Jenessa

Our recent trip to Chicago had three main objectives:

1.     Experience some of Chicago’s history and what it is like to be in a big city.

2.     Visit specialty shops and see examples acquired branding knowledge to get a better understanding of what all needs to be involved in branding a shop.

3.     Visit a design firm to understand what it is like to work in a design firm in a big city.

We had our work cut out for us to achieve all our objectives in a three day trip.

Experience Chicago

I have visited major cities like New York, DC, and Orlando, but Chicago is really one of my favorite cities to visit. Unlike many other large cities Chicago is a very clean city which makes it inviting to visitors and, I’m sure, more pleasant to it’s inhabitants. It contains just about anything you could want from the magnificent mile, to tiny art galleries, to museums, to millennium park and navy pier, or just wandering around people watching and looking at the amazing architecture. There is truly something for everyone to enjoy. On our visit, we took a tour of Millennium Park and took the river cruise, neither of which I had done before. It was fascinating to learn about all the history behind the magnificent city. Growing up hearing about buildings like the Chrysler building by William Van Alen, the Sears Tower by Bruce Graham, or the Marina City towers by Bertrand Goldberg you can begin to take them for granted. Seeing them and hearing about the history behind them and the significance they play not only in Chicago, but in the entire architect community is very impressive. As tragic as the fire of 1817 was, it created the opportunity for Chicago to become the beautiful city it is today.

Specialty Shops

In class we have been discussing the importance of good branding and what that looks like. To demonstrate our understanding, we have to design an entire brand identity for a specialty shop for a particular item. Visiting Chicago presented the perfect opportunity to do research for this project.

Old Town Aquarium

Maybe it’s because I’m a swimmer at heart, and some days I think I should have been born a fish, but I really enjoyed this shop. Because the shop was located in Old Town, that was incorporated into the name, but it didn’t stop there. The sign hanging out in front of this quaint little shop looked as if it had been hanging there since people first started settling the area, setting the tone of an old world feel.

As you walk into the shop you walk past a bow of a ship that doubles as a front desk for the store showcasing certain fish inside the portholes. It’s like you are walking into a shipyard about to cast off to go catch rare species of oceanic fish.

Flight 001

The next shop I enjoyed was Flight 001. It was a store that specialized in things travel related, primarily to do with flying. The inside of the store was bright and clean like one would expect to see on the inside of an airport terminal. The blue and white theme and the typeface is carried over throughout all the packaging and the signage in the store. A lot of their items were in their signature packaging style. Their Logo is made up of little icons like that that would be on the emergency information card on the plane. This style of few words and lots of icons in this simplistic style is carried over into their packaging. I think that they present a very cohesive brand identity. You look at their products, or names, or store and instantly recognize the clean crisp style.

Lego Land

The Lego store I felt was the most cohesive branding out of all the small specialty shops we looked at. When you approach the storefront you instantly get a sense of the fun vibrant atmosphere that is created to attract kids. The front arch that forms the entrance to the store has massive Lego blocks created to draw you into the Lego world. Once inside you see the fantastical Lego land with 6 foot sky scrapers and a four foot Godzilla built out of regular size Legos and brightly colored bins of Lego pieces. It is enough to inspire any child’s imagination. While we were there we even saw a birthday party all head into the Lego store and they were able to pick out their own Lego sets as part of their festivities. Seeing the party was a testament to what the store is all about. A world geared for kids where anything is possible. Everything in the store was geared to display or reinforce the Lego idea from bins made with the circle inside the square (like the shapes on the bottom of a Lego) to the lights all being in sets of twos and threes mounted in circles recessed into a rectangular mount. Because the Lego store was in a mall, they decided to have benches located around the mall advertising the Lego store by simply having a person sitting on a bench entirely made up of Legos. I thought it was a very nice touch of reinforcing the brand without having to plaster the name everywhere.

Marbles

I felt was another great shop that had a good solid brand that was a little more subtle than that of Lego. It is a store with mind games and other brain building games so you don’t lose your marbles. I thought that their subtle reputation of the circles, representing  marbles was a very nice  touch.

Liska Associates

As we are preparing ourselves to head out into as a design professional, are beginning to ask ourselves what will be required of us as professionals. To help shed some light on this mystery, we broke up into groups to visit different design firms to get a better understanding of what lies ahead. My group went and visited Liska. When we got there, we were met by none Steve Liska himself. He talked with us about the importance of creating a strong brand and sticking with it. Much of what we have been learning while learning about creating a brand identity. He also talked about the importance of being smart. A well-educated person with clearly developed ideas with a reason for the work that they do is going to far out weigh a person who just has pretty portfolio pieces. A lot of it ties back into the T shaped person. Have a broad general knowledge but be great in a specific area.

