monday night, feb 10th visrhet
TRANSCRIPT
Today1) How are we doing? 2) The Literary London Brochure: The major project3) All the pretty colors4) How to sample a color palette5) Typography6) Some Type Sources7) Practicing up: Making a new Flier with Logo8) Logo practice: let’s make a Logo!
Literary LondonOur major project for the semester will be to work with our client, Kaara Peterson from Miami’s Literary London program to create a new brochure. We will get much more information as the semester runs, but as we get started thinking about it, you’ll want to think about the imagery here. The goal is to create an easy-to-read, easy-to-use brochure that communicates the richness of the program without being too ornate or too sloppy.
The Joy of InfographicsLet’s start our consideration of color with a quick tour of some really impressive infographics that will allow us to condense some of our knowledge and expand on a few interesting ideas.
Soooo… What does all of this tell us?
And how might we apply it?
Activity: One of the best ways to put together a color palette is to sample colors from nature. It might sound sort of overly simple, but we want to see colors that go together naturally, and (of course) things that exist in nature naturally coordinate. A frog, for example, wouldn’t be the wrong colors for a frog.
Activity: To sample colors, you want to do a few things. One, you want to create a set of squares on a blank image (just use the shape tool). You can do splotches if you want, but I like to make sure mine look good. You then use the eyedropper to sample the colors you want, use the bucket to fill your square on the other image, and repeat as needed.
Type: some video
Here are some videos to give us a little bit of a transition into talking about fonts and typography.
Some Font Fun
And here are some fun sites we can tinker around with just a bit, to show you that type, like life, can be fun times.
How to get nifty fonts
You might notice that most computers– even the ones here in the super-slick design-minded labs– don’t have a huge selection of fonts.
This can put you at a disadvantage as a creator. But not to worry. Fonts are out there.
Let me show you a few cool places to visit.
Next Activity: Given what we’ve learned about type and about C.R.A.P., I want to show you a very, very bad flier. We’re going to then make a better version fueled with our new skills. You can work in pairs on this project, or if you want to go solo to get the experience, that is fine.
Annnnd now…
Design
You’ve done some reading on design, and we’ll talk much more about design principles next week. But to get us started, I want to look at one poorly designed flyer and talk about how we might make it better.
Prepare thyself!
From http://www.bignnastyprod.com/site/djdirty/djdirty.htm
Design choices
I’m not sure I precisely understand it, but there’s sort of a sub-genre of party flyers that look a bit like this one. Knowing that, I don’t want to act as if this is absolutely hideous, but I think you can safely say, based on our readings so far, that this is not a well designed flyer.
When addressing a flyer like this, we want to collect some key information. So let’s break down what we actually have here.
Elements
Text: Images:Color:
What is “essential?”:
As pairs, hop on a machine
And make a better version of this flyer using InDesign and Photoshop (use Photoshop only to create elements to feed to your InDesign document) .
You can do it! I’ll give you all the time we have left to work. When we get to the 5 minute warning, I’ll ask you to save and send to me. If you get done sooner, we can show off what you made. But think about doing it well; don’t worry about doing it fast.
Design Task 3
For your third design task, I want you to do a series of text/color treatments of your own name. This will combine the two new things we covered this week.
Please do at least three variations, though you were welcome to do more. And think about what each says rhetorically!
Homework: For next Monday: Read for class: Golombisky & Hagen chapter 8 and 9, and and “Typography 101” from How to Design Cool Stuff and Chapter 8 in Lynch and Horton, “Tips for Designing for Color Blind Users”, and based on those readings, tinker with Colors on the Web