Art by Lorna

Destiny’s Update 4

So the business cards have been completed and the Refer a Friend cards needed to be reordered. But, I am extremely happy. My apologies for the beat up cards in the picture. I only have a few and they get taken out of my wallet constantly to show people.

Also, I have design some envelopes and letterhead for when we start mailing them out to various local business and potential clients. So far, we have only sent out one and will have the others mailed out by the end of the week.

I am currently working on completing the identity package so that I can get nice copies printed for the company, my advisors, and myself. The intention behind those is to have something to show the clients, supporters, and others the brand and how to appropriately and effectively use it. 

Also, I am working slowly on the website but I’ve been lagging behind in that aspect because of some issues with domain names. We have decided to stick with Destiny’s Doggy Care as an overall name, as Destiny’s for Dogs was too similar to another company’s name.

Overall, I’ve been learning a lot about consistency throughout the design and trying my best to make everything simple and clean. One of the things that I am trying to get better at is effectively time management and such. I have picked up a few books, or rather ordered a few books off the internet, to get a better understanding of Visual Communication Design.

Can be found here : https://abookapart.com/products/designing-for-emotion

Designing for Emotion is one of the books that I decided to pick up, as one of my professors kept saying that he “swore by this book”. I am hoping that this is just as great as he kept saying it was. Also, I have picked up a few other books about design process, logos, and the like.

DESTINY’S UPDATE 3

We started Kick Off Month about an hour ago and in honor of, I took photos and created some posts to showcase the three main flavors and how Ruthie, the owner, has recipes to offer the treats grain free if needed! 

This has been quite the interesting journey as I’ve been learning things about printers and Facebook’s Ad Boosting. I definitely believe this knowledge will help me in the future!

Our Business Cards and Refer a Friend cards are finished and we will make some adjustments on the next batch of cards but I am extremely happy with how the physical copies of said cards turned out!!! The printer we used didn’t have many orders this week due to the upcoming holiday so they got them done in a day! I was pleased.

Here they are:

We will definitely continue to go through them for all our other printing needs, especially since they are printed on nice paper and look clean and professional.

This weekend, I am working on finishing the website, writing letters to local companies and potential clients, searching for good grant and loan information. Ruthie got another intern who is going to be looking into properties around Cheney and will be learning all of the accounting and business stuff.

Anyway, I figured I would post an update because I’ve been so happy with all the stuff going on!! Head on over and give her page a like! We’ll be starting to work on opening our first fundraising (probably on Kickstarter) and are aiming for $500 to get the proper supplies needed to help make the treats and snuffle mats faster. Then, if that goes well, we will open up a larger fundraising to start raising money for the future!

Working on designing package designs, creating nutrition facts templates, finalizing all the cards to be finally printed through a different printer. So far, creating all these things has been showing me what I needed to improve at!

I have been using adorable pictures of dogs from unsplash.com, where there are tons of adorable stock photos. 

Learning how to make everything look good on the social media, starting with Facebook. My goal this summer is to create a style guide that shows everything, including colors, images, fonts and weights of fonts, etc. I’ll be working on that throughout the week. This quarter is my last quarter if I can successfully finish everything!

The logo for my classmate turned into a full plan. She is officially starting up her business and I have become the designer. Just the logo has turned into business cards, punch cards, refer-a-friend cards, letterhead and envelopes, toys, labels and stickers, etc. I am extremely excited for to do this for her and am going to turn it into a summer long project. I’ll have more communications work also, but that’s a whole different story. 

The name and information has been blurred out for now. Once she has okay’d it, I will post the non-blurred version.

**Work in Progress**

I am currently working with friend of mine with the logo design for the business she is working on starting up and this design appears to be the one she wants to stick with. Destiny is the name of her service dog and she feels like that would be the best name for the business. Now, we are trying to get the logo completed so we can start making stationary, mailing labels, business cards, etc.

Back at it again with another homework post. This time around, I’ll be talking about halftones, duotones, glitches, and the relationship between the three in terms of Graphic Design.

Definitions

Halftones - When an image is compromised entirely of dots in various sizes and colors. The proximity, size, and color of the dots help show design.

Duotones - When an image is compromised entirely of the tints and shades of two colors. Spotify is a big culprit when it comes to utilizing this design technique.

 Glitches - When an image is purposefully distorted to appear as if the computer itself is having display issues. Known as a purposeful imperfection.

Now that we understand what these three terms mean, we can start to discuss the relationship between the three. Halftones, duotones, and glitches are all common ways of producing a piece of artistic design work that is different than the normal, high quality photo you would see or the photo that has a lower level of brights to appear darker. In fact, they are ways to create a visually interesting enough piece for viewers to click on, read, touch, watch, etc.

A fun way to mess around would be to combine duotones with glitches and attempt to make a glitched image with only two colors. Or to make a halftone’d duotone image where you have only the shades of two colors but with varying sizes and positions of dots that it looks like a photo. 

Either way, I hope you have a load of fun messing around with these different design options and get a feel for what you want to do as a designer yourself. Below are multiple tutorials to help you practice!

Tutorials:

Halftones:

http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/tutorials/adobe-illustrator/create-vector-halftone-effects/#1

http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/tutorials/photoshop/create-vintage-design-using-stylish-halftone-effects/

Duotones:

https://medium.com/@pierrellev/reproduce-colorizer-effect-of-spotify-71d5de88039f#.o8mr9072z

http://blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/tutorials/how-to-create-a-colorful-fluoro-pop-art-photo-effect

Glitches:

http://blog.animalswithinanimals.com/2008/08/databending-and-glitch-art-primer-part.html

http://kawiku.deviantart.com/art/Glitch-Effect-Tutorial-372342580

Sources

http://www.ted.photographer.org.uk/photoscience_halftones.htm

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/duotones.html

More homework for Production Design class.