The trip to Chicago was very enlightening on many levels. It broadened our cultural understanding of our Midwest region plays in the architecture world and exposed us to one of the nations largest collections of great architecture and architects. It also was a very educational experience exposing us to practical applications of our theoretical knowledge as far as creating cohesive branding. And finally, it gave us insight into what is to come after we graduate in the field of graphic design, what we can expect, what we can do to prepare, and what we can to become better designers.

Camera Raw After some investigating into camera raw, here’s what I found out. Camera Raw is a form of capturing information on your camera that will capture far more information than if you were just shooting a regular picture. Because of the massive amounts of information that is captured, it gives you much more flexibility in the adjustments you can do to the image. How it works When taking a normal picture, your camera will absorb light onto photons. The photons absorb red, green, and blue wavelengths. There are more photons that absorb green light than red and blue to mimic the way the eye sees light.

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Photons can kind of be thought of a pixles. Depending on the intensity of the light color that hits the photons, your camera will use preset calculations to determine what color that photon represents. Once the camera has calculated the color that should be represented, the camera will discard the intensity information. The biggest difference between regular pictures and camera RAW is that in camera Raw the photons will absorb light and the camera will calculate information using the surrounding photons and then retain all the information. Confusing?? I’ll try and simplify it. A general photon array looks kind of like this:

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If this photon array only absorbed 100% green on all the green photons around the one set that is being calculated, then the photon will be represented as 100% green. If you had one photon registering green and the surrounding green photons registering zero, then the resulting color will be light green. Then, after all the information is captured and calculated it stores the calculated values and the original values. The difference is similar to what you would have if you save an image in Photoshop with layers, verses without layers. It is far easier, and gives you much better results to manipulate an image that is still in layers rather than one that has been completely flattened. An image saved on a camera in RAW has much more editing capabilities than an image that has been flattened by the camera’s calculations. Standard images are usually saved as JPEG’s, but RAW images can be saved as a multitude of extentions (.CR, .CR2, .RAW, etc.) Pros and cons Camera RAW allows you to capture a vast amount of data to aid you in camera editing. Unfortunately, with all the data the file has to retain, your file sizes become that much larger. RAW is great for uses that require high quality, but for your everyday snap shots, this is probably not what you want to be using. If you are unsure it’s better to capture too much information than not enough. In a nut shell, shooting in camera RAW captures the components of the calculations rather than just the results. This allows images to be edited while maintaining much more detail than an ordinary image giving you a higher quality photo.

A company I feel has done a good job with their Brand identity is Fischer Skis.

Fischer has had the same triangle pyramid logo they’ve had since the late 1956, and they have stuck with it through today. Their colors changed from red and white to the 80’s to the unique Fischer yellow color they have now. However they kept the same strong, simple logo shape, which would have helped people identify the same product and expectations they were used to. I believe that the harsh yellow color is distinguishing and gives their company a leading edge feel because it is just riding on the border of being an uncomfortable color, whereas élan is a more pleasing yellow green color.

I like the fact that the Fischer logo is an abstract mountain shape, yet it also symbolizes the three blades of a helicopter. Fischer factories are best known for their production of skis, but they also are a leading producer of helicopter blades. Their advanced knowledge and research of light-weight and strong technology gives them the ability to be leaders in both fields.

I think their branding is successful because anyone in the ski industry, and may outside of it, can instantly recognize the logo on it’s own, and know that it represents a good racing product. They carry leisure skis, but racing is their primary focus, and it is marketed to the public that way.

Chartpart

Chartpart is a Google chart generation tool. Chartpart works great if you need a simple chart to put into a website, or to use as a placeholder while you are in the development phases of building a website.

In it’s most basic phase, you can enter just a few variations of the figures you need and it will generate clean code ready to insert into your website. This is a nice feature, but even better, you can click on the link labeled Google’s Chart API and it will bring you up to the developer’s guide for the chart.

In the developer’s guide, it gives you a very detailed explanation of what each piece of code does and all the options that go into being able to edit and customize your chart to suit your needs. Realistically, creating a chart only applies to a very small audience. However, being able to read code, and at least having a vague idea of what it is actually saying, is extremely important in our field. With everything turning to digital, it is important to be able to understand the limitations presented by digital interfaces and be able to design for digital interactions. Being able to understand code is an important step in understanding that knowledge.

By entering the following code into my html, I can create the pie chart.

