Final Synopsis

This flash project was definitely a challenge. I've only ever really touched on this program, so it was difficult to try and understand everything. What I liked most about this project was being able to create something and see it actually play out on the screen. I really wanted to make my text come alive. With the quote I picked I feel like there were a lot of key words in there to play with. The most difficult part of this project was figuring out timing. But towards the end, I think I finally got it down. It was helpful to step back, take a break and come back to it 10 minutes later. Overall, I'm quite happy with how far I've come with this project. I figured out things that I never thought I'd be able to do. I think it's very simple, but easy to read. I'm happy with how it ended up, but it would be interesting to see where I could take it with more knowledge and time.

Class Critique/Progress Report

During our class critique, professor Fender offered some really good advice. He suggested to ease my transitions a little better. Right now they're kind of harsh. I'm still trying to figure out certain things. The layers and symbols have been the hardest for me to figure out. Professor Fender also suggested I repeat some of the same movements throughout the whole movie. For example, I have a lot of my text making some sort of impact in the first part of the movie, so I want to incorporate that towards the end. The critique was very helpful, he gave me some great ideas that I've started working on. Right now, I have all the text in my movie and I got most of the timing issues figured out. Now it's just making the final tweaks and making sure everything flows really well together.

Progress part 1

So far for my animation, I have the timing figured out. One thing I found difficult with figuring out the timing was that it was hard to change after the initial set up. For example, at first when I set it up I was 15 seconds short. So I had to go back and change all the timing. And if I changed one layer, I had to change all of the layers. After I did that, I moved on to the actual animation part. I'm still confused as to how to use Flash, so it's a little frustrating. It takes me a long time to figure out one animation for only one key frame. I'm getting nervous I won't have a complete animation. I've never been a great learner when it comes to flash, but it's definitely an interesting program.

Animation Content

The briefer experiments and calculations are, the better. . .practice will make people very good guessers, and the best work of all is done when the worker guesses rightly, and follows his guesses with the actual work, itself the trial and proof of accuracy.

--edward johnston

I decided to choose this as my quote to use for my animation. This was a quote I had to re-read a couple of times to understand. But after reading it multiple times I saw a lot of possibilities in how I could animate the text and make it come alive. 

Type promo synopsis

Overall, this project was a lot of trial and error. I originally had a main idea, but had to make several tweaks throughout the whole process. My main goal was to create a 70's vintage look with my book. I wanted to keep it pretty clean and simple which I thought I was able to execute well. Some of the challenges I experience was being able to keep my text and different elements within the grid. The grid was both helpful and restricting. It was helpful to have a general grid to place all of the text, however when I wanted to explore with bigger letters and shapes it was challenging to make sure it complimented the grid well. But I am happy with the overall look of my poster and book. I think they compliment each other well and it was definitely a good learning experience.

poster

Book/Poster Critique

During the book and poster critique, professor Fender talked about some of the visually challenging elements I had incorporated. From the critique, I tried to make a more uniformed book, adding some of the same elements and weight on each page. I also played around with the text more, creating more variety on the pages. With my poster, I changed the placement of certain design elements and got rid of some text. I wanted to create a more "poster like" feel, so I added more color, and diagonal lines.

This is the first draft of my book. I'm still working with a color palette. I wanted to do a simple book that has a lot of white space. 

This is my latest version of my poster. I wanted to do something playful, but sticking with more neutral, vintage colors. Myriad is such a contemporary font, my goal is to show that it is such a versatile font and could be used for almost any time period. 

Myriad poster - First draft

This is the first draft of my Myriad poster. Right now it's really simple and I will continue to add on to it. But this is my general idea. I wanted to stick with a more neutral color palette and I also wanted to create a very clean cut feel. Myriad is obviously a type that is often used, so I want to make sure I incorporate something different and fresh. 

