Final Project

I'm very happy with how my project turned out. The colors are consistent and bright, the drawings are much better than I expected and everything seems to fit together as a whole.If I had to pick a favorite part, I'd say it's the map with the tea box as a close second. The map just has a great feel to it and the colors are enjoyable, I tend to like posters the most all the time though. The tea box is nice, but I feel like I could have thought out how to present it better.

The whole process was a little strange for me, having to draw everything out by hand. It took me a while, but by the end I was a lot more comfortable with drawing.

Readings 9 thru 11

These chapters were very helpful in trying to figure out what I want to do after I graduate. Shaughnessy says that, although boring and tedious, working as an in-house designer is great experience for really feeling out how you work and helpful for finding out what you really want to do. I feel like that would be the best option for me to start out in for a few years.

Although it would be nice to sometime be freelance and have the freedom to take the clients I want and make the art I want, I don't think I will be at that point in my life for a while. Same thing goes for setting up a studio.

Reading 8

The forward and introduction make this book seem like a very fun read and allows me to put my trust in Adrian Shaughnessy, and I like the fact that he says I don't have to agree with or practice everything in the book.

Trying to describe how you see a design in your head can be a really great way to visualize how you want it to look. I think if you can do that with lots of depth it can be a great guide in making your project come out the way you like. A lot of the times it seems like I have a very clear picture of how something will look and, before I can get the whole project laid out visually, I lose it. As a result I either get bored or frustrated with the project.

On page 27 he says "in a world with no principles, people often respect those who have some". It's funny because usually think of business people as really heartless capitalists and then artists are all in touch with their emotions, so emotion is represented through the company's promotions and branding, as is their values.

Personas

I'm not sure I really understand the whole persona idea, but it seems to me like it's a bunch of data collected on the target audience and then it's further segmented into individuals and then people would act as those individuals to see if they would generally like something or not. If this is right, I don't like it for a few reasons: it feels like an extra, pointless step, although it's based on real data, you aren't designing for fictional people so how will you get a genuine reaction to it unless you can really put your mind into their's.

Judging from the products mentioned in the reading, personas don't work that well. I mean, MSN Explorer? not even sure what that is if it's still around and we all know how Windows has been consistently going downhill with it's users.

In the end they explain that personas were helpful in the beginning, helping them think about the audience in a more quantitative way but it's very hard to tweak in order to get the right personas. So it seems to me that the setbacks outweigh the positives when it comes to personas, however if used correctly it could be helpful, especially with larger projects.

Reading 5

It's a little creepy to think about how some people are put into a community in order to "earn enough trust" in order to study the way it interacts, it just sounds so dishonest or sinister to me. Maybe it's because I remember that the purpose of anthropology was a tool of Imperialists in order to effectively conquer and enslave their enemies and this is just applied to companies in a way to help understand how to effectively sell to their consumer base.

But directed storytelling seems to be a good way to do ethnographic research without all the creepiness involved in earning the trust of the community and I can see how it would be useful in helping a designer understand the experience.

Audience as Co-Designer

It's interesting how the most effective pamphlets and posters are designed by people in the community. They may not be designed the best, but they speak to the community the greatest. The dilemma is that designers are uneasy because they can't make things look good and speak to the audience at the same time. Being a typical designer, they want have to fix the problem.

The three teachers and one grad student make a project out of it. They're idea is to reach a middle-ground where they have both professional designers and the audience to help design effective posters and pamphlets. So instead of the designer trying to understand the audience's perspective or the audience trying to create visually and conceptually stimulating pieces, they work together. As a bonus they're also teaching design to the community so they can help in the future.

I like the concepts they come up with, I would like to see the finished posters and if they were effective and well received.

Touching Hearts Through Design

Over the summer I was listening to a lot of music and watching a lot of movies and noticed that they can give touch me emotionally much more than any design has ever done. I was going to do something with this for the term long project but I couldn't get my thoughts on it together on it in time. After reading the article by Sagmeister I'm still confused on how to do it, but it's good to feel accompanied by someone as big as Sagmeister in my confusion.

