viscomtwo. f+s. two.

This is working with representing quantities through sizes of circles. one try that I had for one of my info graphs worked with this same sort of technique.

this is just pretty. a guy mapped out his day through an info graph, The order in which he did everything color coded by task. The man likes his pool.

viscomtwo. icons. twocolor. updateone.

Here are the updated two-color studies. I have quite the selection of puddle icons just to try out different color combinations. I hadn't reached a nice combination in the first round so I tried even more this round. I still don't know if I have it yet, they're still a little iffy.

I'm not feeling the fill icons anymore once I applied it to the rest of the icons. However, I still quite enjoy the split, but they still need a bit of finessing and I'm not totally sold on the colors just yet.

viscomtwo. icons. color swatches. updatethree.

So, Jamie, you said to "use scale, space, and contrast to emphasize those lovely grids". Well I did just that. Did I take it too far? Possibly. But it never hurts to try totally redesigning something if the first round just wasn't working. I set these pages on 11x17 instead of 8.5x11. I put them into three columns, each area getting four sections. The bottom text was broken up into two sections of three. With the text I used a 14, 21, 48, 60, 72 scale to create hierarchy.

Things to think about from here out;

• Should there be text on top of the top images
• Are the images and text fighting for dominance
• Is there too much space given to the top section and not enough to the bottom section

viscomtwo. icons. digital twocolor studies.

These are my digital translations of my two-color icon studies. The top set are of the splatter concept. However in the first set of digital translations, the pooling of water looked more like blood, paint, or ink splatter and less like water on the floor. To fix this, I made this second set look more like my original drawings. So, if anything, I should really call the first set "puddle" and not "splatter" because I don't want a splattering of water, I want a pooling of water. The second set is the highlight. Highlighting certain parts of the icon to give them emphasis. The last set of icons is the transition set but the name probably should be changed from transition to something else because the two colors no transition smoothly, they just abruptly change colors. With the layout, again, I was going with whole grid system. clean. simple. helvetica.

viscomtwo. icons. color swatches. updatetwo.

Here are the final pages of my color swatches. I put them on a grid system that could be repeated three times on a page based on a grid from The Grid System. I love grid layouts alot, here is one gorgeous example of a grid system done spectacularly well. There is something about information put into a grid with a nice hierarchy of information that really makes me happy. I wish I had done Georgia for the header font, the font I use here on my blog for all of the italic text. I'm still no master at this but the more I do it the better I'll be, right? Practice, practice, practice? Practice makes perfect? Let's hope so!

viscomtwo. icons. color swatches. updateone.

Color swatch layout?

Possibly.

Helvetica Bold & The Golden Rule Grid.

i will not give up my helvetica.

sources: the grid system.

image. sds. train of thought. sequence.

This is a train of thought blog. train of thought writing is less structured and a more fluid way of writing. Writing down everything that comes to mind and then going back through it all to sift out the best of what was written.

To make my piece as cohesive and interesting as possible I want to figure out the order of how my seven deadly sins will be placed in the final artifact. From the way i started this project out I studied myself throughout almost a week to figure out what parts of my life best accentuate the seven deadly sins. While taking the first round of photos I tried to figure out a way to make them all cohesive. Through that first set I figured out the best, and easiest ways to make them cohesive as a whole through lighting, outfit, and setting. But figuring out how conceptually I want to show these I want there to be a purposeful order them all. Starting out with sloth would make the most sense. Starting out with sloth and me sleeping in a messy room with clothing everywhere and food strewn throughout. from there I could move into greed and me standing in my closet with all my clothes hanging up showing off my absurd amount of clothing wanting only the best of the best. from there it could go to pride with me standing my clean, pristine room wearing my finest. from there it could move into wrath with me yelling at my friend. then go into gluttony with me sitting at the table with a feast of food but not necessarily the best food in the world. Then from there it would go into envy with my room mate and her boyfriend being all cuddly together while I'm segregated from them. then the last frame will be of lust with me back in my bed. each of these frames will go throughout the day. The first frame will be at noon with light streaming in through my windows in my room. then with each frame the outside light will fade and the inside lights will come on so by the time we get to envy it will be fully dark outside with all the lights on inside. Once we get to lust, the last frame, it'll be night time with just the light by my bed on with my lower half under the covers hand reaching down.

Below I have taken what I wrote above and typed out into a structured, more formal form.

The Order.

