Category: College Posts

When we started brainstorming for this project, we first had to come up with a place. We chose Gooseberry Falls because we had all been there and we knew the area very well. We thought a place that was a type of river would be great as a twelve-foot vertical work.
Dividing everything up turned out to be pretty simple, but everyone helped each other out in different areas. I did the photographing and collage work, while Nick worked on the typography, choosing the poem for the work, and coming up with the idea of replacing the water in the photos with type. Erik worked on the illustration but there wasn’t too much of it in our project. So he definitely made up for that by helping Nick and me tremendously with our jobs along with assembling the work itself.
We had started with a very complex idea of shower curtain strips waving in front of our collaged photos and type. This had turned out to not work because we couldn’t iron out the wrinkles in the curtains. We eventually simplified by cutting down the size of the width tremendously from 4 feet to 8 inches. This seemed to work better because the viewer could focus more on the type.
The unique part of our project is that the water was taken out of the photos and replaced with text that is flowing along a wavy path. It is then collaged down the work that is 8 inches by 12 feet, looking like a river of waterfalls.
Our work has a bit of surprise at the end with a silhouette of us three group members. It appears that three people are looking at this work and you can see their shadows by the sun.
Our craftsmanship is very unique and well executed with our seamless collage that runs the full 12 feet. We also spent a lot of time working on the waved edges, which we found out adds a lot of visual interest to the work.

For our studio tour this semester, we were invited to Yamomoto Moss. This was one of the cooler firms that we had visited. Last semester, we went to Duffy, Sussner and Aesthetic Apparatus. Yamomoto Moss was more along the lines of Duffy, where they are a bit of a bigger firm and had a handful of big clients. We all asked a lot of questions, mostly about portfolios and how to get a job (surprise surprise).
We also had gone to the portfolio fair that the SDO had also put on. This was VERY interesting and totally worthwhile to go to. I had gotten feedback on my book, and most of the things I agreed on. We had also gone through a lot of general questions about books, and what they should look like, how many pieces, etc. I was lucky to take some notes on these things, and have them under my “jobs

Our client project for the semester was working with Jamie Harvie, who was with The Institute for Sustainable Future. His goal was to educate more people in how to use products that were friendlier to the environment and to make sure that there was no misuse of antibiotics on farm animals. The way that he got this message out was to use these characters that he had made up over the years.
Our job was to use these characters and create a campaign called The Anti-Biotics Revolution Revolution, or ABXRR. So we started brainstorming with Jamie as to how we were going to accomplish this. He had a great amount of ideas for us and we started to sketch and get these ideas to paper. We had Erik and Trevor do the preliminary illustrations and the rest of us worked on color schemes and layouts of different ideas.
We had a problem with communication with our client at times. Near the end of the project, we had a whole set of cards, post cards, berets, pledge sheets and a logo set out, but it turned out to not be what Jamie was envisioning. So we did not get a final product to our client that he had liked in the end.
I had learned a few things when working in this group. First, if there is no leader, one should be appointed, because it wasn’t clear who was to make decisions. Also, I learned that you have to be a little more forceful with your client if they can’t make up their mind, or it is unclear what they want. There were many things that my group and I could have done different to make this a smoother process. Even though we didn’t come out with a final product, I still came away with some useful lessons throughout the whole experience.

For the weekend, a group of us from the SDO went down to Mankato for ByDesign on the MSU campus. When we got there, we heard a lecture from Paul Wharton from Larsen Design. He had told us about some scenarios where things had gone wrong. Overall, it was good lecture.
The next day, we started off with our first workshop, which was Final Cut Pro Tutorial. Through this, a guy from Apple showed us the basics about Final Cut Pro. Although I had already knew about these things in FCP, it still got me fired up for some editing that I could do for my cousins wedding.
The next speech was Kate Pabst and Emily Eaton. They were partners in their own firm and had shared with us their success and falls while being in the industry. They talked about the evolution of the web and how they were the ones to help NWA get their site up. I thought it was exciting to hear that they were part of some of the first web sites ever made.
One of the other workshops was Macromedia Flash. It seemed that this gentleman, who had a background in graphic design as well as computer science, was talking a bit over all of our heads. But it was still very interesting to see the possibilities of flash.
One of the best parts of the weekend was going out with all of UMD and MSU students to BW3’s and other such establishments. Much fun was had. There was talk later of having UMD’s SDO doing something like this next year. Only time will tell.
Overall, it was a VERY fun weekend, and I learned a lot about other school’s GD departments.

The Challenge was to make some sort of product or kit to put into the given box. The other half of the challenge was to have the idea be something green or eco-friendly. The suppplies were also supposed to be friendly to the environment.
I started with making a list of 100 ideas that would fit into this 3.5″ x 15″ x 1.75″ box. The problem was that most of them were not eco-friendly. Then I narrowed it down to fourr ideas and expanded on each one of those. After looking at these for a while, I decided on the recipes.
My solution was to make a box that holds recipes, an assortment of herbs and spices, measuring spoons and a stand to hold your recipes.
It hold a mini rack for the spices, measuring spoons, a place for the recipes, and the fold up stand to hold the recipes on. I used design on some of the elements. I used a layout on the back side of the cover to show people what was in the box and it’s purpose. I also used typographic design in the recipe cards. And lastly, I used it on the spice rack to label the spices.
The reason why this constitutes being green design is because the recipes are healthy and all the herbs and spices are organic. I found it important to give a healthy lifestyle feel to this while using 30% post consumer waist paper throughout the box.
The list of materials is as follows:
Old measuring spoons thhat I found in a Friends house that were going to be thrown away. Cost – $0.00
Cardstock found at paperhog which is 30% post-consumer waist. Cost $0.15/sheet
Containers for spices found at my father’s office, being thrown away. Cost – $0.00