I think he's right with having to put sincere personal feelings and beliefs in it though. That, to me, is the biggest thing that needs to be in there. But, not only is that the most important thing, it's also the least obtainable quality for me. To me, if I sound sincere, I feel fake and if I have a belief, I feel unsure of everything.


However, when I experience something that touches me and makes me think, I know it.

Tea Product Deliverable

I decided on colors and fonts I want to use. And worked a lot on the Ellis Tea product packaging deliverable as well as some more of the scenes lined out.

Schedule

Schedules make me feel so constricted, but I'll try to follow it.

Oct 27.
5% Final Grade
3 Deliverables w/ variations
Start Storyboarding scenes

Oct 29th
Finish Storyboarding, pick color schemes, fonts etc.
Feedback on story

Nov 3rd
Start drawing actual scenes
Flesh out deliverables

Nov 5th
Continue drawing

Nov 10th
10% Final Grade
Continue drawing
Start coloring and scanning

Nov 12th
Continue Coloring and scanning

Nov 17th
Work on deliverables

Nov 19th
More deliverables work
get book together for first printing

Nov 24th
15% Final Grade
Printed out first draft of book
mock up deliverables

Nov 26th
No Class

Dec 1st
Printed corrections

Dec 3rd
Printed penultimate

Dec 8th
Finished!

Cultural Probe

The first thing that caught my interest is the idea of research through design. I'm torn between the scientific way of researching, which is boring, but proven to be effective, and the design approach, which sounds way more fun and interesting. My outlook on life is to have fun, but I really value being efficient and effective as well, so if design-as-research turns out to be an effective (both in data gathering and in cost) I would be the first to advocate it.



I've always been interested in the idea of trying to understand technology better by repositioning how it fits into our lives, giving it different functions and expanding it's uses. Who says a computer mouse can only be used as a pointing device for the computer? Maybe it can be used as a pendulum in a clock. The best people to do this are the people who aren't already accustomed to the object, like children or the elderly. They also bring up a good point that children and the elderly shouldn't be treated the same, as they sometimes are, alienating them from the rest of culture (South Park did a great episode addressing this problem). Not only did the researchers/designers use the elderly, but to reinforce their different (or at least old fashioned) way of seeing things they added elements to make them take a second look at culture and everyday life.

The results they got were mixed, but they did come up with a good understanding of the type of community the elderly live in and how it can be improved to include them more. So in their conclusion they say that they were able to communicate with the elderly. To me, that sounds like it was a success, maybe I'm just being skeptical, but it seems like somethings missing. I know they said they didn't plan on analyzing any of the data or compiling it, but it just seems so weird to not have any quantitative data and relying on the qualitative. I guess sometimes I just like to see numbers.

Term Long Rethunk

I decided that working with music would be too subjective of an experience and wasn't going anywhere. So I went back to square one and tried to figure out something that I would enjoy doing and the audience would enjoy experiencing. After much thought I came to the idea of a picture book. It would be fun to write, illustrate, and, of course, read.

First thing I did was break it down by content, setting and style, and humor.

Content
After choosing a picture book I almost immediately went to the classic children's book by Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland. What interests me most about the story is how Wonderland just gets stranger and stranger by the minute and, as they say, goes down the rabbit hole. I want to create a story that is ridiculous and yet relevant at the same time. Obviously it won't be as long and in depth as Alice in Wonderland, but a few sentences on each page and a few scenes.



Setting and Style
I wanted something that would allow room for the imagination to wander, something sort of magical or romanticized, but wasn't too cliche. So the first things that were out was Medieval (Knights, Wizards, Magic etc.) and Modern, I needed something in the middle. I played around with the Pirate idea for a while, but that's too much like other projects I've done in the past. I settled on the French Baroque period with Louis XIV and the powerful, eccentric aristocracy. This also already had a great style that I am already interested in and have always wanted to attempt to replicate.



Humor
My inspiration for the humor and some of the content is the Monkey Island games. In the game you play a wannabe pirate, Guybrush Threepwood, who has this misadventures around the caribbean. It's a really fun game and has provided me with a lot of laughs over the years. Incorporating those sort of puns and satire along with some of Lewis Carroll's word play would be a fun project for me.



