Evansville Museum Ad Campaign

This assignment involved picking a local business from a list and coming up with a nice ad campaign for it. Surprisingly, most of the class picked the Evansville Museum along with me. They're a privately run museum that's currently trying to raise the money needed for an expansion. They have a lot of neat exhibits but not a lot to capture the public interest. Therefore, I first sat down and considered what the museum already HAD that could bring in the public.

My favorite part of the museum in my youth was the replicas of Lincoln's home and other period shops and homes, so I focused a lot on Lincoln and log cabins in my initial sketches. They also have the EMTRAC museum that has an actual train you can check out, and a planetarium. I also tried to think of more cost-effective means of advertising, because they obviously don't have a huge ad budget.



I really liked my idea to create postcards that could be folded into interesting things. I had a log cabin, a "planetarium" that you could pop on top of a flashlight, a train, and other silly things.

When Dave looked at my sketches he wondered what my obsession with Lincoln was and when I replied that I was trying to focus on the stuff that they had to attract customers, he encouraged me to perhaps think of some stuff that the museum NEEDED that could also attract guests.

Upon researching other museums, I decided that our museum needed DINOSAURS and a cafe. They're located right on the river, providing what would be a really nice view for visitors that would like to drink some coffee and sit a spell.

My ideas were distilled down to some final concepts.



First, I created my billboard. It would set the standard for everything afterward. The image is from the Stock Exchange as so many of my images are! The font used for "celestial" is from Blambot, I think, as so many of my fonts are.



Some of my classmates weren't wild about the font, so I changed it out for my final draft. Font from Blambot yet again, I believe!



Next, I created the buswrap. It is difficult to find a usable dinosaur skeleton just lying around, you know? I eventually settled on this one, just for the purposes of the assignment. The bus is from the Stock Exchange, yet again~ I really wanted to find a usable image of the buses our own METS uses but could not. I took photos of our buses but they didn't work well once I plopped them in Photoshop. The billboard and building itself were my only usable photos, actually.



Third is the magazine ad! This is my favorite one. Why do I have such love for a dying medium?? The picture of the river is by myself, and the coffee is from the Stock Exchange. When it was all said and done, someone remarked that it reminded them of another ad campaign from someplace... Like Jimmy John's or something? I guess by the way the words are stacked. But... I LIKE stacking words... ;)



Lastly is my "installation." The EMTRAC was NEVER open when I had a chance to come down and take photos, and as I said, most of what I took didn't work well anyway. I had the idea to make a sort of installation along the building using train tracks and a replica train, but that just didn't pan out. Instead I created a huge banner! With a train I took from the Stock Exchange. It really wasn't detailed enough to make a good banner image, though. Curse you, trains!

MSI Site Design and STFU Tak Illustration

Today I have a Web Design project for you and a new illustration!

This project involved choosing a band with at least four releases and redesigning their logo, then creating a discography and merchandise page for them. I chose Mindless Self Indulgence because they are my favorite band and their site is okay but rather disjointed design-wise.

MSI uses a lot of Nintendo chipset music in their work, as well as having lots of bright, neon techno elements in their design aesthetic. I wanted to stick to that, while making it a little more slick since they've been sort of entering mainstream music.



I tried playing with Impact and layering colors to see how they'd interact. (The "MSI" logo is intentionally vulgar, haha! MSI is a bit of a vulgar band. Don't hate!) I also had my prerequisite hand-drawn font. I downloaded a nice font from Blambot and played a lot with its serifs. We all ended up liking that logo the best.

Once the logo was straightened out, I went about designing the pages. I stuck with my techno vibe in my sketches.



I really liked the circuit board and microchip ideas I'd come up with, but trying to integrate them practically didn't really work. I did end up using the sort of "electrical current" vibe in my final design, though.



For my first draft, Dave didn't quite dig the way I had laid out my navigation links. My classmates also pointed out that the gradient was a little ugly looking. It's supposed to fade from green to pink, but I intended for the page to extend beyond this "preview" window, so I didn't adjust the length of the gradient.

So I fixed those things! Made the nav links smaller and separated them with the fonts neato "asterisk." The way the page is supposed to work is that when you scroll over each thumbnail, it increases in size. If you click on it, additional info and order links will appear. MSI doesn't quite have their own storefront for a lot of their music; you are taken to other sites to order.



Then came the merchandise page! This one operated on the same basic premise, except I also added a shopping cart and size menus and the like.



