Week 6B

Day of Design

9:30 Speaker
Aaris Sherin
Book: Sustainable Thinking

The whole idea of her presentation was sustainability. Her book talks about sustainability being the balance of social, economic and environment resources for the continued health of the planet and future generations. She talks about how we must start rethinking how we use resources to help future generations survive. Rethinking design can help improve the lives around us. Some example of companies starting this are Fair Trade, Beyond Skin and Magno Products. She talked a lot about how textile designers don't see the true value of their design and how it appeals to people. Textiles are things like rugs, chairs, bedding, etc.
One of the questions I asked Aaris was "In terms of packaging, do you think industry has made an improvement or do you think they are still falling short of successful 'green' packing". Her response was both because packaging is very wasteful but they are starting to use less in terms of the amount of packaging being used. They fall short because you still see styrofoam being used which takes thousands of years to dissipate but cardboard has made a huge impact on being used more frequently. Packaging has only really made a economical difference in the past 5 years.

3:30 Speaker
Josh Bryant

Josh graduated with a computer science major and now works as a lead web developer for Journey Group. He focused he's presentation on what makes a quality web and what the industry looks like through breadth and depth. He talked about 5 groups of designers (system administrators, back end developers, front end developers, UX designers and graphic designers). With each of theses he talked about what they did in their field and the quality it takes for perform their field.

System designers are the deep backends of websites where you find the servers, data, files and the domains like IP addresses. The responsibly of them is to make the back end secure and fast, everything must be monitored and possibly automated so the site is able to work on its own. Back End Development is the application development, the structuring data, CMS installation, the server side programming like (PHP, ASP, NET, Ruby, and Javascript. The function of this is to meet the functional specification of the website, maintain structural integrity, readable, and maintainable. On the other hand Front End Development are the web designers, this is mostly what Josh Bryant does. These type of designers work on what you see on the browsers. They work with programs such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript. They translate the design that the graphic design want it to look like on screen. Their job is mostly to match or improve the designer intentions, make readable and maintainable code, have it accessible and the site is performing fast. UX designers are the visual experience designers where they make navigation possible on a site by working on content strategy and interaction design. Interaction designers have a huge responsibility because the site must be audience focused, readable , intuitable, usable and eye catching. The last type of designer you see in the web is Graphic Designers. They mostly work on brand applications, messaging, typography, images, and the rules of system and thinking. They must keep in mind the brand and make sure they are designing for the audience. Their files must be robust, readable, and scalable.

Project 2

Logo Animations

Goal: to create meaningful connections between company identity, branding and a signature product with an use of motion.
3-4 seconds long.

-Visual interest > connection > visual rest
-Series of 3
-Simplistic
-visual voice

Pick whether you want your animated logo to be an show opener like the "abc" logo to a show or and end (tag) closer like what you would see giving credit to companies like in a commercial, production or sponsor.

What i'm doing...

I think i'm choosing to do an end tag for a company called Nature Sound Production. I'm not quite sure if this is a true company but for the project I am further developing a identity for the company. Basically it would be a Sound Production that you would use for nature or environmental shows.

Week 6A

Critique Day: Project 1

Some feed back I got after watching my quote motion video were things like fixing exit transitions from one phrase to the next, fasten up words of beginning of video because by the end it seemed like a better pace. I think this also was due to getting more familiar with the program. Something I forgot to add in my video was the authors name. After watching other students video I felt the readability of my video was strong compared to others since it was to fast or the juxtaposition of the words was arranged in a difficult way.

Homework:

Read at least 10 minutes worth of Aaris Sherin Book "Sustainable Thinking" to be prepared for Wednesday presentation at 9:30. Her whole book it looking at a new perspective of design and find new ways of how it can be used to help further generations survive since the impact of natural resources is decreasing over the past decades. 

Week 5- Outside of Class

4 Final Motion Exercise Videos 

Line
Emotion created by a line. The emotion I created was anxiety. The line moves around constantly and gives it a nervous anxiety feel.



