DT: Secondary Research

Refined Rationales Blog Post #5B

Project Title: The Nav

The Nav is a unique project because it undergoes a visual identity change yearly. The challenge lies in creating new energy for the student-led press while keeping it recognizable as The Nav but it is also an opportunity to push myself as a design student and push the boundaries. This year I had the task of redesigning my own design from the previous year. The goal was to reign it in and give it a cleaner look from last year while maintaining the distinct personality within. I also needed to make sure that the layout was simple enough that a team of three could ay the 40 page magazine out in one day. 

Project Title: Balanced

Overwork is a worldwide social stigma that promotes an unhealthy lifestyle. Through this project, I wanted to work on a solution for people who lead an unbalanced life by giving them tools to change their relationship with work. The challenge lay in creating something usable that could be integrated easily into a busy lifestyle. I decided to create a scheduling app that would guide users to make healthier choices through education on mental health and forced rests. To this end, I designed a smart ecosystem that learns and adapts to the user through use. 

Project Title: Fox & Koi

Last year, I realized that I needed a way to reconnect with my passion for graphic design and push myself to create outside of classwork. I’ve always loved enamel pins and so along with a business partner, I began an enamel pin shop. There’s a lot that goes into a pin from conception to iteration and the final physical object. Through Fox & Koi I’ve not only worked on my illustration skills but my business skills as well. I run the business side of fox & koi. I speak to the manufacturers, find new manufacturers, coordinate locations and markets for selling the pins, create the websites, package the pins, do the marketing and I also design pins, stickers and prints.

The Core Values of Place

If you build it, they will come.

Together we can do so much.

Do something today that benefits tomorrow.

You have power, do good.

A hearth should always be warm.

We share this Place with everyone.

Day Three - Blog Post #4

Today was fun! We took our digital work and printed them out to see how the type and colour looked and to make sure that we had our sizing right.

I had a heck of a time with it and needed to print my package out three times! The first time I did it, I accidentally cut a flap that was meant to be a fold. The second time I printed, I ripped my paper when trying to use the bone tool on it. For my third attempt, I realized that patience was key so when I glued the design onto the bristol, I pressed firmly and then waited for a few minutes before trying to use the bone tool on it. I also made sure that I had a fresh blade in before I tried to cut out my package.

I was happy to see that my colours worked perfectly! I used the pantone book last week to choose them but I was worried that they wouldn’t be quite right. Working with the gradient has been a bit of a chore but also fun! Getting it just right will be tricky so I really need to spend some time on that.

Now I just need to make sure that I have my type set perfectly before I send my package off to print!

We’ve Got Colour

So with a chosen logo to work with, I now have to figure out colour. I know these posts have been a little bit long-winded but bear with me here, typing all this out is helping me think as well. 

When working with colour, it’s important to think about emotions you’re trying to get across as well as what your audience is. Since my audience is the community, I want to use colours that are welcoming and friendly.

I started by collecting some colours that I like. I usually do this by looking at other work I’ve done and picking from photos that fit the mood of the project.

Lately, I’ve been really into softer, bright colours. 

These are some of the colour combos that I played with for this project but ultimately, I’ve ended up on the pale yellow, red and blue. They’re a softer take on a fully saturated primary palette. I may use the light pink as well later in some pattern work. 

Yellow = optimism, happiness, enthusiasm, hope red = passion, love, fire, determination blue = sea, sky, confidence, calm

Portfolio Website

The Links I’ll Use

about me, small joys, resumé

Which 3 (or more) projects will you showcase on your site?

Balanced Balanced is a project that I did last semester where we had to choose an issue and then try and solve it as best we could through graphic design. Balanced ended up being an integrative system to promote a healthy work/life balance for the issue. It showcases an app design, web page, smart watch, smart speaker and welcome pamphlet as well as a colour brand.

The Nav The Nav Student Press is a magazine that I have been art directing the past two years and worked on for the last three. It showcases my editorial skills and features two different base designs for me to show on my website.

Place Place is a branding project that I am currently working on for design for business. At the end of this project I will have a fully branded guide for a new business. This will include a logo, a pattern, style guide and branding elements. I will add it at the end of the term.

Fox & Koi Fox & Koi is the enamel pin business that I run with Teigan Mudle. Through fox & koi, we have designed over 30 pins and I have personally been responsible for 15 of them and collaborated on 5. I have also done some illustrative print work, designed backing cards and created stickers.

Where do you need to fill holes in your showcase?

photography

mockups

sketches/roughs for all projects

more active dribble, design instagram

What will you do specifically to fill holes?

write rationals

do photography of products and/or mockups

post more on my design instagram

post more on dribbble

organize past sketches and roughs into something legible.

What platform will you use?

Wordpress, powered by semplice

What is your domain name?

saraholmes.design

Design & Thinking Documentary

Design & Thinking is an interesting documentary to watch as a designer because it has designers in the working field that agree and disagree with it, and designers who don’t know exactly what it is. I’m always fascinated when we get to hear from other designers in a visual sense, much more so than the written word. I thought some interesting things were said, here are some ideas that I really quite liked.

