conceptually the meaning of the term. I was given the word surprint which, after doing some research, has a few different meanings developed overtime. For the sake of clarity, I went with the definition that involves printing a percentage of a color over top the same color of a different percentage. This is typically done with text over images or plainly over a box of color. For my design concept I knew i wanted to show surprinting in some fashion but without going with the absolute obvious and commonly used surprinting is seen in design. Surprinting in general seemed like somewhat of an “old-school” term of use since most people today would just refer to the act as overprinting. Overprinting is simply printing one thing on top of another. I went with the dated vibe and chose Marie Antoinette as my term’s subject matter. Marie, like surprinting is an important figure within their own realm of being. But they are both rather dated. The target audience for these designs are young graphic designers(specifically of our class) ranging in their 20’s. Because of this, I also felt Marie Antoinette would call some attention and spice things up a bit since most had not heard of surprinting in the first place. She’s serving to all of those things, as well as add some elegance and beauty to the commonly ‘looked down upon’ design aesthetic that surprinting can sometimes be handled with. I went with a simple vignette oval portrait of the image made up with one solid color. I then overlapped and applied an overprint effect to demonstrate what surprinting looks like. For my main color scheme I went with tints and shades of yellow.

Below is a sample from the series, the poster.

css zen garden

The css zen garden is website for graphic designers to experiment and dedicate some time to giving their css skills a whirl with the same provided html content. For my design concept I originally wanted to go for a hand drawn look and theme. I looked around at many different sites to see how people were handling those elements and gained much insight and inspiration. I ended up going with a somewhat different approach to keep more structure, unity and more typographic drawn qualities. I had previously ran across a typeface called Rev_ev handmade on freetypography.com. The designer of this typeface made Rev_ev for people to experiment and play around with throughout their designs. It has a playful and unstructured personality so I felt it would be fitting towards my original concept. The background of my css garden is a full image of my moleskin notebook where I keep all my sketches and design processes. This seemed appropriate in bringing the print quality environment into the digital world of the web. I enjoy mixing these elements throughout my work and showing the very canvas of where many designer’s processes are first mapped out fit. For the grid system and layout I really appreciate websites where there is no scrolling involved and all the content you need to see is nicely arranged in the window for viewers while still being as little chaotic as possible. I organized accordingly by putting all the main bodies of content on the right side fitted to the page mimicking the way actual notes would be layed out. The title ‘css zen garden’ possess the larger level of hierarchy with much negative space surrounding itself on the left hand side. The curly brackets serve not only for visual interest but to also reinforce the many roles that punctuation marks play in the html and css languages. LVHA was also integrated into the design for maximum clarity in usability while navigating around the site. I kept the colors in sync with the background image while still having enough saturation to activate some colorful aesthetic interest among viewers.

logo for web in the wild

right now you all are viewing my very first logo, no big deal.

This logo was a perimeter in a made up web conference called web in the wild. Web in the Wild was a sort of web education event for web professionals, educators, students, or whomever to come and learn and explore the possibilities of web design. Hence, a logo is born. My whole idea was based around a sort of airy, organic feel while still sustain a degree of professionalism and elegance. I wanted it really clean and simple while still possessing some degree of movement and interesting visual elements. I used the type face Aller, which i thought was both beautiful and quite appropriate from the moment I saw it after weeks of looking through typefaces and almost on the verge of using Helvetica neue(no offense of course). I decided to combine typographic elements from this typeface to create a new form for my logo. I used the dot of the i which had slightly rounded out sides and curly brackets. The end product achieved creating movement and a light lifting arrangement. It kind of reminds me of a flying bird/insect and mountain peaks all in one. This helps in the fact that the event is held in Chattanooga which is all about the great outdoors. For my color scheme I chose very vibrant colors that I’m very fond of at the moment and feel are gender neutral. To compliment these the red-orange is paired with a softer deep purple, cream, and gray.

now it’s time to say goodbye….for now

so we have now undergone our last day with medium and tubatomic. It’s been a really great experience overall and I feel like I learned a lot having it only been a short two weeks. They pretty much summed everything up that we had talked about previously and continued to iterate the importance of professionalism and relationships in the work environment.

you’ve gotta know who to please and when to stay on someone’s good side… always of course but never a bad reminder.

its important for a good communication flow to be happening in all parts of the working environment..front-end, back-end, marketing team, accountants, cliental, whomever! all the different departments must work as a whole for a pleasant and solid output.

not everyone receives a happy ending but because of little compromises that may come along the way…but you know, that’s life. not that i’m a huge fan of the word compromise. but if you try to be, do, and live good (i know, improper english) through the design/relationship building process in the first place, there may be less of those situations to run into.

williams visual solutions

web media remix 3

css and html via tubatomic and medium

today was another awesome day from our special guest instructors from medium and tubatomic. we got to dabble in some CSS and html ‘tags’. It was a bit overwhelming at first, kind of going over the head. Noah and Steven Bush broke it down quite nicely, though. Once they started putting things into more laymen terms it was all starting to fit together. We did an excercise where they had a script already laid out and we could manipulate and see the results back and forth accordingly. It was cool getting to legitimately play around the the coding languages for the first time and having visual references and immediate feedback helped for a smooth sailing learning experience. A few terms to throw out there for you starting with basics were: html, head, body, h1, h2, a href, hr, br, strong, img src,…and so on. We also learned about some basic font families used on the web as well as sizes and arrangements of body copy. Makes you think what a long way the language of punctuation can go beyond just the context of the verbally spoken language.

