Communication Artifact

In our style guide we stayed true to the original colors for the new designs we have come up with. I felt like red and black would be appropriate for the new logo as well. We have revamped the website for St. George so I decided that the logo should be appropriate for the area we live in. the triangles in the logo represent both the roof of houses, because that is what they mainly sell, they are also a doubleface as mountains since we live in beautiful red mountains, and the company also sells land. I started with closed triangles and a window to make it look more like a house, but as a group we agreed that it looked better without the closed triangles and the window, and the simplified version looks much better than the others. The logo is symmetric, clean, and has a some negative space. We got our idea from an open house poster in ivins, that looked very unorganized, cluttered and not very well thought through, it i stressful to look at.  Therefore having clean lines and a simplistic look like this makes me a lot calmer, and it looks more professional. 

Personas & Styleguide

Objective: Make the company more attractive to potential clients. Reflect its higher end clientele.

Couple that got their careers going

Mary and kent got married a few years ago, they do not yet have children, but they would like to in the near future and are looking for a home to start a family in. Mary is a lawyer and kent is a dentist.

Rich retired couple with way too much money

Richard and Bonnie has been married for over 30 years, and have lived a meaningful life. Richard has been working as respected surgeon in the local community and have created a good life for himself and his family. The couple is ready live the life as retirees, but does not want to live in assisting living places like sunriver.

Contractors

Patrick is making his living by buying property and building townhouses and apartment complexes, that will be brought up again by real estate agents. He is in his late 40s, has one child and a wife to support.

Artifact: I am in charge of the logo for this project.

Mis-En-Scene Inception

The job as a director is to oversee the whole production of the movie, and make sure that deadlines and budgets are being kept, as well as organizing the film crew to meet his expectations.
Christopher Nolan is the director of Inception, and he has been working on this for 10 years. His baseline was that have dreams projected in movies, and that dreams can feel real when we are in them, and that we are invested in the dream we are in. The hallway scene was filmed in a huge custom rig, because Nolan wanted to do as many as the stunts as he possibly could without using CGI. He wanted to shots to be genuine, and later use technology to enhance the scenes instead. 

Nolan had incredible trust in his team and his actors/actresses, which is what made the film possible. he would work closely with the actors in order to get the right "personalities" on screen. 
Nolan did try to navigate the hallway while moving, in order to see what he was putting his actors through, but he could not because of motion sickness. 

Comparing Designs

This poster is for child abuse by CCAN. Unless you look at the writing on the poster I am pretty sure you will not know what they are trying to convey. There is however a figure ground relationship going on, with the shadowhand trying to grab the lego man. They are creating a contrast between their statement of fighting real monsters and having "fictional" poster theme. But this is not enough to create awareness of child abuse, 

This is another poster. Just look at it, it is beautiful. There is contrast with the bright pink against the black and white. The bright and colored picture is simplistic but enhanced by the colors in order to emphasize to speak up. Even the stripes on the shirt of the top billboard goes along with the hands around the girls waits on the bottom one, even the arms are matched up which gives us closure in this picture, the two separate pieces is a part of a whole. The simple, light and dark contrast symbolizing good and bad. Even the spacing between the picture is carefully thought through so the wro separate billboards create a perfect square. 

Group Gestalt Activity

Web Site Axioms

This is what I like about this website; How easy it is to navigate to what you need, and the boxes all has the same distance between each other. This is a web page that is for a ski senter so they have their ticketing, calendar hours, school and all the important things you would look for right in front of you.

What needs some work: the one picture in the middle that is higher up than the others, the caption needs to be changed to fit into one line. Also having a picture as a background is not necessary a bad thing, but the picture is dominated by blue which makes it hard to read the name of the site, and to ee the like button.

The most important part of this website are the smaller boxes, they have the ticketing, ski school information and basically the reason why people visit the site, yet they are not on the mobile website. I do believe that more poeple use their phones to check this website on the go rather than on a computer, so they might have to work on that.

Chef Alfredo Menu

I was in charge of the menu, and one of the biggest issues with the existing menu is the size. What I did like about it was the Italian names for the dishes.

What I have chosen to do is to put the menu is a leather "book cover" that is the size of a regular piece of paper. This gives it the classy look and feel, like the restaurant deserves. Just like book, a menu is judged by its cover. The black leather does not interfere with our style guide, and I believe that any other colored leather menus will make it look fake or cheap, which is not my intentions.

