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Final Reflection

These inquiries helped me expand not only my technical skills, but also my creativity. I enjoyed thinking of different scenarios and what products or designs would help the project be more effective.

I was able to develop the branding and pantry thanks to the useful feedback I received. I’m so glad Noah suggested that I make a repeat pattern because that was one aspect that was considered very successful. Also I enjoyed making it.

I enjoyed learning about the philosophy behind community pantries by talking to people involved in setting them up in different cities. I wanted to make sure the people who rely on the pantry feel welcome, respected, and like their needs are taken into account.

I hope in the future that some community pantries will develop in Columbia. While it doesn’t solve food insecurity it does help fill an immediate and necessary need.

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Blog post 5

Inquiry 5

I decided to explore an invention I had been working on called the Porch Protector for this inquiry. I believe it could save a lot of people’s packages from being stolen and damaged. 

The logo design is simple, fluid, and communicates what the device does.

Over the next few weeks I will be conducting more research on the two demos that will be interacting with this device; couriers and the purchasers themselves.

I recently discovered communities of couriers on reddit. On some threads people have shared their opinions on different parcel boxes. I have started writing interview questions that I will post on these threads. 

I have a lot of plans for this invention and I’m excited where it will go from here.

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Inquiry 4, Media 4,Gil Shuler,

Inquiry 4

For this inquiry I wanted to focus on something I had recently learned about, community fridges. I got in contact with In Our Hearts, an NYC based charity that helps communities set up fridges and pantries. They connected me with their google docs and taught me about the legality of the fridges. I contacted the community outreach coordinator at Oliver Gospel, Dust Smith and heard back from him right after presentations ended! He’s interested but wants to know more. I’m excited that this might become a reality. Due to COVID 19 more people than ever are without adequate access to food. These fridges aren’t exactly a solution to this massive problem but they can serve as a bit of a stop gap measure until greater social movements take place. I wasn’t able to get to it in the presentation but we could use photographs of the fridges in promotional items like a showcase at the Columbia Museum of Art which is right around the corner. And as thank you gifts for donors and sponsors they get postcards. I would like all of the locations to have an identifiable color. Here I have it as a cherry red wood color but really I would like it to be yellow, or some other cheery color.

Gil Shuler

Hearing about his process for the Barn Jam series was interesting. His explorations using the consistent jar motif was impressive. He is incredibly thorough in showing clients how the designs can be applied. I definitely need to adapt that into my work flow. It was also kind of him to offer to look over out portfolios, I should take him up on that!

Media 4

The focus on info gathering and concept exploration. I found Beirut’s design evolution especially interesting. The New World Symphony’s mark became so abstracted that it devolved into a design with the idea of the letters, but not the letters themselves. The viewer can make the connection to the NWS simply through understanding the basic design elements of those letters, and the associated context. This design is just that, a design, and doesn’t have to be completely literal. This reminds me of how the Toyota symbol has characteristics of all of the letters of Toyota inside of it, but overall it is just a nice design and not obviously made up of those letters.

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Inquiry 3,Media 3, Badass Cross Stitch

Inquiry 3

Recently I’ve had the urge to solve problems through creating things that I haven’t seen before. For this inquiry I decided to finally expand on an invention idea I had a few years ago. It was great hearing that so many of my classmates wanted one or saw a need for this device. I’m always happy when I feel like I’ve created something people can easily understand and easily connect with. I think I would like to create this in the future.

Media 3

I have never thought of integrating anger into my motivation for design. There are definitely things that frustrate me so I try to design things that solve that problem. But anger can come from passion. When I hear from others that are angry I do try to have empathy and understand where the anger comes from. As an African American I understand that anger comes from being abused and ignored.

 I believe I have yet to challenge traditional design ideas but I think I should try to. I’ve recently seen anger towards the new corporate art style of the small head large body illustrations popularized by Facebook. 

Hearing that creative output should begin with the self but ultimately be for others made sense. I think I’ve thought something similarly before but I’ve forgotten it over time.

Badass Cross Stitch

It was so great learning how to cross stitch. I had seen Shannon’s work before so being able to meet her and learn from her was awesome. She has inspired me to be more of a go getter. She found a way to achieve her goals all while being a creative and doing great things for the community. I haven’t had time to finish my cross stitch, but I was surprised at how relaxing it was so I’ll definitely return to it.

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Inquiry 2 Media 2

I was having trouble coming up with an idea for this project. So I decided to work on something that I have experience with, and knew it could be vastly improved, Tiktok. I noted how I’ve heard multiple people I follow talk about how simple changes could make the app more accessible for the autistic community, hearing impaired, ect. And as an African American I heard many other fellow AAs talk about having their accounts silenced and posts limited because they spoke about Black Lives Matter, and other social movements.

