Helpful Design Hints

Making a Powerpoint or similar presentation?  These will help ensure success!

Edward Tufte shows us how to present data & info, a set by Lauri Johnston on Flickr.

Letterhead Inspiration

Business Card Love

If  you’re going to use a tiny piece of paper (less than 17 square inches back and front) to represent your company to potential clients, then you’d want that tiny piece of paper to be clear, innovative and beautiful.  Here are some examples of business cards that clearly relayed all of the pertinent information, but did so in a creative and striking way.

Digital Photography 12/22

Today, you will be doing what photographers do when they are planning a gallery show.  You’ll be responsible for producing two things today: an artist’s statement and a gallery floor plan.  The artist’s statement you’ll post on flickr.  The gallery floor plan you’ll draw out.  There is an excellent example of both on the black board in the room labeled “Sample Gallery Proposal.”

Artist’s Statement. 
The first thing you need to do is write a five sentence explanation of what you are trying to say through your series.  Is it telling a story?  Is there some common visual thread you are trying get people to see?  Is there a mood or feeling you’d like to inspire in your audience.  Feel free to look up some artist’s statements online to get a feel for what they’re like.  Then, post ONE of your series photo to your flickr Photo Stream (NOT the Friday Photo pool).  In the comments of your photo, paste or type your artist statement.  Grammar, spelling and content count, so craft your paragraph carefully.

Floor Plan
You’ll be designing a floor plan for how you would set up a gallery show of your six photo series.  You must plan how your work will be displayed: will some of them hang next to one another?  What color walls would you have?  Will there be furniture or benches?  How do you want a viewer to ‘travel’ through your show?  What photo do they see first?  Last?   Use the paper and colored pencils in the back and assume that the gallery space is a big rectangle (like the sheet of paper.)  You can ‘build’ walls, by drawing them, in to alter the space if you like.

Get done as much as  you can.  Do the Artist’s statement FIRST because that will allow  you to crystallize what kind of mood you’d like to set and the statement you’d like to make.  Then, the gallery space should tie in to that. 

Both of these will be graded.  Impress me!

Re-branding an Existing Company

When a company chooses to completely abandon their logo and create a new one, they are taking a big risk.  Will existing customers still recognize and trust this company after completely changing its appearance?  Often, a company chooses to re-brand (change their logo) if they have gotten a bad reputation and want to present a ‘fresh’ face to the world; to turn over a new leaf.  Sometimes, companies re-brand to show that they are keeping up with the times and not stuck in the past. 

WHAT TO DO:
1. Start with choosing a company, school or organization (different from the one you just completed). 
2. Find out what that company does and who their target customers are.
3. Then to 10 TOTALLY DIFFERENT sketches for ideas for a new logo.  This does NOT need to have any relation to the existing logo; it should be completely new. 

Here are some examples of a complete re-branding from Brand New.  Whether or not they’re an improvement is for you to judge!