Deliverables
One thing I would like to create is packaging for some of the objects in the story as if they were real. Cards detailing characters. Different merchandise.


Story
The basic story is a tragedy. Outline as follows:

• The first page we see the main character, he seems to be a completely normal, almost stereotypical, member of mid-late 17th century French aristocracy, drinking tea and being merry.
• As we see him leave the scene, reality hints that it is breaking apart.
• We turn the page and he gets to the next scene, which is noticably, to us, strange. However, he continues on as normal, creating an uneasiness in the audience, who are not sure if this is normal or not.
  
• He meets a character, who is quite strange in our eyes, but the character doesn't react like we expect.
• As our hero leaves, the character warns him about something.
  
• Another scene that's fairly innocent, but gives us another hint that this world isn't exactly as we've perceved.
• Another scene that brings up the intensity of the story, putting the character in danger or showing him starting to lose his cool.
• Finally, the climax, where he is in real danger.
• It ends before the audience has planned, and does so tragically.

Audience & Participation
These are my weak points. I could read the story to an audience in sort of a children's story telling/tea party event.

Term-Long Ideas

I want to focus on something I really enjoy and has been really inspiring me lately (more than usual anyway), music.

My first idea has to do with last.fm. This site tracks your played music with a program called audioscrobbler. I have built up a large statistic of what I listen to over the five years I've been on the site and it would be really fun and interesting to map it out. I think I could bring in some other elements to this project to make it more ambitious because this sounds like a fun idea and, other than sifting through 5 years of data, easy.


My second idea is mapping influences. The problem with this idea is that it has been done a million times so I have to put a different twist on it. I was thinking of looking at my music and see which bands have influenced me to start listening to another band.



Another idea, which sounds really interesting but isn't very fleshed out, is breaking down songs and looking at the different layers of sounds and instruments used in them.

Something dealing with how the music industry is shifting from record labels to online and self promotion. My inspiration was reading an article in the vanguard about how the music industry is being effected by downloading and bands being able to promote music without a label. Another inspiration is sellaband.com/ which allows artists to get money directly from fans to help produce their music. The fans also get a special prize depending on how much they donate.

Fluxus

The Fluxus movement started with experimental composer John Cage. He composed music using I Ching and pioneered noise, influencing Sonic Youth and Stereolab. Later in life he produced prints.

VII from Mushroom Book

Fluxus is similar to Dada in that it was about anti-commercialism and anti-art, meaning that it wants to blur the lines of what is considered art and what isn't. It favored simplicity over complexity and had a 'do it yourself' approach.

Much of the art associated with the movement is performance events or happenings. George Maciunas, who was influenced by John Cage, organized the first Fluxus event in 1961.

There are four key factors to the Fluxus philosophy:

1. Fluxus is an attitude. It is not a movement or a style.
2. Fluxus is intermedia. Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found and everyday objects, sounds, images and gexts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images and texts
3. Fluxus works are simple. The art is small, the texts are short, and the performances are brief.
4. Fluxus is fun. Humour has always been an important element in Fluxus.

Harrell Fletcher by Allan McCollum

I really enjoyed this article and thought Harrell Fletcher has some really great ideas. The project Some People From Around Here was interesting, it's about making regular people feel like a celebrity. It would be surprising and fun to see a big portrait of a friend of yours or someone you know randomly by the freeway, you'd have to ask them what's going on and how they got their face to be there.

His Reports project is similar. Giving regular people a spotlight, showing them how they want to be shown and letting the world know what they think and do.

The article talks about how he did a project in school on random people he meets. I found that interesting because I have such a different outlook on life. I don't particularly like trying to find out what makes a person interesting and listening to their stories. Whereas this project and also the dinner date around the world project we saw in class deals with talking with and trying to understand the different people of the world.

I like how he doesn't really distinguish between artists and regular people. He has these projects like Learning to Love You More that everyone can participate in, whether they're an artist or not, and it's not about skill or aesthetics but more about ideas and peoples perceptions.