christenrobinson

[christenrobinson]

Ethics & Morals in Media Design

In this final Media Design course we focused heavy attention to Ethics and Morals in the Media Design industry. As designers it is important to build and establish a trustworthy reputation both amongst peers and with the public in order to achieve a successful career. Three main takeaways from this month’s course for me are in regards to ethical standards, the designer’s responsibility to clients, and the designer’s responsibility to the public as outlined in the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) guidelines. From my research I learned that consumers ranked “ethics and values” as the number-one factor in assessing whether a company can be called a “corporate good citizen” (Snyder, 2011).  These three are important because they break down best practices that all designers should strive to maintain. It is the designer’s responsibility to be ethical and protect both their client and public to whom they serve while ensuring the production of the best quality of work. When advertising the designer must be truthful and not misleading in order to not only avoid legal issues but most importantly to avoid any harm to the public audience. Furthermore the designer should not work on assignments that create conflicts of interest. The designer should always utilize proper usage rights and maintain confidentiality while working with clients and other designers (AIGA, 2009). Lastly the final thing we worked on this month to close out the Media Design experience was in crafting an experience map. There are many examples and may ways to do this and interestingly enough I arrived at a simple solution that illustrated my experience and skill as the same time. Looking over my journey I am very satisfied with all of what I have accomplished especially starting out with very little to next to no Adobe skills. I have truly learned a lot in this program!

Resources: AIGA. (2009). Design business and ethics. Retrieved June 14, 2017 from http://www.aiga.org/design-business-and-ethics

Snyder, W. (2011). Making the case for enhanced advertising ethics: How a new way of thinking about advertising ethics may build consumer trust. Stories that move mountains: Storytelling and visual design for persuasive presentations. Journal of Advertising Research. Retrieved June 14, 2017 from Ebhost.

[christenrobinson]

Presentation of Design Solutions

With the close of month 11 I am now one step closer to the end of my Mastery Journey in Media Design! This month’s challenge was to develop a website that displayed my past course work as well as a review of the “Stories that Move Mountains: Storytelling and Visual Design for Persuasive Presentations by Martin Sykes, A. Nicklas Malik, and Mark D. West. Apart from completing the required and typical work load of writing a 1000 to 1500 word essay about some other designer’s experience with finding design solutions, inspiration, and or communicating with clients, the real challenge for me was to find a creative and interesting way to redisplay that same work that I’ve been working on for the previous 11 months of this journey. Granted that the last three months were spent making edits and updates to previous work based on feedback from peers and professors. I found myself growing uninterested in the examples of previous student works that all seemed to look the exact same with no real intrigue. And then I happened upon a story from our assigned reading that demonstrated “how a good idea can be killed by poor communication and how tenaciously people can fight to reject a good idea”. The moral of the story concluded that “all new ideas, large or small, meet with some level of resistance, especially if the new idea requires new behavior” (Skyes et al, 2013).

  When designing my site my goal was to show my work different from the previous collage styled displays that I had seen from previous submissions so that I could showcase my unique view of things. I understood that while given certain limitations based on a rubric guideline that some things were going to unfortunately feel like carbon copies of previous submissions no matter what. However, there were some places where certain liberties could be taken with the arrangements and selections of work chosen to speak to the core achievements each person should have gleaned from this month’s work. Furthermore, as I had previously spent time redesigning my Behance site which, was the initial place where monthly submissions of my work for each course had been displayed throughout this journey, I found that a lot of what was asked for this month had already been done.

In the redesign I removed weaker work in exchange for showcasing my best work with better descriptions and details that provided more insight into what I was working and or had worked on and I didn’t want to waste time repeating that exact same thing in my website. The only problem was that after my first submission, some feedback that I got from my professor seemed to ask for exactly that. However keeping with my goal to express myself through the presentation of my work I decided to hold fast to the direction that I was headed in. I was very proud of my work and even provided and explanation as to why. After receiving feedback from my classmates to do things like fix grammar errors (which of course everyone should definitely do and I did do) other things like listing the types of software previously used and quoting from subjects learned previously, I found this already completed either on my Behance site or throughout my previous journal submissions which, were both already linked to the website. Thus there was no need to repeat the same information over and over again for fear of losing the engagement of my audience, in addition to writing long form 250 word excerpts to describe or provide an overview for my work that I could say in 100 words or less. I am not a person who likes to read novels on a persons web page.