chattanooga times free press

Latest trip with design class was to the Chattanooga Times Free Press. So intruiging and richly full of character and history. I kind of felt like I was in a movie or five years older (in a good way) the whole time. I realized the urgency a newspaper press must uphold but definitely got a more accurate perspective on it and was thoroughly impressed by what they do.
Frank Anthony, the Vice President of Operations, gave us a tour with insight pertaining to the companies extensive history , general facts, and their present day role.

This is while we were waiting in the lobby for everyone to arrive. There were matted and framed old newspapers that were so dated it was beautiful. I love old things.

Speaking of old things, Frank then directed us to the first portion of the tour, the museum. The old machinary looked quite extensive (manual wise) then what we are used to today. He gave us a little history and described the evolution starting with the Hand press, then Linotype, platen press, and rotary press. After these description, there was a glass case full of photo negative glass plates. This was hands down my favorite part of the trip. Oh so lovely.

We continued on to see a small demo on the photo polymer plates to be printed for the press made up of steel and plastic. Even got to feel them + take one to school. 1 sq inch is made up of 10,000 dots!(of ink)

From there we built up some momentum into the newsroom and then on to the photo room where Frank talked to us about their photographers use of the dark room, toning images, and color flexibility. He then led us upstairs where we made our way to the printing press ! This things is 10 feet wide and 37 feet long, no big deal. Each unit runs individually and are rarely in use at the same time. It is made up of 3 levels and pumps out 18,000 feet a minute. holy crap. Times free press goes through 11,000 tons of paper a year, one roll weighing one ton. Thoroughly impressed by what these machines can do, speed and percision. Also kind of makes you want to recycle. That reminds me, Frank says their standard is IMMEDIACY AND SPEED. Looks like they’ve got it.

Bells ringing, factory hustling. Is that ink? Yes it is. Lots of it. Times Free Press uses water-base ink which is why the print is precise and smudge free right when it rolls off the press . They do this so there is no running and its nice and dry once it gets to someone’s door.
Chattanooga Times Free Press is ON IT. Starts the press at midnight, usually runs until 3 a.m. and is at your door around 6! Definitely impressive and visually and conceptually beautiful along the way.

Printing field trip to Allegra

After web media the class and I had an hour or so to eat and get to our next destination and first print stop,  Allegra. First I should mention a few of us went to Wally’s Diner for a little brain fuel andnourishment- quite delish.
Allegra is a small commercial shop and the first all digital based  printing company!

(photo by Austin Reed)
Todd Oats greeted and walked us through a day in the life of an Allegra employee… or at least a mid day. After the front desk of course we were led to see what their graphic designer, Heather, is all about. She talked to us a bit about her role in all of this and some common obstacles faced with file types and image sizes and how these things effect the printed outcome. A lot of times clients will not consider the correct types to save logos, for example, or won’t have them at a high enough resolution, which are all crucial with the quality of a print.

(photo by Tj Bowman)
Next Chandler introduced to the room where mass printing magic is made. Loved her enthusiasm and tutorials. The class and I checked out what some of the machines can do and how fast they can do it, and common problems like printing jams. We can all definitely relate to that! She even had the printers named… Bonnie is the only one that I can remember unfortunately. Chandler give us little booklets bound and all that she had made that morning and began printing a stack of sheets with all of our names on them. This turned out to be the beginning of an ongoing showing of how the Allegra team would, print, slice, and adhese together our very own pads of paper.

(photo by Tj Bowman)
From there we were introduced to the Roland printer costing $30,000 ! This thing was massive.

(photo by Tj Bowman)
This is while we watched them print off some stickers that we later on recieved (thanks you!) Quite impressive process.
Next we moved on to Andy, who showed us how the cutting process worked, what the machine was capable of, and some saftey precautions taken into consideration.
(photo by Tj Bowman)
The room after this made a bit queezy I must say so I have problems remembering all of the details…The custom printing machines! Some people like the strong smell of toxic inks but I must say I’m not a fan I’m afraid. The machines and process were beautiful nontheless. We got to see the procedure and techinques used and watched him print some beautiful envolopes. I’ve never seen such freshly printed ink. There were also some awesome magnifying lenses where we got to see the ink toned dots up close and personal.

(photo by Austin Reed)

(photo by Tj Bowman)

From there we saw how our books were glued together and learned about the different types of glues along with pros and cons. They were pressed together in the Paddy Wagon! Old school but awesome.

(photos by Austin Reed)
To finish up we observed how they would go about laminating, mounting, and cropping a large poster.
It was awesome seeing all of the things that the printers do and what a large part of the design process they posses.
And how could it get any better than receiving our own custom made, paper pads, stickers, pen, and water bottle at the end? It doesn’t. Thank you Allegra!