Dream Sequence
The dream was about a calm, relaxing sunny day at the beach then an unexpected storm comes through. This causes me to want a run to a safe place and once I get there I turn around and get stabbed.
The direction of the video was to have photos of textures that resemble how you would be feeling in the dream with one word in the center of the piece that relate back to those emotions during the dream.



Rhythm
In this video it is representing a beat that you would create through rhythm with the word rhythm. In order to create a pulse I used scaling, shifting, and contrasting to created different effects but with the same repeating beat.



Quote
The quote is "Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."

Week 5B

Quote Motion... Continued 

Here are the final versions of the symbolic scoring with frame times and descriptions of what is happening during the frames. I also have a screen shot of the video in mid-action of a frame. The blue arrows represent the movement of the word and the blue x's are the transition whether it is fading in or not. The final purple x's show the phrase being deleted as an transition. 

Week 5A

Quote Motion: 

Before I decided to change my background to the plain grey I had a brick texture to resemble a path but it became to distracting. The typeface I choose was Baskerville semibold and semibold italic. Below are just more images of progress from the previous sketch layout I had that was just black and white.

Week 4- Outside of Class

Rhythm Motion Redo In-progress...

* The final version will be seen in Week 5- Outside of Class *

Week 4B

Class: In class work time!

During class I focused on sketching my "Symbolic Scoring" guidelines for my animation sequence that breaks down the quote step by step. The frames show what will happen in each frame. At the top right corner of each frame says the of that individual frame and what will happen during that time. The description under the image helps explains what will happen. You can see the quote in Week 4A.

Week 4A

Exercise 4: Message in Motion

Through motion in After Effects the exercise is to take a quote / story line / lyric with meaning behind it and give it a visual voice by using foreshadowing and recall. This project will rely on placement of words and how your using them to portray a message by foreshadowing the sequence.

The quote I'm using is from Albert Camus...

Week 3- Outside of Class

Since this week was lost due to snow our task before Week 4 monday class starts we were required to put together a short video. The video is simply communicating the word Rhythm through motion.

Week 3 A&B

Classes were cancelled due to snow!

Week 2- Outside of Class

Sequence DreamScape Video

Created in: Adobe After Effects





Lynda.com Videos

Some of the videos recommended to watch were the starting elements of After Effects. We first looked at exploring the interface by how we can switch our views of working in text or standard and so on. The timeline is where you can edit the elements/files that were imported from a file. Within your composition you have options by using the little triangles. After Effects works very well with Photoshop and Illustrator files when importing. When you begin to work you must stay organized by labeling your files internally on the interface and externally through your files outside of After Effects.
By organizing your files it becomes less chaotic when you have several options open.

After you have imported all documents you can get started. Within your composition you can build your file with layers. Effects can be found under the Toggle Switches/Modes. Hierarchy is created by building layers vertically on the timeline layers or horizontally by trimming layers to give them a certain time frame within the composition. Some shortcuts for trimming are (opt + ]) or (opt + [). This will only work if the red line with the guitar pick symbol is in the place where you want that layer to be trimmed.

Some interesting things about After Effects is that you have have 3D, 2D and video space within your project. And that there are several different ways of rendering/exporting your projects so they work for whatever space used within your project.

Week 2B

Sequential Dreamscape

What was the dream about?

This is a personal dream that I have had in the past. It starts out with me being on the beach where the weather is warm and relaxing. Once being in the state of fantasy it starts to change quickly. The water becomes creepy and clouds grow darker and darker. This unexpected storm surge shakes all the surroundings around me and the rain and water is out of control. I run back to the house for safety and once I finally get back and take a breath, I turn around to get stabbed and the blood wakes me up instantly.

Purpose of project?

Take textures that represent words/emotions to relate back to your dream. Throughout the video are words describing the dream in one constant line and are used by the duration and pauses. The only thing the words cannot do is create a sentence with meaning.

Photos Used: