Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Package Redesigning the Experience

Objective

Redesign a take-out food packaging experience with consideration to it’s sustainability. In our throw-away society, restaurants usually specify their packaging choices based on conventional sizes/materials or perceived budget restraints. Not often enough is consideration is given to the user’s experience of it, how it leverages their brand or how it impacts the environment.

Designers can have a power impact on all phases of the user experience. Often our involvement is limited to the duties of creating graphics and specifying materials. This project is meant to challenge your design muscles and give you an opportunity to think up and down the entire design process. In this assignment, research and concept will be the most important items you deliver.

5 GUYS

I chose 5 Guys because their packaging is rather plain and boring. The main problem with the packaging was that the paper bag would seep grease from the fries and there was hardly any branding. I am posting my presentation of my redesign and my printing specs to show how the new packaging works with the environment.


Pecha Kucha











Thursday, January 19, 2012

New Semester and 5 Guys


A new semester is upon us; therefore, more projects were introduced. My first blog post is going to be about a new green packaging project for 'Designing Understanding'. I had to go get take-out and create a story board about the experience of getting take-out at Five Guys. Keep posted for new information about this project!

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Blog Posts for Type---Reading and Questions

Who is Herb Lubalin?
He was a logo designer who injected visual metaphors into typography and denied traditional letter spacing.

Why was Esguire important?
 He published respected writers such as hemingway, but the pinup girls brought on bad publicity. 

Who is Alexey Broadavich? 
Worked on harpers bazaar, freed the page to take pleasure in white space and the finely tuned pacing of text and image.

What did Hoefler-Jones do for Harper's?
 
Didot type family.

Who is Gail Anderson? 
Art director of rolling stone.

Who is David Carson?
Art director of Ray Gun, put together first issue.

Who is Tibor?
Designer of Color, lack of decorative elements and visual devices and limited use of sans-serif typefaces allowed the photography and content to speak more loudly than the design.

Who is Neville Brody? 
Art director of The Face and introduced first custom typeface with issue number 50.

What is Speak?
A magazine that was writing on culture, music, fashion, literature, and art. And had a low budget, so they were resourceful when creating key imagery. 
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1. What are some ways to indicate a new paragraph.
A new paragraph begins after an indentation, or tab. A new paragraph can also be shown by leaving a blank line between the two paragraphs. Symbols, text size, color and line spacing can also be used. 

2. What are some things to look out for when hyphenating text.
Try to leave at least 2 characters on the line and 3 following, avoid hyphenating proper nouns.

3. Define font hinting. Why is it necessary?
Font hinting is using a rasterized grid to display letter forms that look right to the human eye. At low screen resolutions, hinting is critical for producing legible text.

4. What is letter spacing/tracking? How do you track in Illustrator or InDesign
Letter spacing is the space between letters and can be called functional white. The white is essential to font legibility and the desired visual impression of the text. The picture illustrates how to track in InDesign or Illustrator. 

5. Define Kerning? Name 8 kerning pairs. How do you kern in InDesign or Illustrator?
Kerning is the process of adding or subtracting space between pairs of characters. You can automatically kern type using metrics kerning or optical kerning. Metrics kerning uses kern pairs, which are included with most fonts. Kern pairs contain information about the spacing of specific pairs of letters. To kern in Illustrator or InDesign, type or select a numeric value for kerning in the Character panel.

6. What is word spacing?
Word spacing refers to the size of the space between words.

7. Explain DIN. 
DIN A sizes are usually the starting point for paper sizes for printed mater. DIN sizes use a 1: Square Root of 2 ratio. Besides the well-known A sizes, B and C sizes are also used. The B sizes are so-called uncut sizes so the page can be printed with bleed after which the sheet can be cut to a size A. The C sizes are mainly used for envelopes, which can then hold an A size. The American version of the A4 size is 8.5 x 11 inches and is therefore considerable shorter than an A4. 

8. What is a baseline grid?
A baseline grid is an imaginary grid upon which type sits. The baseline pf a piece of type can be forced to 'snap' to this grid to maintain continuity across the pages of a design.  The grid in Baseline is composed of 4 basic columns, for more flexibility each column can be divided in 2 units.

9. How many characters per line is optimal? Is there a range?
The optimal line length for your body text is usually considered to be within the 50-60 characters per line. At most up to 75 characters is acceptable. 

10. Define aesthetic text alignment.
Hanging punctuation controls the alignment of punctuation marks for a specific paragraph. Paragraph alignment determines the margin from which the punctuation hangs. 

11. What is a window?
A paragraph-ending line that falls at the beginning of the following page/column, thus separated from the rest of the text
 
12. What is a typographic river?
A typographic river occurs in justified text blocks when the separation of the words leaves gaps of white space in several lines.  

13. What is an orphan?
An orphan is the final one or two lines of a paragraph separated from the main paragraph to form a new column and should be avoided.


Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Dorthea Lange



Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography.

Joel Sternfeld



Joel Sternfeld, (b. June 30 1944, New York City), is a fine-art color photographer noted for his large-format documentary pictures of the United States and helping establish color photography as a respected artistic medium. He has many works in the permanent collections of the MOMA in New York City and the Getty Center in Los Angeles. He has influenced a generation of color photographers, including Andreas Gursky, who borrows many of Sternfeld's techniques and approaches.