No matter where you’ll work, chances are, they have a brand identity all to their own. Most companies, now, are starting to open these up for the world to see. For example, Barnes & Noble or Facebook have intricate booklets showcasing the history, the logos, the colors, and everything else required to stay true to the brand.

You can see Barnes & Noble’s identity booklet here.

These identity packages will include everything from logos to images of the uniforms if that company needs them. The benefit of these identity packages is help keep everything in line so no one has any excuses when something gets messed up. The Executionists describe it as “the primary visual DNA of your company’s branding.” It’s the best way to see everything that is going on with the brand. 

Twitter’s information can be found here.

More Girl Scouts information here.

The other benefit of using a style guide is as a reference guide for future projects. It helps keep all of the colors, logos, typefaces, and such right there to look back on. Forgot if you used a dark or light shade of purple on a document and you’re on a different computer? Open up the pdf and find the Hexidecimal or the CMYK for that color! Forgot if you used Semibold or Bold of a font family? That’s there, too. It saves you hours of messing around with revising. 

Here is a list of websites you can visit to learn more:

https://designschool.canva.com/blog/50-meticulous-style-guides-every-startup-see-launching/

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/07/designing-style-guidelines-for-brands-and-websites/

The W I designed for Whitcon on a whole bunch of beautiful dice.

I’ve been playing around with ideas on how to make a cool, hand-lettered design that says “Powered by VNS”. Then, I want to learn out to screen print and use the facilities in the art building to make myself a t-shirt out of it :)

VNS means Vagus Nerve Stimulator. That is the exact device that I had implanted in my best last week! It’s a small batter/generator type thing that has a wire leading up to my vagus nerve. It’s supposed to help control my seizures and make life that much better for me as I finish up school and go into the world of jobs.

Yet another homework post

As per part of my production design homework, I’m going to be talking about forms! Because absolutely everyone loves forms!

One of the things that is important about forms is that the receiver gets all the necessary information. That way, they don’t have to call you up at 10pm asking questions about the design. The same thing could be said, really, for job applications, resumes, and things of the like.  

The benefit of the rising amount of technology, also, means that these forms can be done all through the internet. A simple exchange of information from the comfort of your own home. The communication process that follows is highly dependent upon the information in the form. Many forms these days are being trashed for online forms, too.

A fine example of that would be the process of registering events for a club at Eastern Washington University. Just two years ago, they wanted everything done through paperwork that had to be signed by your club’s advisor and all that give. Here, take a look at the old Off Campus Event Registration form (which I still apparently have a copy of in my Gamers Club files):

Here is a screenshot of a snipet from the current event registration on Orgsync:

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Forms over the years have definitely improved. Let’s look at some Magic: The Gathering prerelease sign up sheets from the EWU Gamers Club before I got involved and then after I became president. 

The first image is the way the events used to be documented. The officers before me would highlight which event the person was paying for, if they were a EWU Gamers Club card holder, and all sorts of other information.

When I took over, having some disabilities, that form confused the heck out of me. I needed to create a new system to make it easier on me and the other people working in the EWU Bookstore (who take all the money and the like). That’s where the second picture comes in. The second picture is just that. All I need to know is their name, their contact number, and if they are a member or not (which is marked with an M in the last column). Now, the prices are only $25 or $24 for members. And they only get on that list if they have paid. So, if there is no M, I will know they paid $25 instead of $24. And there is a set of papers for each individual event instead of having them all on the same one.

~~~

Overall, I believe that forms are a vital part of our existence nowadays. It is definitely best to go digital for your clients or for you to send to your designer and THEN worry about a physical backup. I hope this was in no way stressful to you at all and that you learned something from it! Forms are complicated and sometimes people make huge messes out of them when they can really be simple.

The words “Naming” and “Conventions” sound a bit tedious when you say them together but really, it’s just the way that we organize our files!

Honestly, I’ve been using the same system for years. It’s quite simple for me to understand and basically just starts with the year, season/quarter, course/client, and then project. In the folder for the project would be all the files necessary. I always say “A folder within a folder within a folder...”

This process has been the thing that’s best helped me understand where I can find everything and is definitely agreat way to reference back to a project even a year or two later. These documents stay on my computer for about a year before they get moved to my external hard drive for safe keeping, though!

This system itself can be a bit of a chaotic mess, though, because I’m only human. It requires maintenance every few weeks once works in progress, revisions, and final products pile up. Say you work really hard on an assignment, get it finished and get the final, and then suddenly, 10 minutes before the time it’s due, you realize that there was one minor kerning issue you wanted to take care of. So that file named “logosproject_f.ai” is no longer the “_f” but really becomes the “_r”. Revisions and Finals. Finals and Revisions. You’ll have to go about naming and renaming so many times before you finally get it perfect. Even I don’t even have it perfect. So hang tight.

But here! Have a screenshot of how my stuff looks when organized!

yes... it was 2am when I took that screenshot.... shhh.

Eventually, too, if you are turning it in to a professor or client, it might be best to put your name into the final zip folder. For example, the project above will be completed and turned in under the zip file name “Logos_lharris”. All the file names will remain the same. 

You can find a few pretty good examples here, too:

http://minesf.com/resources/cca/2013/04/22/file-naming-conventions/

This is the “Strong” T-shirt that I designed for class and am selling over at my RedBubble account to help raise awareness for Epilepsy!

I’ve been having seizures for as long as I can remember and sometimes, they can be way too much to deal with. School gets hard, work gets hard, even just staying positive can be the worst at times. Right now, I’m recovering from my VNS surgery that I had on Tuesday the 28th of March! Just two days after Purple Day (March 26th).