Music Branding Update

Some more poster sketches. Its getting there.

The Professor didn't really care for the second one, he saw it as too much of where I started at, and that I should expand more. Personally I think he doesn't like the grid because he grew up when that was first being used in the 80s and is probably sick of it, where as for my generation its more interesting for its retro quality.

Graphic Design Icon sketches

Icon and Pattern sketches for the Sense of Place project. I assume these will be used in the book/website we are developing for Sense of Place. Just some quickies developed based off things I saw and feel represent Old Bradenton Road in some way. Saw a lot of graffiti so that explains the Spray Can. The Sarasota Fire Fighting Company resides on that street and their trucks fly down the road, alarms blaring daily. I don't hear of many fires in the area, so I assume another day, another old person having a heart attack.

There are stone flowers on some of the buildings of Ringling Campus and a lot of strange flowers in general on the road, so one of the icons was made to reflect it. Old Bradenton is a very long and straight road, you can see one end practically from the other, and so I made an icon that was a road that showed a sense of horizon without actually going to it. I think the play on the type worked out well, "OLD" mimicking a bike lane and all, but it could maybe stand for a revision.

The patterns are basically busy work. I don't plan on using any pattern in the website and doubtfully for the book. The second radial pattern came out decent, however.

Graphic Design II

Sense of Place:

In Graphic Design II we are doing a semester long project called "Sense of Place." The point is to develop different media associated with a location of our choosing in the Sarasota-Bradenton area of Florida; the town surrounding our campus.

Knowing everyone would do the beach, or a mall or one of the other few things Sarasota is known for, I decided to do a road that runs through my campus called "Old Bradenton."

Ringling, unfortunately, for all its merits as a school located in the middle of a high crime rate ghetto. Sarasota is known nationally as the most racially tense and segregated town in the United States, and Ringling is near about the worst of it. I've had friend's houses robbed or mugged themselves, and murders happen across a creek from my apartment in alarming frequence. Its not uncommon for me to hear gunshots at night while working on assignments.

Anyhow, I decided to brave Old Bradenton Road, collecting photographs to use for my upcoming assignment. I walked its entire length where it meets Highway 41 to where it ends at University Parkway near the SRQ airport, documenting nature, downtrodden buildings, graffiti and generally anything interesting I could find for about two miles.

The images I used in the project below and will use in subsequent assignments under this project are taken by myself with a Nikon D40, courtesy of my girlfriend.

Magazine Spreads:

Our first assignment was to find three of an existing magazine, and then make three magazine spreads about our location using a story we had written in the format of the magazine we chose.

I'm not very happy with these as I was confined to using the setup of the magazine I chose: "Alternative Press." Stores usually only sell the existing edition of a magazine, and so while I have many magazines at my house, I had none at my campus apartment and so was forced to use a music magazine that has pretty bad layout and type choices because it was the only one I could get three of. Overall it was interesting, because if I ever work for a magazine firm in the future, it is good to know how to conform to their themes, style and formats.

Music Branding

In Music Branding we are developing a brand identity for a musician that we have either found (and must be relatively unknown) or made up. I have a fondness for electronic music and because my digital skills are better than my hand drawn, I decided to do an electronic-techno band styled in a similar way to Daft Punk. I am a fan of music posters that use glowing effects and geometric figures, giving a very Tron-esque feel and decided to try my hand at it.

Logo Design:

The first phase of the project was to develop a name and a logo. The name I chose was something that just came into my head: "Deft Adept." A silly name when you think about it, as it essentially means skilled at being talented. I picked it because it sounded neat, not really what it meant, I'm sure plenty of bands are like that.

Working on the logo, I realized that the words I used for the name were adjectives, not nouns and didn't really have much to make a symbol out of. The only personality I could come up with that was Deft or Adept was a Ninja, but Ninjas were already an over played phenomenon back in the mid 2000s.

I decided to go a purely typographic route. I realized that the initials of Deft Adept, D and A could be abstracted into simple Triangle forms. From there I played on mirroring the shapes but still letting the letterform be recognizable.

The winning concept was actually one of the first ones I developed; the one in the top left.

I played with some more variations here. I had this idea to cut the triangle form into pieces, and then I realized that I actually had managed to make an "A" letter form appear in the bottom right half triangle shapes, where the A was supposed to be to begin with. It was an interesting idea but not one I had managed to simplify enough to be easily understandable.

