Megan Colwell's Portfolio

The locating place project was a way to explore a part of Austin and take away a part of that particular neighborhood and then creating a book to document this connection. The neighborhood that was explored was the Cesar Chavez community. After walking through the neighborhood, taking photographs, and learning more about the places that make up this vibrant area of Austin, TX. 

The two things I took away from my time spent in Cesar Chavez was the mystery and the history that many of the old building structures hold. In order to show this through book design, I decided to write my own mystery book that encompassed the true history and importance of some of the buildings in the neighborhood. I also wanted to teach the reader about the bad side of gentrification because this is actually starting to happen on the East Side of Austin where Cesar Chavez is located. 

I decided to do this through using photographs and hand-drawn illustrations that I vectorized in Illustrator and colored in Photoshop. The photographs were utilized to show actual structures in the neighborhood and the illustrations were used for the fictional characters in the story. This contrast in artwork in the book emphasized the difference between fiction and non-fiction.

Weather Report

This weather forecast is conceptualized as an interface that is easy to understand for the user. The information is displayed in different ways, the first is through location, the second is through time, and the last is through category.

I wanted to create a weather report that was easy to look at with warm colors but I also wanted to make sure that the information itself was called out and legible.

I chose a sans serif font for the main information because it's is very readable and then i chose a fun script font for the countries because throughout the motion piece they are the largest aspect. 

LATCH Exercise: Hierarchy 

LATCH Exercise: Category

LATCH Exercise: Time

LATCH Exercise: Alphabet

LATCH Exercise: Location

Animated Gifs

This exercise was a chance to explore the Cesar Chavez Neighborhood and come up with ideas for the book design project through photography and animation.

Again, I took a whole new approach to the mysterious feeling I kept having when walking through the Cesar Chavez neighborhood. Thus, I put this feeling in words and created a gif of thoughts walking away. 

Animated Gifs

This exercise was a chance to explore the Cesar Chavez Neighborhood and come up with ideas for the book design project through photography and animation.

Animated Gifs

This exercise was a chance to explore the Cesar Chavez Neighborhood and come up with ideas for the book design project through photography and animation.

Animated Gifs

This exercise was a chance to explore the Cesar Chavez Neighborhood and come up with ideas for the book design project through photography and animation.

Cesar Chavez Gifs

This exercise was a chance to explore the Cesar Chavez Neighborhood and come up with ideas for the book design project through photography and animation.

Identity Series

The identity series was for the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX. The exhibition that the class was designing for was to feature famous graphic design styles from different periods in time. Each person in class was given a different design style to recreate in a poster for the exhibit. The poster was to include all of the information given to us about the museum. The design style I was given was Dadaism. Not only were we to create a poster, but we also created buttons for admission. Each admission ticket, adult, seniors, students, etc., had a corresponding button that reflected the Dada style and was cohesive with the poster. 

The first step in the process of this project was research. Before this class, I did not know a lot about Dadaism. I researched popular designers, pieces of art, and the history of how Dada became an international style. I compiled all of this information into a document that I could reference throughout the work process. 

The next step was to sketch. After having a better idea of what Dadaism looked like and the methods of constructing this style of design, I was able to create several sketches for poster ideas. I knew I wanted to create a collage-like poster, since this was a very popular method used by Dada designers. 

After creating several sketches and presenting them to the class for critique, I was able to narrow down the best 3 sketches with the help of my classmates. I then created actual poster designs to scale of these three posters and presented them for another critique in order to narrow down to one poster design. 

After creating the poster itself, I utilized my past sketches that had the same style of the poster to create the buttons for the project. In class, we learned how to actually make the buttons ourselves. 

The Kitchen of Meaning

Through a random selection process, my Graphic Design II class was assigned a word that could have multiple meanings. Based on that word, we were asked to design a poster that interprets and makes a connection of meaning with the word we were given. The poster was intended to advertise for an exhibit in the fine arts center that displayed all of the words. The purpose of the assignment was to teach us how to use different methodologies to approach a problem, understand meaning within a context, and develop critical thinking skills as a means of analysis when talking about and making design. Creating the poster also helped me understand the relationship of the audience in regards to design choices made and communication performance goals.

For this project I was assigned the word Zeitgeist which literally means "spirit of the times." Zeitgeist is the intellectual fashion or dominant school of thought that influences the culture of a particular time period. I first researched this word and it's meaning, finding several different definitions and ways to approach this project. The obvious answer to go about illustrating the word zeitgeist was to choose a decade of the past, such as the 60s, to show how a culture influenced a specific period in time. However, I did not want to go this route because I felt like it was too easy. Instead, I wanted to focus on today's culture. I looked at several different movements going on in society today that influenced various aspects of culture. In the end, I settled on the environmental movement, focusing on the locally grown food aspect of that subculture because it has influenced not just agriculture but also fashion, design, health, and many other factors in society. 

Instructional Design

The goal of this project that I did for Graphic Design II was to design an instructional experience for a specific user. We had to design and produce a “how-to” piece using both images and text.  Our finished instructional piece had to not only be easy to follow but it also had to be aesthetically pleasing and graphically innovative.

For this project I decided to show someone how to make dog clothes out of a baby onesie. I wanted the overall look and feel of my piece to be crafty, yet still retain a graphically sophisticated design. I decided a small, 5X7 booklet would work best for this piece because this size is easy to store or take on the go. For these specific instructions, I decided that using simple stencil-like illustrations with spot colors would be easy to follow in contrast with some of the more complicated steps. Using diagrams on specific sewing skills was a must in order to create a more understandable instruction manual.