Madeup: Video 1

Madeup is a stop motion video I did, I believe, in August. The visual bit came from simply trying to think of something visually interesting. The sound was built from the video, which gave me a schizophrenic vibe. I am terrified of getting schizophrenia because I don’t think I’d be able to handle it. So I recorded a couple hours of my voice just talking casually and pieced together the interesting bits to make up the voices in my stop motion head.

Email Standards

A few months ago, near the end of the semester, I promised myself that, when I was out of school and finally had some free time, I’d do some research and post about email standards. Well, the summer’s mostly gone and I’m finally getting off my lazy, vacationing butt to do it.

For the TasteBuds project, I designed a newsletter email template. When the thing didn’t hold up in real life, I designed it again. And again. Coding and recoding. I asked for the help of web designers. Most of them said, “You’re coding an email? Good luck.” I thought, there has to be a better way, but the general consensus was that email standards didn’t exist and probably never would.

After I was finished with the project, I decided to take on the extremely difficult task of finding out for myself. This involved Googling “email standards.” The Email Standards Project was the first link. Their goal is both simple and impossible. They’re simply trying to get email clients to agree on a standard. This consists of calling the companies and bugging them until it happens. Trying to figure out the “secret handshake for the Gmail team.” Basically, getting the word out. (Gmail, incidentally, is on their “poor” standards list. Guess I picked a bad email provider to test my code on.) Besides email standards, the site also gives great advice on how to code emails now–something I wish I could have come across a while ago.

So I’m waiting until this email standards thing actually kicks in. ‘Til then, here’s my contribution:

Rant: Cover Art Rip-Off

I realize this is coming a couple years too late, but keep in mind that this rant is for my personal satisfaction.

I should be in bed now. Actually, I think my sister is already getting up for work. But I was just looking through my pictures on my phone today and must blog about something. A couple of months ago, I was browsing through Barnes & Noble and came across a copy of C.S. Lewis’s Words to Live By. I’d just gotten finished reading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, and realized there was a shocking similarity in the cover art:

I looked at the copyright page and my fears were confirmed: this edition of the Lewis book was published in 2007, Twilight in 2005. The C.S. Lewis estate ripped off Twilight. Twilight! I’m sorry to any Meyer fans out there, but the book is worthless. And, remember, I did read it. I’ll give you that it is quite entertaining, but only on shallow and often times carnal levels. It has no literary value whatsoever. Parents think it’s fine to allow their children to read it because the author’s a Mormon and the characters stay chaste, ignoring the fact that she falls madly, blindly, self-sacrificingly in love with this guy with whom the little conversation she’s had has been composed of obvious lies and warnings to stay away because otherwise she’ll get hurt. That’s right, little girls, go for the sexy, dangerous guys. It always works out for the best.

C.S. Lewis is way too cool to be ripping off Stephenie Meyer. I’ll admit that, while the design isn’t impressive by any means, it isn’t bad. It’s very striking, attractive. And, even though I know I should, I don’t mind the apple cliche, although it reinforces everything that’s wrong with the book. I’m not a fan of the typeface used for the title, and I actually think Words to Live By is handled better in that respect.

It’s just . . . c’mon! It’s C.S. Lewis! You guys couldn’t hire someone to create an original design? Has the money from the Narnia movies run out already? I suppose it could be an accident. I haven’t been able to find anything to confirm or deny it. It is a common image. But I can’t convince myself that it’s anything better than an attempt to get the Twilight audience to buy a C.S. Lewis book. It’s just pathetic.

Final Photo Project

The final Photo II project was self-motivated. I wanted to do something about people’s diets. I had several ideas that involved diagrams and food charts. Sadly, such ideas are obviously type-motivated, and didn’t really have much to do with photo. I had some of my friends write down everything they ate for four days, not really knowing what i would do with the information. With Phillip’s help, I eventually decided to take one day from each person’s food diary and make a food sculpture out of everything they ate that day. I tried to get a wide variety of shots from each sculpture. What resulted I think is caught somewhere between repulsive and delicious.

TasteBuds

In a week we’ll be completely finished with TasteBuds. The designs are finished, the identity guide is wrapping up, the press release is on Friday and soon we will sign the TasteBuds rights over to Vanessa. It’s kinda sad that we won’t be involved with it in the future.

I’ve learned a lot from this class. It’s been crazy working with clients- over a dozen clients, actually. We get a whole lot of opinions from all different directions, and have to piece them together to form a design. In one meeting with Vanessa, I misunderstood her to say she wanted three email templates produced: a general newsletter, a volunteer news letter, and a community garden newsletter. All of which I ended up coding and subsequently tossing two. I felt terrible for a lot of my classmates who received changes to the print guide last minute and pulled a couple of all-nighters just before sending the final copy to print. I felt the need to take some of their burdens from them, but sometimes you just can’t split up design work.

I’ve really been concerned about the lack of email standards. I expressed my feelings to Leslie and Josiah at Medium about this, but Josiah simply said, “How would you do it?” This sort of crushed my dreams about some sort of movement going on that I didn’t know about. However, I did finally happen upon the Email Standards Project. I’m swamped at school at the moment, but when I get the time I’m going to actually research them and see if they’re legit.

Teamwork in the Design Lab

Tonight I’ve been working on my TasteBuds process binder in the design lab. I’m here with several other students scrambling to finish the work that’s due tomorrow for Leslie’s classes. I’m so happy that my socially awkward self is starting to feel some camaraderie with my classmates.

This whole TasteBuds experience has forced us to work together and get to know each other better. I feel comfortable sharing my design opinions with everyone in class. I feel comfortable asking for people’s help and giving advice.