There was also a suggestion to include the source of my inspiration or creativity for my work as related to the readings, however for a large part of my work outside of what I quoted, the readings did not really inspire my creativity especially for things where I mainly considered the problem at hand and arrived at solutions that did not follow the typical brainstorming path of thought. This of course resulted in my work standing out and being recognized as interesting and different, which made me happy because I do not always think in a straight line or text book guided fashion, but this also resulted in my not being able to comply with expected formulated results that could be attributed solely 100% to course material. I tend to engage more with images, video, and interesting short copy, so I wrote and designed my site for my ideal audience. This more than likely will have cost me some serious points off the rubric. Yet, in any case the most important take away is not to just merely submit things for grades as grades do not matter to a viewing audience if the work submitted does not speak to your creativity. Therefore in addition to this, three more takeaways that I shall apply from this course toward my future work for visual presentations are that you must free your mind, you have to take a much different approach, and people absorb stories visually.

Sykes, M., Malik, A. & West, M. (2013). Stories that move mountains: Storytelling and visual design for persuasive presentations. John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Retrieved May 6, 2017 from Safaribooksonline

[christenrobinson]

Measuring Design Effectiveness

This month’s course brings me two steps closer to my final graduation work in the Media Design Mastery program. During this month we completed a design research project that solicited a survey amongst an unbiased audience to gain insight as to the effectiveness and suggestions for the improvement of the design. The design that I chose for solicitation was the Elephant Day Music project. It is the one that I am most proud of because of the creative freedom and expression that I was able to to cultivate through the project. Elephant Day Music is a mock concert project that includes a website and promo video design to promote raising support for the protection of elephants worldwide. The survey was designed and executed using the Survey Monkey research tool online and posted / emailed out to a broadly ranged audience to discover the right target audience for the project as well as to measure the success of the design. The goal of the design was to encourage excitement and interest in the cause and raise support. Successfully the survey resulted in the design being clearly understood, considered as being exciting, and socially engaging enough to motivate attendance and encourage social sharing to spread word about the event amongst their social network. The questionnaire identified some useful suggestions to help improve the design such as to show what is being done to the elephants to further validate why the need human support, include images of elephants whose tusks have been stolen, consider integrating animations that could be viewed as videos to increase visitor engagement and to headline the event details topline immediately on the site to improve the clarity of the message. Lastly the questionnaire identified the ideal target audience as being most popular amongst men and women aged 25 – 35 with a graduate level degree and an income range of $85,000 or more.

Here’s a link to look at the design on Behance 

[christenrobinson]

Multiplatform Delivery

As this month wraps up the 3 months worth of project revisions and explorations, I find myself excited for future endeavors. I have truly grown leaps and bounds in my design abilities from the first initial poster projects with mock Romeo and Juliet posters to designing a complete website, animated logo and promo video. The goal of this month’s class was to finish refining changes and further exploring challenges posed by the design committee in preparation of developing a cohesive portfolio that would project our design abilities. It is exciting in that for a person who started out watching hours upon hours of tutorial videos for Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign thinking that it would take forever to learn this stuff, that now I can cut right through each program expressing my creative ideas and actually produce some interesting results. To help guide a lot of the work I revised this month I revisited some previous training provided by artists such as Ina Saltz for typography, size, scale, and placement, Nigel French in designing logos and presentations, Sean Adams on composition and the golden section, and Hillman Curtis on "Process, Inspiration, and Practice” for the New Media Designer. I particularly found Curtis’ experiences and guidance especially helpful when it came to looking for new ideas and thinking beyond the common trends to find uniqueness and intrigue. 

Here’s a look at some of my work: 

[christenrobinson]

Month of Revisions

This month’s Design Integration course was a new challenge to explore and push the boundaries on previous design submissions to achieve new discoveries. Two design projects that I worked on were the EDM (Elephant Day Music) site redesign and the RDT (Rainy Day Toys) logo redesign. I chose to work with the very last and first two projects I completed to inspire myself to see where I started in comparison to how far I’ve come. 

The RDT project was my first attempt at designing a logo using Illustrator, which resulted in something I was very proud of initially but knew could definitely stand to be polished a bit more. 

Here’s a look of what I initially started with:

My goal was to create something that was different from the competitors of other children wooden toy companies that would be unique and appealing to children and parents. 

Here’s the end result: 

The final redesign transitioned into a stamp that could work in a number of variations from flat to color for print, web, physical signage, and display.

The EDM project was one where I had a lot of fun being different. Most of the projects previously submitted used similar elephant themed logo designs with browns, reds, golds, and orange. I wanted to go beyond the traditional “safari look” to be more modern and trendy. Initially I started with a “page to page” container site design to break away from the parallax site or long scrolling style site that so many designers are using now.

Here’s where I started:

After studying some other successful parallax sites based on the feedback I received from my instructor and classmates I found some inspiration to settle in with the trend while maintaining the energy of my initial design. I also redeveloped the logo from a text base design to an image that tied the energy of the event to establish a unique brand identity that could be used on future t-shirt designs and tag posters. 

