DAY TWELVE - BLOG POST #14

Let’s Take a Sec Here

So last week, I took my hundred thumbs and whittled them down to three choices. Those three choices didn’t really feel that great so I started working on more thumbs but found that throughout them, I was fixated on geometry. I was drawing cubes, cones, triangles and a lot of circles. I thought that was maybe just me doodling mindlessly.

Perhaps it was or maybe it was my brain compartmentalizing my thinking, literally putting my thoughts into boxes to be taken off the shelf and stacked up later until I had the semblance of a thing. Design, in all of its facets, can be boiled down to one thing: making things. Sometimes our brains make in chunks first and we work so closely with those chunks that we don’t realize there’s a whole big picture we’ve missed until someone else points out what’s been right under your nose all along. 

Last week my prof took my circle design and asked me why I didn’t just continue with that, but with a whole line of slightly wobbly geometry. I want to show you my emotions about that through this excellent clown illustration above by @nerimative on instagram. 

As you can see, it perfectly displays the feeling within when one performs the blunder described by my oma as ‘looking with your nose instead of your eyes’.

Anyway, back to it.

When I think about Design Thinking, I mainly just think about a circle. A circle represents fullness, infinite and the feeling of being complete. It also has no actual beginning or end, much like the design thinking process. Sure, you start with a problem and you end with a solution to the problem (hopefully) but your path to get there isn’t always linear and can involve a lot of back and forth. Or, you get there in one full turn. Either way, each step of the process is connected. Whether you choose to believe in design thinking or not, you most likely have a loose concept of it that you follow anyway.

We were asked to think about where we’d be in 5-10 years and what we’d like to be doing. This is a good tool for portfolio work because it can help guide what you want others to get out of it.

My Vision:

I want to be changing the world in a positive way through design.

Steps:

Work full time at Common Foundry and develop my design skills.

Create work for clients and passion projects for myself that is effective.

Involve myself in the community and take initiative.

Create every single day and travel often, meet new people, learn, grow, adapt and problem solve as best I can. 

The biggest challenge I have when looking at portfolio websites is that oftentimes, the user experience is poor because of the amount of focus the designer has put into the user interface. I can appreciate a flashy website with a lot of moving pieces but I don’t think that there’s a place for them on a portfolio website unless it’s serving a purpose. For example, it might make sense for someone whose career is in uiux to show off what they can do, but something that’s been drilled into me as a design student is the concept of function over form.

When looking for a portfolio website that inspired me, I found that I leaned towards websites that used grids, that had a definite branded look (colour, style, etc) and that was easy to navigate.

Kate Moross is a bit of a hero of mine. (Kate goes by they/them) They’re a fantastic designer that has been in the business for over a decade and is based out of London. Their work is vibrant, stylized and unique. 

Their website neatly links to each piece and gives many examples of it in different lighting and with great photography. They lay out their involvement in the project in most cases and Kate’s site seems to update each year.

I really like the way Kate’s site is laid out because while they utilize a grid, it has a couple of quirks to it which stays true to their nature as a designer. Kate isn’t afraid to be themself on their own website and I think that’s important, as it was discussed in class, it’s vital to represent yourself truthfully.

I also really like how easy it is to navigate Kate’s website.

The sidebar is bright and easy to find and it pretty much takes you anywhere you might think to go. Kate also has an extensive background though with a lot more experience than I’ve had. They’re well known worldwide and even if you think you’ve never seen their stuff, you most likely have. While my portfolio will be smaller to start, I think a simple layout like this would be easier to keep building up.

Summary of takeaways for my own portfolio site:

Keep it simple, only use flashy stuff if it’s necessary. As a designer, I tend to lean towards a minimalistic approach so my website should reflect that.

Be honest. Don’t use language that you don’t mean when referring to yourself. 

Give users the information that they’re seeking with minimal effort. 

Try to use excellent photography and avoid unedited/poor quality imagery for the website. Reshoot if you have the time or use mockups for now. 

Explain what you did for each project so that people can understand what they’re looking at and why.