“Design Thinking is applying design methods to the working class and world.”

I thought that this was a neat little concept because it really helps me as a designer understand more what Design Thinking is and what we’re trying to do with it. This makes it feel like Design Thinking is less a scientific method and more of a way to bridge a gap.

“Design is a sport where you have to participate.”

I think a lot of designers, myself included, feel like we have to figure everything out on our own but Design Thinking really cements the idea that design thinking is a team effort. I really like how this phrase puts it into such easy terms. 

“Rapid Prototyping: It’s ok to have a bad idea.”

Luckily, this is something we’re taught well in our program but it’s nice to see this concept out in the real world. I’m so nervous about having to be perfect when I leave school but making wrong decisions seem inevitable. 

“Ask Why”

This I think, is my favourite idea from the documentary. I feel like it’s so easy to just take a client’s request and push it out without thought to exactly what they asked for. It’s easy to fall into a rhythm and just forget how to use our design minds, but I never want to forget how to be creative.

Day One - Blog Post #1

I knew that class would be good today when we walked in and there was a picture of an egg on the powerpoint. I thought we were probably going to talk abt how an egg is a naturally good package, I didn’t think that we were going to have the opportunity to try and design a safe package for an egg in 20 minutes!

We weren’t given a lot of direction other than to make the package, so my group wondered if we were supposed to focus on appearance, function or perhaps both. We decided to go for both and used two rolls of duck tape to encase the egg, paper to cushion it and then we wrapped it in foam. We also gave our package a little bit of decoration in the form of a pipecleaner bow and an origami butterfly. 

I think we focused too much on the appearance of the package instead of putting as much focus on the function. Our package was poorly taped and when Nancy shoved it off the table, unfortunately, the package burst a bit and the eggshell got a crack in it.

It was really fun to do something so fast and right away and got our brains thinking for the rest of the day!

We learned how to score paper using a bone tool and tried it out ourselves on a box shape. So far, I’m really enjoying how hands on this class is.

Our assignment for this next week is to take a package that we were given in class and reproduce it three times, let’s see how it turns out!

Something to reflect on: We’re always wanting to think of the environment as graphic designers but when it comes to packaging and brand, brand needs to come first for a corporation. I think that makes it the graphic designer’s job, to provide a sustainable design for the company in question from the get-go. When redesigning for a brand, however, and working for someone like coca-cola who uses tons and tons of plastic each year but is so iconic, how much room does a designer have to play and is it that designer’s duty to do what they can to help the environment even if it means deviating from brand standards? Is it possible to stick to brand standards with the environment in mind?

Place Brand Brief Schematic

In a world where most people have access to the internet, having an opinion is a dangerous thing. Bringing facts to the table along with your viewpoint is essential for anyone who wants to start a conversation on a topic and while there were some points that I thought made sense in Natasha Jen’s talk, I can’t help agreeing with Richard Banfield’s critique of her critique. 

While I’m not a person who really believes in the use of ‘buzz words’ to prove my point, I think that in some cases buzz words just appear naturally in conversation between two graphic designers. Buzz words are also often important to the client, depending on who you’re working with, they want to know the mystical process behind the design work. 

Now, I don’t personally believe that just because you’re using a design term it’s a buzz word. I was looking at Natasha’s list of words and while some of her concerns seem to be valid, a lot of the words she listed are common, easily understood terms. (scale, empathy, user outcomes, etc.) I’d have to agree with Richard that her talk leaned more towards making jokes it seemed than actually proving anything.

I’m open to see both sides of the story, and I do think that there are probably some cases where a process is mislabeled as design thinking because it’s trendy, but I think it’s incorrect to write off a whole process just because of some outliers. 

Also, though it’s popular to say so, a messy or cluttered space does not necessarily mean that the designer is a genius, nor does it mean that the designer did not use design thinking. (That felt like a desperate point in Natasha’s talk.)

The issue of ‘where crit fits’ in the process too is an odd one to me. Obviously, as a trained graphic designer, I know that crit comes at any and all stages of the process whether you’re asking for it or not. As someone who regularly critique’s my colleague’s work, I know that as soon as I show anything to them I will receive crit. Crit is in every single step of the process, for Natasha to focus so directly on where it fits almost makes me feel like she does not actually have a full understanding of her own design process, despite her lofty position. 

Perhaps that is incorrect of me to say, but hey, it’s just a little bit of crit for her.

I think that everyone is entitled to their own opinions and can certainly choose to follow their design process how they see fit. Critique on a process is always welcome at any time and will be thoroughly dissected, ingested and critiqued in return by the graphic design community. The coolest part about graphic design is that we are a collection of creatives, all with different opinions and ways of doing things. If you’re going to give a talk where you critique an entire school of thought though, it’s probably best to come prepared with more than just some jokes about post it notes, buzz words and demands to see evidence when you could just google search some case studies.

Having completed my Logo and drafted my brand standards, I began trying to figure out ways to apply my brand. Here’s what I came up with for my presentation.