Here’s the end result:

As this month comes to a close I find that the exploration in design has led me to also develop some new design strategies that can be used for future projects. One such strategy is to design with a focus centered on the end user and how it the design would apply to them and meet their needs. This helps to keep the designer on task an in line with the end goal rather than just creating for the sake of creating which can become time consuming and costly. Also this helps the designer can maintain open communication with the client to whom the customer / end user audience belongs and whose message will come through the design to ensure that the end result aligns with their vision as well.

[christenrobinson]

SIMPLY BREATHTAKING! Digital Drawing by Gelila Shenkut

[christenrobinson]

Design Strategies & Motivation

This month’s Media Design session for me has been the most difficult to get through, namely because of a very conflicting work schedule and getting sick with computer eye strain also due to my insane work schedule. This session we began the transition into the final home stretch of our Design program which is both exciting and scary at the same time. Exciting because we’re almost finished! Scary because everything intensifies from here on out. This month we received out first Design Committee review of our past work over the first six months of the program. From this we were to develop a calendar based on a timeline for submissions of our work for revision and final improvements. Initially developing the calendar seemed to be a piece of cake as the deadline dates were very clear. It was left up to us to choose which projects to begin revising and to work with our fellow classmates and instructor to received feedback and complete improvements. Ultimately this is something that we’ll be working on for the next 2 months of our program and took a bit of futuristic thinking and good project management planning to accomplish. The one challenge for me with this was the timing of the project deadlines and my work schedule. Right now at work we are in high drive time with heavy hour demands because its the Christmas season. As a result I quickly became exhausted halfway through this session though I started out very strong. When I look back at my calendar, my work schedule is something that I didn’t include only because I was more focused on including the design deadlines and meeting those goals and needs. Moving forward I most certainly will be revising my calendar to include my work schedule as at least for next month we will still be in what is considered the busy season and I do not want to have anything get in the way of me finishing well with this program.

Another very interesting thing about this session was our study on design strategies and finding how they can be applied to our current design needs to improve our creative and professional work flow. Specifically the human-centered design is a strategy that I found most used and relating for my work flow as its goal is to design around the needs of the end user (ie. target audience) and requires that you put yourself in their shoes. Some research depending on the project can even go as far as having you fully immerse yourself into the world of the target audience to better understand how their needs may be met with the product or services that you’re designing. Embracing human-centered design means believing that all problems, even the seemingly intractable ones like poverty, general equality, and clean water, are solvable (IDEO.org, 2015).

Here’s a look at my work so far:

Revision 1 shows some newly revised sketches I used  to explore more ideas to further distinguish the uniqueness of the EDM project. 

Revision 2 displays the new look of the animated logo building from the revised sketches to be more consistent with the uplifting theme of the project.

Revision 3 applies the Animated logo with the promo video and includes some cleaner cuts to improve the overall timing of the video and positive vibe.

Revision 4 applies title text to the promo video to communicate the important details of the event and communicate the brand’s message while maintaining the energy of the video.

References

IDEO. (2015). the field guide to human centered design. Canada. Design kit.

Free Images - Pixabay. (2016). Retrieved October 3, 2016 from https://pixabay.com/

Adobe Stock Footage - Adobe. (2016). Retrieved November 20, 2016 from https://stock.adobe.com

[christenrobinson]

This is the revision of the 30 second promo video for EDM with the new animated logo applied.

Free Images - Pixabay. (2016). Retrieved October 3, 2016 from https://pixabay.com/ Adobe Stock Footage - Adobe. (2016). Retrieved November 20, 2016 from https://stock.adobe.com

[christenrobinson]

This is a revision of the EDM animated logo for the concept Elephant Day Music concert project. The purpose of this revision was to push the boundaries and try new ideas from the previous version. A hot air balloon was incorporated to further connect with the uplifting visuals of hot air balloons that are used in the video and to add consistency while establishing an iconic image.

[christenrobinson]

Here is the final video cut for the concept of Elephant Day Music. Footage and photos courtesy of Adobe Stock and Pixabay.

[christenrobinson]

Elephant Day Music concept logo to video project. I worked with a few sources for inspiration to come up with an animated logo that fit well with the video concept I envisioned. Shown are my top three logo sketches refined, some exploration of the top logo selected which lead to the final video.

[christenrobinson]

Organization Structures

This month’s course was definitely interesting and frustrating at the same time. The interesting portion of the course was definitely centered around the exploration and creative process in developing a sketch to a completely animated logo then using it in a video. I worked with a few different sources for inspiration and used footage and photos from Adobe Stock as well as Pixabay and then used Westar Music to organize a story that communicates the energy and message of my conceptual non-profit that I’ve been building on since the previous course. 

The frustrating part of this course was definitely the discussion posts. After writing the initial 1000+ word essay that has become pretty standard for most of these courses, having to write four additional 500 word discussion posts followed up with lengthy reply posts that are pre-structured just felt more like overkill for me then enhanced learning. The idea behind the discussion posts is to encourage discussion amongst classmates and gain further insight. In my case I didn’t find the posts as helpful as I would have liked given all of the extra work involved outside of the more important Mastery assignments. I know I didn’t put my all into these posts this session other than just doing enough for completion and felt the same from my classmates. Apart from that I also found a lot of the recommended videos frustrating to follow and am glad for it, because this encouraged me to do a lot more outside research to find the resources that spoke more of my creative language and helped me get my learning curve up rather quickly in a short amount of time. Needless to say with my new found skills I plan to work on quite a few additional personal projects to continue cultivating my new skills.

All in all the course was definitely a challenge and has taught me a few more things about my creativity. I am very happy with the work that I was able to produce especially when it comes to using most of the software for the first time to create an animated logo. I look forward toward the next course and the chance to grow even more with the next set of challenges. 

[christenrobinson]

Design comps for a fictional charity concert concept event site titled EDM aka Elephant Day Music powered by Electronic Digital Music. The final design comps are based on a final moodboard detailing the type, color selection, sample stock free images and textured background.

[christenrobinson]

My final moodboard for the concept concert design to raise support for the protection of elephants. The concept is called EDM which represents “elephant music day”, as the name of the concert and “electronic digital music”, as the music source.

[christenrobinson]

Design Research

Discovery, Exploration, and Implementation. This is what I did this month in my Design Research course. Initially I thought there was going to be very little art involved and more research paper based assignments, yet to my surprise there was only one research paper and a whole lot of art involvement. The focus of this course was to get you to think. Think about your design, your clients, your audience, and most importantly your communication. Art can be interpreted a million different ways based on the communication behind it. When this understanding is applied to the design process along with a few other nuances to include usability, functionality and overall look and feel, especially if you are designing a website, it will serve as the foundation that guides you along the way. 

I sketched my way from a rough idea of a moodboard to a wireframe layout that led me to a final design comp for a concept charity concert to raise support for Elephants. I explored the idea of hot air balloons for an uplifting EDM experience to encourage music lovers to attend. The end result turned out to be a vibrant visual of harmonious colors that captured a magical experience. With the exploration of new skills, one generally considers what future employment in the field of web design may entail. Should you learn to code or just use applications that don’t require coding? Should you take a more managerial role and delegate production activities or roll up your sleeves and get knee deep into it yourself? If the goal is to be more of a technical director then you may be good with delegating the workflow and giving final approvals. But if you’re like me then you’ll want to be very involved. Coding does give you freedom to be different and think outside of your container, but it can become monotonous. I think the answer to “code or not to code” is going to be based more on the website’s needs. 

Personally I do not find web design appealing to me as a sole profession. I think it is an important skill that anyone doing anything digital, online, and for just about any industry out there needs to at least have some understanding about. I love the creative process and will most certainly use it in the grand scheme of things toward my ultimate goal of being an independent powerhouse. I’m plan to make live action and animation feature productions inclusive of distribution, marketing, and brand management. However, in the very near future I plan to utilize my new design skills and marketing experience to provide creative digital marketing services to clients on a contract basis to earn profits in support of my long term goals.

[christenrobinson]

Effective Copy Writing Project: Sample Testimonial Ad for a nonprofit. (academic)

Photo Credit: Jay Directo

Resource: Directo, J. (2012). Philippine activists rally in Manila. CPJ 2012 Annual Report. Retrieved September 10, 2016 from https://cpj.org/about/cpj_annual_report_2012.pdf 

[christenrobinson]

How to be Creative

“Don’t be blocked by openness. Be fruitful and multiply” is just one of the take aways coming with me from this month’s Effective Copy Writing course. As Edward de Bono’s quote put it best, even though a decent solution can make you quit looking for something since it seems to solve the problem well enough, do not stop there. Continue to explore other options that work well to have a full spectrum of ideas to choose from to ensure that you are putting forth your best work. This month we worked through a number of copy assignments such as organizing a swatch file of ideas and inspiration, designing testimonial ads and finally writing a descriptive persuasive research paper addressing a business need that could be solved with a proper design campaign.

The work was challenging and fun at the same time. I was able to further my skills with design while learning the elements of copy and how to write it well. Two additional take aways from this course for me to remember to include my voice in all forms of writing and to always tell a story. Including my voice in my writing assignments helps to personalize the piece which will further separate me from the thousands of robot writers who stick to a script. This will be extremely helpful in getting my ads, campaigns, and future projects noticed. Telling stories will also further distinguish my work as no two people ever tell a story the same way. The beautiful thing to remember here is that there is a story in everything, once its been uncovered the creative boundaries are limitless as to how you apply your style in telling it. Be open. Have a Voice. Tell a Story.

Here’s a link to some of my work on Behance https://www.behance.net/crrobinson03b7