Day One - Blog Post #1

I knew that class would be good today when we walked in and there was a picture of an egg on the powerpoint. I thought we were probably going to talk abt how an egg is a naturally good package, I didn’t think that we were going to have the opportunity to try and design a safe package for an egg in 20 minutes!

We weren’t given a lot of direction other than to make the package, so my group wondered if we were supposed to focus on appearance, function or perhaps both. We decided to go for both and used two rolls of duck tape to encase the egg, paper to cushion it and then we wrapped it in foam. We also gave our package a little bit of decoration in the form of a pipecleaner bow and an origami butterfly. 

I think we focused too much on the appearance of the package instead of putting as much focus on the function. Our package was poorly taped and when Nancy shoved it off the table, unfortunately, the package burst a bit and the eggshell got a crack in it.

It was really fun to do something so fast and right away and got our brains thinking for the rest of the day!

We learned how to score paper using a bone tool and tried it out ourselves on a box shape. So far, I’m really enjoying how hands on this class is.

Our assignment for this next week is to take a package that we were given in class and reproduce it three times, let’s see how it turns out!

Something to reflect on: We’re always wanting to think of the environment as graphic designers but when it comes to packaging and brand, brand needs to come first for a corporation. I think that makes it the graphic designer’s job, to provide a sustainable design for the company in question from the get-go. When redesigning for a brand, however, and working for someone like coca-cola who uses tons and tons of plastic each year but is so iconic, how much room does a designer have to play and is it that designer’s duty to do what they can to help the environment even if it means deviating from brand standards? Is it possible to stick to brand standards with the environment in mind?

Case Study Draft

Project Title Balanced.

Class Name Design Research Project

Date of Completion 11/29/2019

My Role Art Director

Summary Balanced. is an organization focused on promoting a healthy work/life balance that I designed in the final year of my degree. It is an integrated ecosystem focused on providing a healthier schedule for those that tend to overwork themselves.

Project Challenge

Possible header photo: Waving/animated Ish with the balanced. logo Overwork is dangerous for not only your mental health but your physical health as well. working more than 55 hours a week raises the risk of heart attack and stroke. At this point in time, overworking yourself can officially be a cause of death. Something needs to be done. The challenge lies in ‘What’ and ‘How’? How do we change the way a whole society perceives work/life balance in an appealing way, especially when the target audience is most likely too busy to go through and set up a whole system?

Strategy/Methodology Show pic of Ish

Using myself and my own experiences as a key target audience, I realized that the most important aspect of Balanced. had to be a simple entry point. A simple voice command system in the form of a smart speaker program would be necessary and from there, the rest flowed. The system would be wrapped around the central character of a little AI robot named Ish. 

Ish can be likened to a little assistant that lives inside the user’s phone. It helps plan the user’s day, sends messages to ask how the user is feeling, sends the user on forced breaks and is the face of the Balanced system.

Show Ish screens

Design Process Identification Conceptualization Ideation Show ideation/drafts of Ish Show logo ideation (sketches and final)

brand ideation Production Revision & Feedback Deliverables

Solution/Contribution Show images of the completed booklet, al stages of the ecosystem Balanced has been developed to become a foil that fits snugly around the user’s life. At the beginning of integration, Balanced studies the user’s day to day activities using the deliverables that will be described in the coming pages.

This sounds like a lot, but Balanced knows that not everyone has the time to set a whole system up, so it has been designed with the intention of ease of access. Balanced will bring awareness to the issue of overwork and what it does to an individual’s mental and physical health. It will impact the way that people value their time and themselves as a person and deconstruct the idea that overworking oneself is admirable.

Balanced is an app, a smart speaker, a website, a watch integration, a friend, a secretary and a resource.  Takeaways - This project taught me a lot about the design process from start to finish and also showed me that everything starts from a poor looking sketch but end well depending on the amount of effort and skill you put in.

