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.