ONE LAST THING

It's the end of the semester. Again. It just keeps happening this way, in that funny little way that time works. And since it's the end of the semester, it can only mean one thing. FINALS!
Finals are upon us, and in some cases, behind us. The final assignment for this Digital Foundations class was to, wait for it, document things digitally!
Oodles upon oodles of fun. Of course it is.
Luckily enough for me, I actually had a little bit of prior knowledge from working with InDesign in the past. Granted, it had been in the past, and I had forgotten most things. As a big fan of trial and error myself, I set off on a grand adventure to figure out the inner workings of this program.
After about five hours and two scratched files later I finally got the hang of it all.
First step in making this book: gather all past assignments.
Now this is harder than it looks. To begin with, you have to remember what all you managed to do in the first place. And that is a chore in and of itself. After that, you actually have to find them. Thank god we had to keep a blog.
After all those steps of one, it was just a simple matter of adding in text here, deleting everything there, crying in the corner for a bit, eating an entire box of donuts, and then BAM here we are. Like magic.
Or technology as some people call it. But we all know what it really is.

Here are some of the pages from my book:

Makin' the Photoshop things

Our last project in Digital Foundations is to do whatever we want! WhooHoo! So of course I couldn't think of anything to do right? Eventually out of necessity I decided to just go ahead and recreate my 2D final in photoshop. However, considering the fact that I had enough trouble just making one version of that project, I decided to ditch that idea.
Instead, I decided to go with something not only less time consuming, but also useful! Business cards! Are you pumped cause I'm pumped. I'm designing my very own business cards.
After having worked for a while on my final digital portfolio in InDesign, and having come up with a color scheme and layout that I was rather fond of if I do say so myself, I decided that I would make my business cards reflect that as well.
This ended up being what I came up with!

What's in a week? Part two: critique

DID THE THING. In class we had a rather different version of critique than normal. Instead of having the entire class critique everyones project, we split off into groups of three (ok there was one group of four, but that's not important). My group included Mandie and Toonky. (psst, if you click their names, you'll end up on their blogs…) 

And so we set up a thingy that looked like this:

(++)

(+)

(o)

( - )

(- -)

The ++ being what we thought was the best thing going on in the project. O was our overall opinion on it. And -- was what needed the most improvement.

This is what mine ended up!

(++)    Organization of it was easy to follow

(+)      It was personal

(o)      Overall they seemed to like it, said it was "really nice" and colorful

( - )     The words need work. Suggestion of using hierarchy? Maybe stacking them

(- -)     Words need to be bigger

What's in a week? Part One:

So! Our version one's of our current project, the info graphic, was due today in class. So, here I am with my info graph, in class! Our project was to make an info graph on how we spend our time in an average week. To start out we logged in time on excel in thirty minute segments. Whatever activity we were doing in that time we put down. Since some events were not set in stone for each week, I generalized different activities as one big one. For example in mine: sleep / other/ teenage miscreant deeds is one whole section. For the visual part of it, I decided to use pages in a book to represent my time after I realized that I spend so much time reading.

I now present part one!

P.S. have another

There's this super cool info graph of the Periodic Table of Artists I found. I love it, although one small problem I found: Van Gogh should definitely have been under miserable white men. No question.

Helvetica: A film

In preparation for working with type, we're watching Helvetica in class. These are the notes taken (I feel it only acceptable to from here on switch to Helvetica):

Fun Facts:

- First known use in early Mesopotamian civilization before 3,000 B.C.

-The terms "uppercase" and "lowercase" originated when people set print by hand. The lowercase letters were stored in the bottom, or lower case, and the uppercase letters were store right above, in the uppercase. 

Give words a certain coloring

"Graphic design is the communication network in which the way the world reaches us"
Artists have a visual disease, it's what fuels us.

Type isn't black, it's white, it's the spaces between.

We believe there are not that many good type faces.

When helvetica came about we were ready for it
1950's
 In post war period there was a feeling of idealism. The design is part of that need to rebuild and reconstruct. Sense of social responsibility. Early experiments of type.
Swiss designers really drive it along. Helvetica emerged in 1957, from a need for rational type faces that could be used for anything and could be presented in a legible way.

"Creating order is typography"
Helvetica was a real step for 19th century typeface. It got rid of the manual details in it, and it made it more neutral. There should be no meaning in itself, only in the words themselves.

Serifs on the bottoms of letters, the little feet

Swiss paid more attention to the background so that the spaces between really hold the letters. 

About the font itself:

- developed for the Haas Type Foundry by Max Miedinger and Edüard Hoffmann in 1957

- they wanted an updated sans-serif

- helvetica was originally named Neue Haas Grotesk

- Later changed to Helvetia, which is the Latin name for Switzerland, by German companies Stempel and Linotype

Helvetica was overused so much
Just because something is legible doesn't mean it communicates

Hella cool info graphics

So obviously you can see by my last post (and the title of this post) that we're doing INFO GRAPHICS(!) now, and as I was perusing the internet I stumbled across some 3D sculptural info graphs! As a sculpture major, I though these were pretty cool. I can dig these. I'd like to make a 3D info graph for mine, but alas, this is a class called "digital" foundations.
They frown upon not using computers in this class.

Here's the graphs by the way:

(psst...here's a link to where I found these…)