Poster Sketches:

My current assignment is developing a poster that will serve to advertise a Deft Adept concert or event, or simply be a promotion. These are some of the first concepts I came up with. Extruding and then giving a perspective to my initial logo proved to be an interesting piece in itself that I will probably keep for something in the future.

I have the event take place at Musikfest, a popular festival in Bethlehem PA where they block off entire city blocks to make room, which is near the city of Easton PA, where my fictional band resides. Musikfest happens during the month of August and I decided to let them perform on my birthday, which also had the happy accident of being 8 9 10 this year.

Playing around with repetition. I like how the spirals swirl into each other.

Color concept. This spiral shape is supposed to abstract things like a record player, a knob that gets turned on dj equipment, or sound waves or a pulse of some kind.

Experimenting with glowing effects. Going for a Tron kinda feel.

Update Kaboodle

Well it has certainly been some time since I last updated.

Apologies are due i'm sure, but as last semester came to a close, things got a little hectic, and I had overloaded my schedule with a concept art class that kicked my butt since I didn't have great figure or drawing classes my freshmen year, so I kinda lost track with new posts.

Summer of course, was a nice refresher, gave me time to get outdoors and do some good old man's man work as a landscaper.

Now it is a month into Junior year and time to post the new work! Let me get you up to speed with last semester's stuff of course, continuing approx. where I left off.

Design with Type II:

Longscycle Redesign

We were tasked with remaking a pretty horridly designed website called "Longscycle.com" a retailer in bike equipment. This was never designed functionally, simply Adobe Illustrator and Indesign mock ups that showed the improved layout and navigation systems. It was about reduction, simplification, just ways to make a website pleasing to the eye and easy to follow.

I used yellow to bring to mind Lance Armstrong, who's corporate imagery is strongly associated with bicycling these days. It brings an air of professionalism that the website drastically needed.

I liked the alternating black and yellow highlights on the links that got navigated, I feel it would've been pretty interesting had the professor wanted us to make a working website. I wanted to use more symbols and icons for buttons instead of text as that is simpler, but they felt it was unnecessary. After all, it was a Typography class. The only icon I made that survived was the Shopping Cart. Ohwell.

Type In Space

The award to most design iteration changes definitely goes to this project.

The assignment involved picking from a couple of design events that occurred at several different museums and making a typographic poster that utilized three dimensions or otherwise involved motion in some way that sponsored the event.

My first staircase concept was a little too hectic with the information, so I made sure to simplify it. A big problem was the sheer number of things that had already been done from previous examples that she gave us. There was only so much I felt I could do with isometrics. Eventually I strayed away from 3-d altogether, the class as a whole was doing more motion based pieces and because they consistently didn't like what I was showing, I decided to be a sheep and follow along with what they were doing.

The yellow one was what I settled on. Another color scheme might've been better. I think the purple and black rectangles could've worked, the professor didn't care much for the font though, and I didn't really care for the concept with a conventional font. I still think the one with intersecting planes was neat as well as the one with white accents around the text.

New Media:

Don't feel like doing screen grabs of this website, but I feel this guy was pretty successful.

Check Me Out

Flash required to view.

We had to make a six-page website that extrapolated upon a six-sided package of our choice, one box side equals one webpage. I did Orbit Gum. The buttons were meant to be unique but understandable, I decided to make them sticks of gum inside a package, and model each page on a different flavor.

The "Cinnamint" flavor was supposed to have moving fire-esque flames in the background, but that was troublesome to animate and I wasn't the best at budgeting time last year. I've improved on that aspect of myself a lot for this year.

Graphic Design II:

Book I

These are some page excerpts from the first book I had to make in Graphic Design II. I had some exercises that played with the icon back in my posts in february, but here are some of the finalized pieces. I loved trying to photoshop the icon into actual places, check back into the february posts to see some of the other variations I tried. My craft on the actual book was not very successful however...

Oh, and the photos that I manipulated is not my own. The teachers explained we are allowed to take photos and use them for our projects as long as we don't start selling them. Just an fyi.

Book II

Book II involved taking our Icon and really pressing the idea as far as we could. We started with indexs which is a term used to describe the footprint of something, such as the snow print to the animal paw. We had to come up with large compositions that had imagery, a word, and a poem or phrase that all had an overarching relation.

This book didn't have much of new content, instead focusing heavily on the process of building up to our six final compositions. I didn't find my earlier works to be of much interest, so these are the six final concepts that relate to my Fluorescent Light Bulb icon shown earlier.