We’ve Got Shapes

So step one was to make some rough shapes on my ipad and then bring them into illustrator to make them into vectors. I tried to keep the style similar to the circle so that they would all match well and ended up with this:

Alright, not bad. You’ve got a square to promote balance, structure and in a more abstract sense, community and integrity. The circle represents wholeness, infinity, oneness. The triangle is known to be the strongest shape to build with as any weight placed on them is evenly distributed amongst the sides. Triangles also represent harmony.

Placing them in a line like this makes them look a little like building blocks, or children’s toys. The idea is that you can build Place into a space you need it to be.

Rough: verb.work or shape (something) in a rough, preliminary fashion."flat surfaces of wood are roughed down"

That’s a cool meaning and it applies well to Place because it’s supposed to be a space that you can make your own during use. 

Just to be sure, I also tried out smoothing out the shapes so that I could see whether a rough shape or a smooth shape would be better.

At this point, I’m still undecided. I feel like rough and smooth have very different meenings to me. I like the way the rough one looks because it feels more organic and handmade, which is the type of community I’m trying to promote and reach with place. I want Place to be like a community hub and don’t want it to come across too polished.

On the other hand, I want Place to still appeal to higher-end events as well, despite the playful atmosphere of the logo shapes. In that sense, I think the smoother shapes could do better. I also know that the smoother shape would shrink down easier, and probably be easier to work within the long run. That being said, I don’t think it’s necessary to choose one or the other. There may be opportunities to use both styles depending on the event. 

We’ve Got Colour

So with a chosen logo to work with, I now have to figure out colour. I know these posts have been a little bit long-winded but bear with me here, typing all this out is helping me think as well. 

When working with colour, it’s important to think about emotions you’re trying to get across as well as what your audience is. Since my audience is the community, I want to use colours that are welcoming and friendly.

I started by collecting some colours that I like. I usually do this by looking at other work I’ve done and picking from photos that fit the mood of the project.

Lately, I’ve been really into softer, bright colours. 

These are some of the colour combos that I played with for this project but ultimately, I’ve ended up on the pale yellow, red and blue. They’re a softer take on a fully saturated primary palette. I may use the light pink as well later in some pattern work. 

Yellow = optimism, happiness, enthusiasm, hope red = passion, love, fire, determination blue = sea, sky, confidence, calm

This week I created some rules for my logo. My logo is interesting because it’s rather playful in nature and there’s a lot that can be done with it. I have three possible marks that can be used to represent place and four base colours to play with as well. 

This base set of rules is a good way to get me going on my brand guide. There’s a lot more to implement though, and I’m excited to keep going.

The Rise of Design Thinking in Meetings and Events

I really enjoyed the relevancy of this reading for this class and felt that although it uses some industry-specific language it is still accessible. It seems like such a simple concept to ‘design from the attendees’ perspective’ but it also et like a ‘eureka moment’ to read that phrase. I think that in the past, many events have been designed specifically with the organizers perspective and it feels like designing for attendees is just common sense. What better way to use a people-oriented method like design-thinking?

Opportunity, Formulate, Build and Debrief

It’s easy to fall deeply into the design aspect of our grad show because that is the primary focus, displaying our work, but I think this reading has an excellent point about involving the attendees to keep their focus. There’s the yearning to want to make a whole new experience and refresh the Design grad show but there’s also the need to work with the space (and items in that space) that we have. We want the attendees to feel welcome but not overwhelmed, and we want to make sure that everyone involved is getting the same amount of attention to detail and care as everyone else because all attendee’s motivations for being there are different and in the case of our event, they’re most likely there to support one or two students in particular. 

“Consciously think about event design from the user perspective.” I think that our focus for the grad show, now that we’ve obtained a speaker and location, is to really focus on wayfinding and hammer out how we want to display our work in a way that does the work justice. We need to map out the floorplan in a way that prioritizes the attendee’s experience and can maybe be interactive.

I’m wondering what might be a good way to make our show a bit interactive? We were thinking about creating a walk through an area of our work that would require the attendee moving through all of it, sort of like a museum floor, but even better could be printed objects they can pick up and touch or digital screens that they can swipe through.

I think we have many opportunities here and after this reading, I’m feeling inspired.