Where I am at right now . . .

So now that all my info is in and I kind of played with the font, I decided to break the design out of the periodic table form. I had some ideas of maybe stirring the boxes around in a bowl of salsa or making the shape of one of the fruits. However, I talked with Austin Gundlach and he had the idea of laying things out on a cutting board. I started playing with that idea. I changed the shape of my box to match a section of the diced fruit or vegetable. Then I laid them out in rows as if they had just been diced. I am going to add half of the fruit or vegetable on the side and probably a knife. I could also do a salt and pepper shaker with the different spices on them. I think it would also be cool to show like half a bowl of salsa on the side. I think this approach will work really well and is obviously much more interesting then the periodic table shape.

Draft 3

In Draft number 3, I changed my typeface. I spent a long time looking at mexican or spicy themed fonts but they all looked really cartoony. So the typeface I decided to try is called phosphorous bromide. I thought it worked because the serifs are pretty sharp but there shape of the characters a little less specific. It kind of has a more organic feel.

Visual Studies Draft 2

This is draft number two. I resized and added detail to the icons in each box. The illustrator drawing now fills the box and is a little improvement.

Visual Studies

So I realized that I haven't posted any of the work that I have been doing in Visual Studies so here we go.

First Draft of Periodic Table:

Basically all I wanted to do on my first draft was get all the information in. My idea is an ingredients table for salsa. The first section is different varieties of tomatoes, then peppers, onions and spices. The bottom two rows are for tropical salsa and lists different varieties of pineapples, peaches, mangos, avocado, and corn, etc. I think that different colors of the sections are a strong point of this design.

Green Tree Design Comps

So after we got tore apart on the critique on Tuesday, We decided to switch our direction. Rachel drew up her own blueprint design. This approach seems to be working much better. We edited the design in Illustrator and added color. There are good places for information and we can still do our plan to pull little parts of the design for other pages of the brochure.

Sketches for Greentree Design

For the Green Tree Garden Club Project, Rachel and I are focusing on the concept of agricultural skyscrapers. Our design consists of different sections of a building covered with trees. I think it works because it brings interest new ideas for green living and both Rachel and I are interested in architectural design. Rachel sketched all our building designs and then we live traced and edited them in Illustrator.  Here they are . . .

More Civil Rights Pilgrimage

Another Flyer for the Civil Rights Pilgrimage job. We planned an info session for Clare Hall and Assisi Hall. These are the flyers and door tags that I created to advertise this event.

Business Card

For my business card design, I immediately wanted to design a two-sided card. I thought of it as the two sides to my brand, farmer vs designer. I edited my name logo so there was just one with the barn and one with the silo.

Then I laid the designs out on each side of a business card so you could get the flip back and forth between farmer Cathy and designer Cathy. I like this card a lot because I think the flipping back and forth between sides works well. I also worked in little designs off the C and Y. The plant on the C represents growth from the farm background. The light and stoplight design on the Y represents, light ideas, and stoplight, bottom light is green and it is lit, green means go aka I am always moving forward and an over achiever.

Logos

My personal brand is based of the idea that I am a farmer and a designer. I grew up on a small farm in the country and now I have chosen a career that is pretty much city based. It is that contrast that sets me apart from other designers. In my logo I play with that by replacing the normal barn and silo with a barn and a skyscraper next to it. I like this design a lot. I think it fits who I am as a designer and a person.

I then took my logo and placed it in with my name so the barn stands as the A and the skyscraper as the T. I was playing with different ways to present my logo so people begin to recognize it as Cathy.

After a Busy Month (ha ha) Time to Catch up on Some Blogs

Let's begin with the first project in graphic design. We were working on our personal logos. One really strong point of my personal brand design is the typeface I chose. I am using a typeface called New Garden light. It is a very modern typeface with delicate swirls off some of the characters.

In my designs, I edited the G into a C because I wanted it to have the swirls. I also created my own h and t because I wanted them to have more of a curve. The F is one of my favorite characters. It is one of the only ones that extends above the base height. Overall I really like this typeface. I think it is really clean.

The Brand Gap Book

I love the brand gap book by Marty Neumeier. I think its easy to read, pack with information and entertaining. A couple things that made me laugh are:

The coke bottle Illustration on page 13 - Without the Brand, "Coke's glass would be half empty"

Page 31 - "If you do have compelling answers, great--you can skip this chapter" . . . turn page - "Still reading? Thought so."

It is clever comments and illustrations like those to examples, that makes the book so interesting. It has has great examples that make the information really clear. One topic that I thought was covered really well in the first section was the idea of focus. A brand should focus on one thing that makes it really strong. "It is often better to be number one in a small category than number 3 in a large one. (pg 44)" It goes on to give examples of John Deere and Porsche, describing how the perception of their brand would be skewed if expanded their market from farm equipment and sports cars.

I am probably going to read ahead or at least look at more of the diagrams just because this book is really clever. The book says, "It's different--I like it. (pg 34)" My saying for the year is, "It's clever--I like it."

Sponsor a Mile Publicity

An ongoing fundraiser for the Civil Rights Pilgrimage is our sponsor a mile push. I designed tickets that we will sell outside the Union and Serra Hall on different days. Each ticket says that $10 will sponsor 20 students to travel one mile on the trip.

Besides just word of mouth, we are setting up tables to sell the tickets. These are the large posters that I created to advertise it.

The space under being sold outside is for signs saying the Union and Serra Hall, and signs saying Today. We are going to attach them with velcro tags so we can change the dates and locations when needed.

Like all good fundraiser we wanted to have a thermometer to measure how close we are to our goal. So I created the map that is on the flyers. We are going to have the bus from our logo move down along the road as we raise more money.

Civil Rights Pilgrimage Trip Applications

These are the trip applications that I made.

Civil Rights Brat Fry Fundraiser Publicity

Our first fundraiser was a brat fry in Mequon. Here is the publicity that I designed for the event.