Optima or Myriad

I'm really in between the typefaces Optima and Myriad. Optima is very historic and has a roman/greek feel, while Myriad is modern. I like Optima because of its natural feel, however it has had some negative appeal to some people. Hearing that, I'm having some questions about whether I should follow through with Optima, but here are some of the few inspirations I found.

I like the sans-serif look to Myriad. I like how its contemporary. But since it is used a lot and is associated with the Apple brand, I don't want to get stuck using it it one specific way. Right now I'm going to research Optima the most and see what I come up with. 

Synopsis

Overall, this project was a lot of trial and error. I found it difficult to build the structure, but to also remember to focus on the overall type as the main design. If I could go back, I would have executed the project a little differently. I definitely would have put the tabs on the side of the panels so they could slide out instead of putting them on the top for people to pull up. I also would have made the balsa wood pieces a lot longer. I only cut them 2 inches, but looking at it now I would have made them at least 6 or 7 inches.  My overall goal was to make this project interactive. I want people to lift the panels, flip them, and place them how they want. I think I did a good job at organizing the panels. I put tabs in the order I want people to look at them. I'm happy with how the type transferred. It a few spots it got cut off because of the movement of the paper. I ran into some difficulties because I only had so many materials, so if I messed up once I couldn't fix it. I'm covering Bauhaus for my Graphic Design History class and we need a model, so I'm hoping to remake this model the way I envision it looking with all the changes. 

Choosing Bauhuas

I decided to choose Bauhaus for my project. As I researched and I looked up images that dealt with Bauhaus I visually liked the way Bauhaus is represented. I like the architectural aspect that Bauhaus has. I was first inspired by the tables. I thought the stacking and the use of bright colors was quite interesting. Bauhaus designs do a nice job in connecting everything and making sure each element contributes something. I originally made a paper model of papers stacking like these tables. However, figuring out that I was mimicking the original table set, I thought of different ways I could incorporate the design. I created this model to get an idea of what I wanted to do.



After making this, I found out that this wasn't going to be as easy as I thought. The board wasn't connecting well, and overall the stability wasn't where I wanted it to be. I practiced a type transfer and I really liked how the blue, red and black looked on the book board. It has a really organic and natural feel. As I started gluing I realized that I didn't need the two side panels. I think it would have working if I wasn't putting the rest of the panels inside a box, but it turned out that just the base was the only thing I needed.

Calendar project

This project was more challenging than anticipated. With the first version, it was challenging because we were so constricted with what we could design. It was definitely helpful to create pre drawings, because that gave me some direction when I first started. For this version, I wanted to create a big calendar making the numbers more prominent. When I started the second version, we had all of this freedom to use any type of font, color or weight size. I usually would love that, but coming from the first version, I found it more difficult to come up with something. I decided to start off with a design influenced by a clock. I wanted to create a radial feel and make it more 2-dimensional. I found it difficult to fit everything in the area, but once I figured out a system it was easier to create the design. For my third version, we were supposed to take what we learned from the first two and incorporate what we thought we did well into that version. So I took the weight sizes I used in version two and created a graph like design for this calendar. The third is definitely not my favorite. For me, it has a little too much white space. But overall I think I took my idea from my original sketches and translated that into InDesign as well as I could. At first I would have said I preferred intuitive over analytical because of the restrictions, but for this project I would have to say that analytical was easier to process. Overall, I would say my first version is the best. I like how it's easy to read, yet the type plays as a design for the calendar.

These are my original sketches, I found it difficult to put together what I drew out onto the computer. 

Version 1: I fixed the kerning on each, and I also changed the numbers to every other color (black/red) to make it less confusing. We discussed that it would be easier to read in the critique that way. 

version 2: I spread out the days of the week more, and increased the type size to make it easier to read. I also made the gradient less prominent, allowing the numbers to show more. 

Fixed spacing between each, so numbers weren't as close. I also spread out the entire spread. I made the days of the week bigger and the month smaller to make less prominent.