Hiroshi Sugimoto


Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. In 1970, Sugimoto studied politics and sociology at Rikkyō University in Tokyo. In 1974, he retrained as an artist and received his BFA in Fine Arts at the Art Center College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, California. Afterward, Sugimoto settled in New York City. Sugimoto has spoken of his work as an expression of ‘time exposed’, or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time. His work also focuses on transience of life, and the conflict between life and death.

Lewis Baltz


His entire work is focused on searching for beauty in desolation and destruction. Baltz images describe the architecture of the human landscape, offices, factories, and parking lots. His pictures are the reflection of control, power, and influenced by and over human beings. His minimalistic photographs in the trilogy Ronde de Nuit, Docile Bodies, and Politics of Bacteria, picture the void of the other.[vague] In 1974 he captured the anonymity and the relationships between inhabitation, settlement, and anonymity in The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California (1974).

Walker Evans



Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans's work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent".[1] Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art or George Eastman House.[2]

Yousuf Karsh



Yousuf or Josuf (his given Armenian name was Hovsep) Karsh was born in Mardin, a city in the eastern Ottoman Empire (present Turkey). [3] He grew up during the Armenian Genocide where he wrote, "I saw relatives massacred; my sister died of starvation as we were driven from village to village."[3] At the age of 14, he fled with his family to Syria to escape persecution.[4] Two years later, his parents sent Yousuf to live with his uncle George Nakash, a photographer in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. Karsh briefly attended school there and assisted in his uncle’s studio. Nakash saw great potential in his nephew and in 1928 arranged for Karsh to apprentice with portrait photographer John Garo in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. His brother, Malak Karsh, was also a photographer famous for the image of logs floating down the river on the Canadian one dollar bill.[5]

Karsh returned to Canada four years later, eager to make his mark. He established a studio in the Chateau Laurier Hotel in Ottawa, Ontario, close to Canada’s seat of government. Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King discovered Karsh and arranged introductions with visiting dignitaries for portrait sittings. Karsh's work attracted the attention of varied celebrities, but his place in history was sealed on 30 December 1941 when he photographed Winston Churchill, after Churchill gave a speech to Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa.[6]

Friday, November 11, 2011

INFOGRAPHICS. Alcohol Abuse


Tim Walker



Tim Walker’s photographs have appeared in Vogue, month by month, for over a decade.Extravagant staging and romantic motifs characterise his style. After concentrating on the photographic still for 15 years, Tim Walker is now making film. On graduation in 1994, Walker worked as a freelance photography assistant in London before moving to New York City as a full time assistant to Richard Avedon. On returning to England, he initially concentrated on portrait and documentary work for UK newspapers. At the age of 25, he shot his first fashion story for Vogue, and has photographed for the British, Italian, and American editions ever since. The Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in London include the photographs of Tim Walker in their permanent collections. He staged his first major exhibition at the Design Museum in London in the spring of 2008, coinciding with the publication of his book ‘Pictures’. In November 2008, Walker received the ‘Isabella Blow award for Fashion Creator’ by The British Fashion Council and, in May 2009, he received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York for his work as a fashion photographer.

Irving Penn



Irving Penn studied under Alexey Brodovitch at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts) from which he was graduated in 1938. Penn's drawings were published by Harper's Bazaar and he also painted. As his career in photography blossomed, he became known for post World War II feminine chic and glamour photography. Penn worked for many years doing fashion photography for Vogue magazine, founding his own studio in 1953. He was among the first photographers to pose subjects against a simple grey or white backdrop and used this simplicity more effectively than other photographers. Expanding his austere studio surroundings, Penn constructed a set of upright angled backdrops, to form a stark, acute corner. Subjects photographed with this technique included Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O'Keeffe, W. H. Auden, Igor Stravinsky.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Letter Fountain pages 37 - 51

What are small capitals? How are they different than something set in ALL CAPS?
Does your font have small caps? If not name a font that does.

Small capitals are are smaller versions of capital letters. Small capitals are generally a little taller than  the x height and they are more successful in situations when a person is using a word that they want to be highlighted but not over baring, like it would be if they used all caps. Clarendon does have small capitals.

What are ligatures? why are they used? when are they not used? what are common ligatures?
Does your font have ligatures? If not name a font that does.

Ligatures are combinations of characters that were designed to prevent ascenders from hitting descenders in a body of text.  Ligatures are only used when it is necessary, most of the time the problem does not occur. No my font does not have ligatures, but Bembo does.

What is the difference between a foot mark and an apostrophe?

A foot mark does not has a cone shape while the a quote mark has a 9 or 6 shape to it. 
What is the difference between an inch mark and a quote mark (smart quote)?

 The inch mark is a straight shape while the quote mark has a curl to it.
What is a hyphen, en dash and em dashes, what are the differences and when are they used.

hyphen - is used as a symbol to break words.

en dash–is used to indicate a sudden change of direction.
em dash—is used to demarcate parenthetical thought.