Lauren Ashley

I came across this EGD experiment on the Design Ignites Change Webpage. I was first drawn in by the design of it. How each piece is something completely different, but when you look at it from afar they all fit together. I think the idea of this project is really interesting. They went to Center alternative school and had kids who were having trouble each write something they love on a piece of paper, and add it to the wall. They said their challenge was to make the kids feel as though they matter and have a sense off belonging. I think their execution was great, and it seemed to be a great success. I think more projects like this should happen more often. They not only are aesthetically pleasing, but they make a change in someone's life. Environmental graphic design for the win.

http://www.justimaginedesign.com/work/edmondson_portfolio.pdf

I found this animated font display celebrating Gotham, and since i had been looking into using Gotham for my project, i decided to take another look at why it is so successful. Gotham really boomed when Obama had used it for his campaign typeface. I believe that this was a good choice because he was trying to appeal to all people. It is very universal, legible, and bold. It also goes really nicely with a variety of secondary typefaces. With how popular Gotham has become will it be the next helvetica?

So i've been looking into Hand drawn lettering lately for one of my other classes, and it got me wondering how useful it really is. After searching for a while and trying it for myself i came to the conclusion that it is really helpful to draw out your type faces. It taught me a lot about kerning and how different fonts work together. I also learned a lot about the varying thickness of type. All and all i think it's something everyone should dabble into at some point in their design career. It doesn't always work with what you're working on, but if you do it in the right way it can really be successful, and it appeals to most everyone. 

I think all of these are successful. They are very reminicent of the 1960’s even in their color scheme. They are very legible, flexible, and can be used in a variety of styles. Not all decades have a particular style when it comes to typefaces, so it is interesting to see how obvious it was in the 1960’s. Other research told me that most typewriter fonts at the time were Univers, Helvetica, Courier, and Letter Gothic. Some of the more display fonts were more like Folio, as they were mostly fatter fonts. Something to note in the red album cover is the varying width of the fonts between the serif and sans. It’s interesting that these two fonts can work so nicely together while being so vastly different. I think a good thing to take from this research is the over all style of design and type from the 1960’s. Bold, fatter display typefaces, traditional content typefaces, Bright colors, and a grid layout.

With the classes help i decided to go ahead with the vine/floral/leaf fleur de lis logo for the Garden District project. From there i started researching other viney floral leafy logo designs to see if i could pull from some of their techniques to clean up my logo. I started looking into the leaf shape and size. The shape of the fleur de lis in general. I literally took a picture of a fleur de lis i found in a dressing room the other day because i liked the shape of it. I'll have to post it when i get the chance. For now here's a nice leaf logo i found.

This week I wanted to focus on a logo that I see on a daily basis. Something that i see every day, but never really took the time to appreciate it and the design decisions put into it. I decided to go with the Texas state logo because it relates back to last weeks post in which I had found another great example of Garamond. Texas state's logo is very simplistic and professional for their clientele. They used a very traditional font for a traditional school. I looked up our other official texas state typefaces, and found that it is a univers. I think this pair works wonderfully together. They are very universal in that they can be effective in almost any medium. I look at the Texas state logo, and appreciate the simplicity of it. You don't always have to have an over the top logo to try to convince people you're school is the best choice.

I've been doing a lot of research for my garden district project. These are some of my logo doodles I've come up with so far. Still many more to go! I'm thinking about focusing on the garden aspect of the neighborhood over the architectural aspects.

Kendra Scott is an up and coming jewelry store based out of Austin. They carry beautiful jewelry for women between the ages of 15-50. It has become very popular in the past few years, since I just got a pair of their earrings for Xmas, I figured id take a second look at how their branding and typeface choice has helped in the sudden boom of success. From what I can tell it seems as though they’ve chosen a small caps version of Adobe Garamond. It works very well with their simplistic logo, and is very legible even from a distance. I think the best thing to learn from this is that there is nothing wrong with using the classic typefaces. They are used often, but they are used so much because they are successful.

Problem: The Garden District is a neighborhood in New Orleans. It was developed as plantations between 1832 and 1900, and is now considered a very cultural and historic area of NOLA. Each plantation had a lot of land in which they had immaculate gardens as well as beautiful victorian homes. The Garden District was lucky in that they didn't suffer too much flood damage from Katrina. They did however suffer from a lot of severe wind damage. I hope to spread the word of restoration of the GD to keep the unique culture of NOLA alive. http://www.neworleansonline.com/tools/neighborhoodguide/uptown.html