1. Sloth. High noon with light streaming in on messy room and me asleep on my bed.
2. Greed. Me standing in my closet with all my clothes hanging up wearing my favorite outfit. Sunlight a little lower in the sky.
3. Pride. Me standing in my clean, pristine room, wearing my finest outfit. Jacket, tie, and all.
4. Wrath. Yelling at my friend in my living room with the door to my bedroom open in the background. By this time the lights inside have come on and the light outside is at twilight.
5. Greed. I will be sitting at the table eating a smörgåsbord. This will be almost fully night time. The window behind me will be open and it will be the very end of twilight.
6. Envy. It will be fully lit from the inside and my room mate and her boyfriend will be sitting on the couch kissing/close and I'll be in the background with my bedroom door open again.
7. Lust. Me back in my room with only my bed light on with me back in bed. Very dark light.

image. seven deadly sins. test shots.

So I have my first round of images. I have selected what I feel to be the most successful of each of the sets. The order of the photos are from top to bottom: sloth, wrath, pride, envy, & lust.

Consistency. Focusing on the different criteria I blogged about in the previous post to achieve consistency I'd say it was achieved rather successfully. Envy was taken more for test shots for composition and how I can most successfully convey envy. The final shot will be taken during the day to get the same amount of lighting and feel to it as the other photos.

Composition. For composition, some photos are vertical and some are horizontal so I'll need to figure out which orientation works better overall. I feel that sloth reads pretty successfully, however I don't want me sleeping to be mistaken for dead, some of my poses of me sleeping looked a little dead body esque. Wrath is getting there, I tried a few different compositions and placements of the camera in relation to the apartment and wanting to get my bedroom in the background. I feel that the action shot of me lunging at him is more successful than the more posed feeling photos. I don't fully know how much pride actually feels like pride, however. I think the concept is getting there but maybe the camera angle should be lower or I should look more arrogant. Envy feels not too bad actually. I like the crossed arms and the sort of closed off feeling I'm trying to convey. The couple I used just happened to be wearing almost the exact same outfits though I want to try a couple shots of where they're also kissing so see if that would help at all or if it would just end up looking to overdone. Ohhh lust. It's getting there I suppose. I tried some shots of me fully nude with nothing actually showing, just alluding the action with hand placement and body gestures but it felt too exposed and no consistent enough with the other four. Even with sloth I'm look naked from the way I was placed but I'm still covered up, so I felt the need to cover myself up.

Questions. Things to think about going out from here. Do I need to have my bedroom in every shot whether the photo take place in the bedroom or able to see it in the background? If not, should there be some sort of flow to the images that shows spatial relation from one photo to the next? Should the photos be taken during the same part of the day to achieve consistency with lighting or could a wider range of lighting make it more interesting? Do the pictures during the day work better or the photo at night?Oh, and use the same camera for every photo!

image. seven deadly sins. consistency.

This is first and foremost a post for me to figure out the technical aspects of the seven deadly sins project. It may be a little rambly and not the most well put together post of my life.

My direction for this project is personal, I'm studying myself. Yeah I can see how doing this project like I am could be seen as very egotistical but in all honesty it's not. I am putting myself out there and searching deep within my psyche to figure out what I do personally that best exemplifies the seven deadly sins. I really like the idea, it's definitely different from what everyone else is doing, but at the same time it's going to be rather hard conveying some of these. The thing that I have currently run into is how am I going to photograph each of these seven ideas and have them be consistent throughout the entire piece.

To answer this dilemma I think the best way to make them coherent is to shoot all of the photos in my apartment during the brightest part of the day. My apartment is very open, we have a lot of windows to the outside to give me the most light to work with. The walls are all a nice white and it is small enough that if I photograph them just right I will be able to get the same background elements throughout every photograph. Some of the sins involve solely myself, where as some of the sins involve at least one other person, but as long as the background elements and I stay the same, that should be fine, if anything it will just give the piece a wider variety of scenes.

So the elements that I need to focus on to keep consistency:

• Background: keep elements the same and stay within the same area of my apartment
• Lighting: keep, for the most part, the lighting, and from there the color, consistent, or consistently varying
• Wardrobe: keep mine stylistically the same. suspenders & jeans mainly.

viscomtwo. icons. color swatches.

here's a little quicksie looksie at my color swatches in progress. lotsa more color swatches to do by friday, and not to mention to design this prettily, can't ever forget thattttt.

dezyne. thirtyfour. chiquita.

So Chiquita has come out with a new campaign and it fits perfectly with whats going on in viscom and the reading we just did about generating and culling your ideas.