For the actual content of the menu I decided to stick with the original Italian names, and made the font Niconne in accordance to the style guide, the english description below should have been in the font Georgia. To separate the the different sections in the menu, I went with a small black and white version of the two leafs used in the logo. The black and white choice is to keep it subtle. 

The size of the menu is now small enough not take up 2/3 of the table, but it is still big enough for elderly people, or people with some reduced visual usage to read what is written.

Mis-en-scene Mad Max

George Miller is known for directing all the Mad Max  movies, and one day on an airplane he had a vision of the 4th movie, and already in 1999 he created a storyboard looking like a comic book with 9 500 boards.
The job as a director is to oversee the whole production of the movie, and make sure that deadlines and budgets are being kept, as well as organizing the film crew to meet his expectations. For the our scene in Mad Max, and the movie in general the storyboards came in very useful, because everything was already drawn out for everyone, so most of the the crew had a pretty good understanding as to what their job was, and what the director wanted.
George Miller had already produced the first 3 movies, and had proved himself in those movies, there was no pressure for him in making the fourth other than putting his vision onto the screen. Some of the actors has commented on the scene that Miller told them to do the weirdest things, and they just went with it, and filming the movie was like living in his head. It all make sense as the the movie was done.
The first car chase unique because they filmed it in such an open space, they used the sand to their advantage, Miller got to blow things up, but flames everywhere to his liking, and I believe that is what made it another hit.

Compose your frame

I walked around that Holland building for a while and took a bunch of pictures, and this is the one I ended up being most happy with. The chairs line up with the rules of third, and also creates diagonal lines that almost vanishes at a non existent horizon. On the right hand side there are vertical lines as well. The picture itself reminds me of train tracks, and I feel like there should be a train coming at me in the middle. I guess that is why I chose the picture as well. The picture seems fairly symmetric between the right and left side, but not all the way, but is is definitely asymmetric from top to bottom. The chairs can also be leading lines, leading you towards the "horizon".

Design

These two printing ink packages are very different. And I am going to admit that I do have some biased opinion on Lexmark. But the simplicity of Epson is what drew me into using this as my example, you can clearly see the color of the printing inc, and the which number it is, and it does not seem to be a problem figuring out what you are getting here.

LEXMARK... 

So first of all, there is a black and white picture and a colored picture, with different numbers. I know from experience that there is only one cartridge in the package, so which one is it? I will give them credit for being true to their colors by having black and red as their main color. 

Contrast, Balance and Harmony

Paris, again. there is just something about this city and its monument that I cannot put aside. And I guess that is your psychological context, it makes me feel joyful inside when looking at this, and it simplicity amaze me, considering how complex it is at the same time.

When the tower was first build, a lot of artists and designers in France criticized the the building, but it has become one of the most recognized icon across the world, and a symbol of Paris and France. The ENTIRE country of France, is symbolized through one triangular monument, how fantastic is that?

Contrasts in this photo are plenty, there is the yellow light that is contrasted with the blue sky, while it is also light and dark represented in the photo. The texture of the building is made with light and shadows so you can see the stairs going 3/4 of the way up. Balance to me has always been symmetry, and the eiffel tower splits the picture into two halves, which to me is insanely satisfying. Lastly there is harmony, I believe the components of this picture works well together because the light and dark complements each other with, and there is not too much or too little of anything in the picture.

My Visceral Response

This is it. I have spend hours staring at this picture, trying to figure out why I love it so much. Stupefying. O.M.G!. Whatever you want to call it, this would be it.

This picture was taken in the beginning of July 2015, when my dad had given me a trip to France as a Birthday present, and we were able to take the train up to Paris and stay in this city for 2 nights. The first night was spent running on and off a nasty subway, and weird people that spoke a language that I cannot keep up with, and A LOT of walking. The night ended in front of the Eiffel Tower right before it started lighting up like a christmas tree. I dragged my dad up this sidewalk in order to get the "perfect" angle, and even though we passed trash and just about 250 ginormous rats on the way it was totally worth it.,

There is something about those vertical lines, that is created by the light poles and the people that is supposedly leading you towards one of the most known piece of art worldwide,  and the Eiffel Tower does not have the brightest light but it is still so prominent, because the other lights are blurry along with some of the people in the foreground, while the tower is very clear. But most importantly, the sky is the perfect kind of blue, because it's my favourite kind of blue.

So maybe I like this picture because going to to this place has been my dream since I was 12, and I took this picture myself, and it is probably the prettiest picture that I have managed to take, or that it bring back to many great memories of a father-daughter trip that is unforgettable.