I'm pretty pleased with this but I ended up getting a "B." Horrors! Dave said that the lack of a grid might be confusing... Which confused me, because I am sort of operating on a grid. *sobs!*

Next is an illustration I did for a good friend of mine. She gave me a hand with something when I was in a bind! This features her character Bianca and my versions of two characters from the old TV show Invader Zim. Bianca and the alien don't get along very well, and the poor hairy guy is caught in the middle. Love triangle!

By clicking on the thumb you can see my pencils, inks and the final version. :)

Conbook

Of the projects I did this semester, this one is probably my favorite. It combines two of my most favoritest things: Illustration and Magazine layout. (Both things that are going out of vogue in today's high-tech times, eh? I've always been on the cutting edge of trends that way)

So anyway, we were tasked with creating a four-page magazine layout focusing on a subject from a list we were given. One of the subjects was "Social Networking and Privacy," with a link to this news article. I took the assignment pretty literally and assumed we were supposed to actually sort of lay out the ARTICLE.

First, of course, were sketches.



My first idea was for a sad man to be tethered by the neck to a computer monitor. Then I thought about having a pair of hands coming from behind bars, typing on a keyboard... Next I thought of going for a more "Facebook-esque" layout... And then came the "mouse turning to handcuffs" idea. Everyone seemed to like the mousecuffs, so I went ahead with that one.

Funny (or perhaps sad) story: I actually went and looked at photos of mice on Google when I drew the mouse. And yet I still managed to draw it monumentally WRONG. The buttons were on the bottom with the scroll wheel floating somewhere up in space.



The drawings I did made it through, like, two critiques and several instances of my instructor looking at the image while giving me feedback... As well as, of course, my own eyes staring at the thing... And nobody noticed my mistake until the final critique. And I'll probably never live it down, either!

But that's ok, I fixed it.



I think everything turned out pretty nicely. I wonder if I should have justified the text, though. Yet again I misunderstood some conversation about the whole thing and thought it should all be left-aligned.





Now this is mounted and hanging up in the Visual Communications hallway. Hooray!

Dash Dash Dash...

Dot Dot Dot Dot Dash Dash Dash. Or is it the other way around? I don't know morse code.

So anyway! Gonna get caught up on my projects, here! This is the first site design Dave had us do for Web Design I. The project entailed taking a box from home and turning every side of it into a site! A much taller order than I suspected it would be, probably because I picked a box with a lot of redundant information on it.

But I picked the box I did because it had cute graphics on it.



(S.O.S is a marvelous product, by the way. I just recently started living by myself and cooking, and this makes cleaning up so crazy easy...)

Of course, the first thing we had to do was sketch out our plans...



I pretty much knew what I wanted as far as layout goes. I thought it would be neat to use the tab as a navigation button of sorts. I pretty much knew what graphics I wanted for the main page as well. I think perhaps Dave suggested some lavender in the background to make it more interesting.

Originally I tried a photo of some lavender fields, vector traced to better match the illustrations. Nobody really liked it, and looking at it myself I thought it kinda looked like somebody's head... Braided into purple corn rows. SO instead I headed on over to the Old Stock Exchange and found me a nice photograph of some lavender flowers. Everything started to come together after that!



I redid the logo and left out the bevels and the lens flare. I think most people would agree it's an improvement... And then I redrew the lavender in Illustrator, which was fun.

Next was the "Uses" page, which took up the back of the box. That had the neato graphics that I liked so much. I tried reproducing them in Illustrator but they just didn't look right... Instead I cleaned up the box scans I did in Photoshop and just plopped them in. The effect I wanted on the page was for the user to be able to scroll over an image and cause it to roll to the side, revealing the uses for that area.



Last came the "Green" page... The only other page I could really glean out of the content on the box. It's a pretty minimalistic design, haha! Nothing much to say about this one.



And there you have it! My first website design (for a grade)!

Survey of Web Design Employment Opportunities in my Area

I searched Indeed, Courier and Press, Monster, Authenticjobs and Ivy Tech's own Jobzone... And the answer is "not much is available in my area." Even freelance opportunities in other areas seemed to be scarce. That doesn't surprise me considering the fact that our economy is probably doing better than in many other states. The only job that would even remotely interest me is for a Web Content Specialist position at Courier and Press itself. Everything else was the typical "WORK FROM HOME AND MAKE $$$" listings you tend to find in every classified section.

From Graphic Design job listings I've seen in the past, I know that pretty much any creative job these days requires you to have some web design experience... Which is why I enrolled in this class. I can't help but wonder about the general conditions around this phenomenon, however. How many companies have completely dedicated web design professionals? I imagine many of them either contract out that kind of work or make some poor sap with another job description attend to it. With the Internet environment as it is today, so many companies still seem to put their sites in the hands of third parties or nonprofessionals.