The Identity group was in here tonight finishing up the identity guide for TasteBuds. When everyone in their group was busy, they’d ask me for help on little technical issues they were having with the programs or wording. They’d shout out questions about fraction to decimal conversion, which I was no help for, but it was nevertheless amusing to see an entire room full of people try to figure out six divided by eight.

One extremely frustrating yet ultimately beneficial teaching method of Leslie’s is that she often won’t give us the answers to our questions. Instead, she makes us ask our classmates and work our problems out amongst ourselves. Every once in a while she’ll notice us floundering a bit too much and finally give us the answer, but usually she’ll make sure ahead of time that at least one of us knows the answer already.

So with this semester coming to a close I’m excited about getting to work with my class for our final year.

TasteBuds Press Release

The TasteBuds press release is happening on Friday at Crabtree Farms, 9:00AM for us, and I think around 11:00AM for the rest of the world. We’ve got to be there early to help prepare and to get our t-shirts! We’re all very excited about t-shirts. The event team has done an excellent job of deciding on the material, color, and design. At first, Vanessa was unsure whether the guys at Crabtree would wear eggplant, but we did a quick survey and figured out the the fellas are down with purple.

The weather’s going to be iffy on Friday, and because Crabtree is a farm, We’ve been instructed to dress for a muddy farm from the waist down, and work hard on looking awesome from the waist up. Tara seems a little concerned about how we will present ourselves to any reporter who might want to talk to us. She posted an essay on Basecamp instructing us on the do’s and don’ts of getting interviewed. No ums or ahs or likes. No fidgeting. I might have a small problem with that. Fidgeting is a lifestyle I’ve fallen into. Even in middle school girls choir my choir director would yell at me for constantly touching my hair on stage. I’ve learned to pull my hair back since then, but that won’t stop me from picking at my fingernails during an interview.

In short, this press release will require a lot of will power.

If I do get interveiwed, I’ll do my best to make TasteBuds, Leslie, UTC, and Tara proud.

Image Types

The first time I printed my CMYK girl for the print guide, she came out kinda crunchy and gross. Matt suggested that I turn her into a vector image with Adobe Illustrator. At the moment, she was a raster image, which is an image type composed of pixels on a grid. This isn’t so great for a little cartoon composed of three colors, with no dark shadows to hide it’s pixels.

Raster images are great for photographs, and horrible for text and simple illustrations, especially those that will be scaled up. When you scale a raster image up, it’s kind of like looking at a pretty person’s face too closely- you start to see all the flaws and [figurative] pimples. However, vector graphics are path based. When you blow them up, they don’t become pixelated because the pixels used to render them adjust to the mathematical shape of the image.

Here’s an example using one of the icons I designed for TasteBuds.

That is the size of the original image. Here is an ultra close-up of the fork:

You don’t see the giant, enlarged, black pixels cutting into the white because the image doesn’t have fixed pixels. Instead it’s told to curve smoothly at this point, no matter what size it is. Here’s the same ultra close-up, but the image was rasterized before being blown up:

I don’t even know what that looks like.

So I devoted many hours to figuring out how to create a vector graphic from scratch. What I learned: It’s way harder than Matt makes it look. At least with what I was trying to do. The Adobe Illustrator pen tool wanted to do things I never told it to do. I ended up printing the image again on a printer similar to the one used at Lulu, and it turned out fine. It was mostly the other printer crunching the image, and I just needed to tighten up one or two spots. While I would have preferred a vector image, I think I’ll need to hone my skills and wait for the next time I have the opportunity.

Finishing the Pring Guide

Our final print guides are due for Process and Materials next week on our exam day. Most people have received their versions in the mail from Lulu.com already, and they look really good. This is what mine ended up looking like:

I haven’t decided if I completely like the lines yet, but I think they work well enough. I still prefer the title hugging the girl’s bottom, but Leslie did not and she’s the boss. Casey suggested that I change “Sexy Printers” to just “Printers,” to make it less… S E X Y . Which I fully agreed with, mostly for his abstract reasons, but also because of some of the things people said in critique. They were referring to my blue girl as if she were a printer, saying things like “I never really thought of printers as sexy!” She’s really supposed to represent printing rather printers. It’s a small detail, but I really didn’t want my cartoon to become more than an image.

I made some adjustments to the table of contents and the title page as well. I added some lines similar to the ones on the cover to keep everything consistent, and I also generally tightened things up a bit. Instead of having the contents conform to the side of the CMYK girl, I created a cleaner table next to her. Luckily, the natural curve created by the right side of the text kind of imitates the curve of the body, enhancing what I hope is a humorously alluring image.

Email Work

I wrote the following blog a while ago, and I just discovered I forgot to hit the “publish” button.  When I found it in my drafts I decided I’d go ahead and post it.

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We’re beginning to tie up the TasteBuds project.  I’ve been working on the email template for…too long.  I feel like it should have been so easy, but coding for email is just so weird.  This project has made me a strong advocate for email standards.  If I could just use a freaking style sheet.  And if the email’s appearance wasn’t most likely going to change in every server.

I attempted to place a background pattern similar to the one that will be in the website, and with a lot of struggling was able to do so using a table within a table (a sinful method anywhere but email).  I had read that Gmail would get rid of any background image, so I put in a suitable background color behind the image.  So I sent it to myself to test it, and it completely falls apart.  The white background in the inner table disappears, revealing the green background as well as the white borders I put around my images to make up for the fact that Gmail throws out both padding and margins from around images- or at least my images.

I emailed the html to someone who’d offered to help me and posted some questions in a web design forum, but I couldn’t really find any answers.  I ended up just scrapping the border idea.  Thankfully, the design still works without it.