This brand refresh was done by DJ Neff(creative director) and his staff at Neff Ink. Their main focus were the iconic blue and yellow stickers found on every Chiquita banana and how they could update them. They created a new set of icons from the basis of the original set. They immersed themselves in the culture and brand and took in as much knowledge that they could and then they "let it all spill out in different ideas, drawings, sayings, photographs, then start to figure out truths." He went on to say,"These truths all stem from the product and work outward, pulling from research and ideas to build upon the foundation, laddering up to a big idea."  What he was saying directly correlates to the icon assignment we, as sophomores, are currently tackling. We have been pushed to produce(or at least we should have been) as many different ideas, drawings, styles, colors as we can to help ourselves in this process of creating our icons. We can only produce the best icons possible if we produce the maximum amount of them to make sure we exhaust all of our possibilities.

So they took the iconic blue and yellow sticker with the woman wearing the fruit hat and turned it into a line of characters and above is the set of all of them. I love love love this concept so much. And they did it so very smoothly as well. All of the icons fit so well together yet they span such a wide array of faces. The same thing that some of us are struggling with when it comes to our icons, cohesion. It takes a  certain level of skill to fully pull off cohesion successfully.

sources: design:related, neff ink.


ABOUT THIS POST. This post has been a work-in-progress for the past week... and tonight i finally got the chance to finish it... so that being said, this had the potential to be a much stronger post but that week break from it kind of killed it...

blog colours.

updated helvetica seafoam & offwhite
i'm planning on keeping a running log of how my blog changes over the rest of my time here

viscomtwo. icons. two-color studies.

update. I've been talking to a lot of different people from the other section about this stage of the process, adding the second color. If you're lookin' at this blog post to see what I did, lemme give you this advice: do not let the color change the icon. Instead, let the second color add to the original icon.

So we have now entered into the beginning stages of adding color and a second layer of information to our icon sets. Above are the ten different styles of color I tried out. Clicking on the images give you bigger versions. With my icons, I had issues with coming up with ways to add a second color to my one-color icons. My entire object is one continuous contour line that makes up the entire object and because of that I had to be creative with ways of adding that second color. Some ways worked better than others. Each set of styles are labeled a-j and each set is the horizontal row of whistle, suit, and medal.

Sets a, c, f, and i are the four sets that Jamie picked out as being the strongest of the ten. With those four in hand I will continue my two-color process forward. Though with sets a & f she wants to see two different versions.

Sets b, d, e, and i all had issues because of the way I added that second color, it ended up closing up the continuous line and really took away from the overall feel to my icons that really made them strong so immediately we crossed them off the list except for i. I will redo set i but just pull the line away from the icon so it's still close to it but actually touching the icon itself.

I like the style of set j with the offset icons but it really is just too distracting from the icon itself and Joseph put it best: drunk swimming.

I really liked set c a lot, so I actually ended up taking it further. My original concept behind it from the very beginning was to make those splatters with watercolor and then scan them in and take the outline of the shape and apply it to the icon. Here is one of those watercolor tests:

So I scanned in three sheets of these and then picked out the most successful splatters, those being the most compact and iconic splatter shape. With the three best picked out I applied them to the vector icons:

So I applied them to the icons but through feedback, and my own observations, with the way I went about making the splatters they went too far into paint and ink splatter and less into water splatter, or puddle of water. I really like this direction and all of my icons have open white spaces for me to be able to apply this affect to. Plus, I love the aesthetics of the water color and it is a nice effect that I would be able to implement later on in the series. And that isn't to say that I can't apply the watercolor to my icons if I don't end up going down this route inevitably, it's a nice concept that fits well with my icons overall. This is what I was getting at in my latest type post about texture reenforcing meaning and giving additional meaning to what is already there.

All-in-all I have some very solid roads to go down and choose from for this part of the project and that excites me a lot. From here on out I love these two-color studies digitally.

typetwo. change one thing. final.

Here is the screen shot of how my poster looked on the front page! It was exciting to see it up and everyone who accessed the website at that time saw it as well. Will I win? Absolutely no clue, but this was definitely an enjoyable project to do nonetheless. Below is bigger version of my final poster.

So this is the final product. I'm rather pleased with this poster seeing as I started this entire process with this:

The initial idea was definitely there, but everything about it just wasn't anything absolutely stunning. With revisions, revisions, and more revisions I finally came up with the final design. Yes the aesthetics of the poster are just that, aesthetics, and doesn't help push content or meaning further, the poster just didn't feel right, or complete with a solid color or even a gradient background that echoed the colors of the paper. I realized once i finished this poster how much I despise 100% digital work without any sort of hand-made quality to it. This was a nice process to be able to spend such a long time on one poster. There is so much that goes into posters that I never fully realized. It's pretty dang difficult to make a shnazy poster and I have so much more respect for the greats who have come before me who have made such amazing posters.

sources: aiga blueridge poster clash website.