<img src=”http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=480x256&amp;cht=p3&amp;chtt=Live Preview&amp;chd=s:CDDEFH,Wps679&amp;chco=ff0000,0000ff&amp;chdl=sales|visits&amp;chxl=0:|jan|feb|mar|apr|may|jun|&amp;chxt=x”/>

Toggle

Toggle is a very useful widget that was presented in class. It is a site that allows you to keep track of the time you spend working on a project, and also allows you to collaborate with others so you can keep track of multiple peoples hours at once. It also will show you a graph at the end of every week so that you can see how much work you have put in. Unfortunately, you need to be connected to the internet to either start or stop your timer. Since I often have limited internet access at my house, I would like to have the option to download the application and have it sync to the internet when I return to internet access. Toggle works as a very efficient time tracker, as long as you are near a computer.

Typetester

Typetester was another useful website I was informed of. It allows you to compare multiple styles of type side by side so you can see which ones you like best. Because of the wide range of typefaces that are on there, it gives you plenty of options. The safe list is a nice feature too because it allows you to choose typefaces that are going to work well on all computers for webdesign.

Kuler

Kuler is another site I use occasionally. When I am stuck for colors to use, I will sometimes go there for ideas. It allows you to see what other color combinations people have come up with, you can choose your own colors, or you can have it select colors from a photograph. The last feature works well if you do some photo sketching and you want to quickly find what colors come closest to the image. Then you can take those colors and import them into your swatches pallets in your Adobe programs.

Kristy from Xpedx visited our class to share with us some of what is going on in the paper industry, what we can expect when we are specifying papers as designers, and some of the qualities that make good paper.

Paper has a wide variety of characteristics that constitute to the quality that the paper is, but primarily it is just choosing the correct paper for the job. Some of the paper qualities include brightness vs whiteness, the grain direction, opacity, basis weight, and the thickness of the sheets. You can have coated papers, uncoated papers, bond or writing papers, etc. It all boils down to determining which qualities in the paper are important for your design and then making the best judgment weighing out the pros and cons.

When specifying a paper, there are three things you need to specify. First the paper. Choose which stock you would like to use, what weight, etc. Second, specify which paper merchant you would like the printer to use. By recommending them, you keep them in business so in turn they can be secure in their job of helping you. Third, you should specify which type of paper you would like to use, but you could also ask the printer for their suggestion. They might be able to suggest a similar stock that might be cheaper, or better quality, etc. There are so many finite differences in paper, use their expertise to help guide you, but not make all the decisions for you.

The big push right now in the paper industry is to try and make things more environmentally friendly. FSC Chain-of-Custody is a certification that basically says, these people are doing a good job about trying to take care of the environment. The companies have to demonstrate that they are committed to be socially and environmentally friendly. For example, Mowhawk is 100% wind power, and French paper is hydro electric and even sends energy back into the power grid. Once the companies demonstrate that they meet all the standards, they are able to put a label on their products proving so in hopes that this will make them a more appealing choice for customers.

Xpedex.com

Just when you start to think you know it all, you find out you really know nothing. So, here are some options that you probably didn’t know you had when using pdf’s and Adobe Acrobat.

PDF, as you probably know, stands for portable document format. This is really nice to use because it isn’t reliant on having software, hardware, or a specific operating system. This isn’t the best to use all the time however, because it is not as good as having the original document in it’s natural software.

Acrobat allows you to make comments on another person’s work. It allows you to either write notes, or do voice recordings that can be saved into the document. This way, if you send your work to someone else, they can make comments on it and send it back to you and you will know exactly what they were talking about where.

Acrobat allows for a preflight option similar to that in InDesign. It checks the PDF to be sure that the document looks like it is formatted correctly. As always, this is no substitute for scrutinizing the document.

When you are printing, you can affect how the color is interpreted from Acrobat to your printer. You can go into the advanced color options and change the color profile to what it is that you want. The default setting is a working CMYK Web Coated.

Adobe Bridge

Sometimes when working on a very large project you will have hundreds of pictures that you are needing to sort through and pull from on a regular basis. Adobe Bridge can be a lifesaver.

Bridge allows you to assign tags to not just pictures but any files that you want to be able to quickly and easily sort through. These could be video, audio, print, web files, etc. Bridge shows you where each of the files are located if you need to access the location of the original file. You can also create a favorites folder in which you can easily access any of your pictures or files you pull aside as ones you use on a regular basis.

To use for a small project where you only have five images or so, it is probably going to be more hassle than it is worth. However, if you are sorting through hundreds of images and multiple people are working on the project, spending a few extra seconds attaching tags to the files can save you hours of hunting and frustration in the long run.

Neither rain, nor snow, nor hail, nor sleet, the mail must get through…. Well that’s all well and good, but first it has to be able to be processed at your local post office.