I knew for this project I needed to narrow my focus, so I chose content suppression, lack of attribution, accessibility, and security.

I also noticed so inefficiencies in the app like forcing people to click on a content creator’s profile just to get to a link related to a video. Some Linktrees had so many links that it was difficult to find the correct one. So I added the ability to add a link of the video itself. This is important because so many people want to support social movements on Tiktok so if the process of clicking important links is too difficult, many people will keep scrolling.

Sometimes I look for too much reassurance when I make my creative work, especially when I post on social media. In the past my need for this validation caused me to be so anxious about not receiving enough positive reactions that I stopped creating designs for awhile. So hearing that I should care more about people that will have my back when the inevitable failures happen, makes more sense. 

Sometimes I do illustration commissions so I’ve become accustomed to drawing what people want. But I would rather get paid to draw what I want, and only attract clients that have projects that I yearn to work on.

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Blog Inquiry 1 Media #1

For the first inquiry I enjoyed coming up with a game concept for the toy project. I am found of magnets so I wanted to do something interesting with that.

Media #1

Problem with CDs: Store displays were made for large albums. 

Short Solution: Longbox jewel boxes 

Problem 2: Longbox was too wasteful for REM

Jeff Gold used longbow to put petition to support motor voter bill on REM’s album. 

I love hearing about spaces being used more efficiently. They were able to take something so wasteful and turned it into something so important. I’ve never heard about packaging being used to aid political efforts.

James Victore Design Talk 1/21/21

Hearing about Mr. Victore’s approach to design was really helpful. I’ve been feeling anxious and stressed for awhile now, and it’s effected my designs. He inspired me to be more experimental in my future designs.

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Blog post 3

Going into the non-profit website redesign project I was intimidated. Web Design is something I have been nervous about but I mess able to learn a lot from the projec. I am beginning to understand the importance of negative space, and chunking text. I wanted to create a clear design language and logic with color.

The original website lacked humanity. I knew adding photos of the people running the guild would help it feel more personal and inviting. I'm pleased with how the About page came out because of those changes. The website also lack photos of the installations, so I found some photos from TAG's Instagram.

TAG's website's main functions are to increase membership, give exposure to its members, and to educate visitors of upcoming TAG events. I kept this in mind with the redesign and made it easy to find the join buttons, showcase images of the members' art, and keep upcoming events on the homepage.

I had hoped to have time to redesign the logo but I ran out of time. I wanted to incorporate a simplified tag into the TAG logo. On a few pages of the original website imagery of a tag was used which I thought was clever and relates to the fact that members of TAG want to sell their art.

I used The Met's website as inspiration because it is so famous I knew the website most likely built by skilled designers. I felt especially confident in using it as a reference after seeing it used in one of the class presentations.

Creating the slider simulation was more complicated than I had originally thought it would be but I'm glad it worked. When I was making it unfortunately I didn't have all of the buttons going to their destinations and I had not finalized the design. So after I duplicated the artboards I had to go back and add wach function and add any changes made to the first homepage.

Next time I would make sure I had one homepage that looked exactly the way I wanted it to, add all of the components and links operating as desire, then I would make the duplications and change the slider images.

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Blog Post #2

The 6ft 1 Question project was our first project of the semester. Going in I was nervous because I have never created a website prototype before. I was surprised to learn that this free application has so many capabilities.

Unfortunately I was not able to utilize all of the features that I had wanted, such as parallax, because I ran into issues with navigation and arranging my layers.

I used the Squarespace mobile website as inspiration for my landing page. When I reseached effective mobile websites Squarespace's was considered well done. I decided to do illustrations because I wanted to capture the emotions of the friends and family I interviewed in a way that I couldn't from one of their photos found on social media. I modeled the illustrations after Keith Haring's playful figures.

At one point we had the prototype designed with the idea that each page could go to a different art board once the link in the hamburge menu was clicked. Instead I made it into a single scrolling page with all of the stories because I wanted people to easily navigate from one story to the next. I'm still a bit uncomfortable with designing websites but after looking at the other students' work I was inspired to, in the future, apply some of those techniques that I felt really worked. I enjoyed thinking about navigation and the different paths a visitor might need to take to get from one area to the next.

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Blog Post 1 ex 1+2

Exercise 1 consisted of Intro to HTML and HTML Basics. these lessons were a great refresher as I had taken some coding lessons years ago. I'm still having trouble with indenting correctly so I need to work on that. The div id not showing up confused me at first but I suppose it's just supposed to act as info for the designer.

Exercise 2 was about tables. So far we learned how to create various cells and how to organize them with table headers and footers. In the example they said an empty <hr></hr> was necessary to make sure the data aligned properly. But we didn't use it in the exercise.