Sooner or later you are going to design a piece that will have to be sent through the mail. Since the closest most people come to seeing the postal process in action is watching your letter disappear into the mail slot, the restrictions can seem overwhelming. So here are a few friendly tips for designers.

1. You can mail just about any size, but to keep from having to make custom envelopes you can use one of the standard envelope sizes. The minimum dimensions for an envelope are 5x3.5x.007 inches. The maximum dimensions are 11.5x6x.125 inches. This is so it can run through their automated processing machine.
2. Postcards can have a minimum dimension of 5x3.5x.007. The maximum dimensions are 6x4.25x.016
3. So that the pieces of mail can go through the optical mail carrier, they need to not have things that may get stuck like stapes or strings hanging off of it. They also need to pass the flex test. By bending the mail at the halfway point, if you can depress it an inch or more, you are good to go. If the item you are mailing can’t go through the optical mail carrier, then there will be extra costs for individual handling
4. If there are any concerns, contact your local post office. They are more than willing to help you make their lives easier.

Reply Mail

There are two types of reply mailings, Courtesy Reply Mail (CRM) and Business Reply Mail (BRM). A courtesy reply mail is postage paid by the customer. This is used in instances where the company knows the customer will reply back (ex. Bills). A business reply mail is pre-paid so the customer doesn’t have to pay the postage. (ex, magazine subscriptions). Here are a few important considerations for a business reply mail:

1.     The no postage necessary box in the corner

2.     The horzontal bars below the no postage box

3.     The facing identification marks (the verical bars) which you can get by contacting your local post office.

4.     The delivery address

5.     Bar code which is needed to help determine where the mail is going. To get this also contact your local post office.

Where should you go if you need a photograph fast, don’t have a budget for a professional photographer, or just need something to show the client to convince them to hire a photographer? Why not use stock photography?

Stock photography is becoming a wide market benefiting both photographers and designers. Stock photography sites allow photographers to broadcast their work to a wide audience of people they would otherwise be unable to access. As designers, it allows us a place to go to find images that we can use in our designs, or just as a picture good enough for now.

You can find stock images in almost any size you want with prices that vary accordingly. The dpi fluxuates as much as the pixle size does. You can find images at 72 dpi for web use or 300 dpi for high quality print. You just have to find what you are looking for. There are a lot of pictures out there.

There are two basic classifications of rights that images fall into. The first is royalty free. Royalty free will allow you to use the image basically however you want. You can use it unlimited times and can manipulate it in any way you see fit. Unfortunately, you do not have exclusive rights to the image so many other people could be using the same image at the same time. This would be fine if you were using the image as a FPO or if you didn’t care how many people may be using the same image. The second classification is rights managed. Rights managed means there are restrictions on how, when, and where you can use the image. You are basically renting out that image, but you are the only one using it. Examples of use might be in advertising or a magazine where it can be highly competitive.

As our world is becoming increasingly digital, stock photography is no longer just related to photographs. Stock photography sites are also reaching out into video footage, vector art work, illustrative artwork, audio tracks, flash files, etc.

Check out some good Stock photography sites:

Sxc.hu

Getty images

Stock vault

The printer is fairly standard, but a nice feature it does offer is duplex printing. Duplex printing allows you to print on both sides of the paper in one print. This works great for saving paper if you are printing booklets or cards where there needs to be ink on both sides of the page. Just remember to have the print area set to centered so the front and back line up. Even then they will sometimes be offset by a couple millimeters. For most printing purposes this is acceptable, and if need be, you can have the printer print bleeds so that you have a little extra ‘give’ in the alignment.

A nice feature about our scanner is that it has a top light, which allows you to scan in slides or film (anything transparent) as well as standard printed documents. Special considerations need to be taken with transparencies however. If they are laid directly on the bed of the scanner, then they won’t be in focus. Our scanner comes with a tray in which you can place slides or film so that the scanner can pull them into focus.

Because often times you are presenting to more than just one or two people, it is important to be familiar with the equipment around you so you can use it to its fullest potential.

Avaliable to us in the Senior Design Lab is a document reader and projector. The Document Reader is a nice device that allows printed documents to be displayed, via the projector that can be view large enough for the entire class to see. The document reader can be back lit so that you can display transparencies or have top lighting so items like a book can be seen. It contains an auto focus, brightness and contrast, and allows you to rotate documents so that they can be viewed as portrait or landscape. The down size is that, zoomed out, the largest size that can be projected is 8.5 x 11 so that needs to be taken into consideration when setting up your presentation materials.

The projector allows for computers to be hooked up directly to it so that you can demonstrate a process on your computer, how to do something in a program, etc.