I started looking at the examples of single scrolling websites for project 1. I found this site entertaining because of the icons that were responsive to the scrolling action. The "+" in the image above rotates ccw when the user scrolls down. These kinds of single page websites are easy to navigate on cellphones bc there is no need to tap on small links to other pages.

I wanted to make some sort of character(s) that embodied the idea of isolation. I'm currently in ARTS 345 where we are making characters while keeping the Pictoplasma theme of isolation in mind. I think I could use a character of a simple website to help get the idea across.

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Final Reflection Post

This semester has been hectic for me. I hadn't been in school for a long time before starting this semester so it’s been a lot to  adjust to. I ended up in three art/design studio classes as well as four other required classes. All things considered I’m proud of the work I was able to create. 

While I was at Clemson University I wanted to study Graphic Design but it wasn’t offered there so I studied Graphic Communications instead. This major had design elements, but was focused much more on technical knowledge that artistic knowledge. I was also a student worker for a communications business on campus where I worked as a graphic designer, creative director, among other roles. I was in charge of a team of designers but I never had help learning design myself. I always wanted to go through critiques and have to complete design based coursework. 

In Graphic Design 246 I feel like I was finally able to study what I’ve been wanting to learn for so long. I have gained more confidence in my abilities and I’ve been inspired by my fellow students. The critiques, speakers, and required reading have been invaluable. I’m excited to see how I will grow in the future.

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Chapter 12

With the process book I’ve been aiming to work methodically while keeping best practices in mind. This semester I’ve been using Pinterest boards and occasionally sketches to help me create a plan and aesthetic. This chapter helped me think more about other methods to make decisive, creative choices when planning out my projects. Sometimes I struggle to not feel overwhelmed at the start of a project, brainstorming, doodling, and looking for inspiration in references are great ways for me to avoid feeling lost. I know I’ll become more efficient at brainstorming with practice, but I’m still trying to figure out what methods work best for me.

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While working on my Process Book I’ve been having a hard time understanding the grid. Finding a way to make templates that highlight my different projects has been challenging. I started picking out a color palette using Adobe Color. And I’m playing with different ways of indicating different chapters. Before reading the chapter I had started using brainstorming bubbles to help me figure out how to communicate growth visually. Since it’s a process book I wanted to communicate my growth with simple imagery. I’ll upload a photo of my brainstorming in an additional post soon.

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This poster was inspired by both film noire which was from the era decade that Cooper Black was created, and movie posters from the 1960s. I used info fro Oswald Cooper’s life and treated it like a movie. He was referred to as Mr.Cooper by most people and worked as a “printer’s devil,” which I thought sounded mysterious and dangerous so I included it. The “M” is supposed to look like a letter block. The skyline is 1920’s Chicago reflecting on Lake Michigan. The woman is just a random woman from a makeup tutorial from the 1960s.

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Ch.10

I still feel like I am struggling to work with a grid naturally. This chapter helped me feel a step closer to getting used to the grid. For the zine project I mostly used one grid as a starting point but the individual layouts have their own grids as well. I built most of the images in photoshop and those have there own grids. For the Mr.Cooper movie poster I realized I was naturally creating a gridded layout without noticing it.

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Initially I had trouble determining what to do for this project. So instead of trying to just pick a font I started with trying to find an aesthetic that I wanted to emulate. I decided on late 1960s-1970s because there would be so much visual material to pull from. This semester I’ve taken to utilizing Pinterest to help me build an aesthetic for projects. For the zine I pulled influence from concert and movie posters, record albums, and even Dr.Seuss. I feel like a lot of this project was me trusting my intuition and going with whatever I thought would be fun or interesting. I was happy that it reads as cohesive because I was afraid it might feel disjointed.

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For the experimental text image I wanted to create a poster for the creator of the Cooper family in the style of a 60’s psychedelic promo poster. I was attracted to how the text for these style of posters adds volume and dimension buy only manipulating the line and shape. I was nervous to warp the text since I knew that it’s considered a graphic design sin to squash and stretch text. Chapter 9 and this project have pushed me to become more comfortable with experimenting with text. I tend to focus more on images in design and reluctantly try to find a place for the text. I know that with more practice text integration will become more intuitive for me.

[sgoodwinsvad-gd]

For the experimental text image I wanted to create a poster for the creator of the Cooper family in the style of a 60’s psychedelic promo poster. I was attracted to how the text for these style of posters adds volume and dimension buy only manipulating the line and shape. I was nervous to warp the text since I knew that it’s considered a graphic design sin to squash and stretch text. Chapter 9 and this project have pushed me to become more comfortable with experimenting with text. I tend to focus more on images in design and reluctantly try to find a place for the text. I know that with more practice text integration will become more intuitive for me.