catch video

a pitch for our multimedia experience system, "catch," a way for alzheimer's patients and their families to try to preserve memories together while they can.

the box

the standard screen. william wants to catch a memory.

he has five inputs. 4 digital, and 1 physical. he's inputting a physical object. 

he holds it up to the internal camera of the box's screen.

the camera focuses and catches the key.

next, he will teach the screen what the pressure sense of the object is. 

now the box can recognize when the key is placed on it.

three inputs are available for the primary description method.

they use the video recording to descrive the object.

touching the camera icon turns the recording on and off.

this memory has been caught!

later, william wants to reminisce.

he lays an object on the box.

this displays the memory map associated with the object, as it has been added to by others.

the mobile app allows william's grandson jacob to capture a memory on the fly, as well as scroll through the most recently added memories.

the hub, as seen through a website.

rollover states describe the two options.

twila wants to catch a memory.

she can add a new memory from her webcam, or upload from her computer.

she uploads from her computer. 

the photo becomes full bleed with the opportunities to add information about the memory. 

twila can circle a moment to tell its story.

twila adds her memory to the photo.

as more people add memories to the photo, these vignetted designs will allow each moment to tell its story individually.

rosedale identity & communication

this is a two-part initiative to unite the citizens of rosedale under a single visual identity that they can take pride in and that can represent them positively to the outside community, all while helping to facilitate communication between the neighborhood's many organizations & resources and the community members that they serve. this is divided into 6 components: a new identity system, environmental implementations, supporting materials, a promotional video, a kit of parts for branding further video productions, and a rosedale guide booklet of resources and directories.

Final Presentation


with love,
the superduperultramegaübergroup (michael armstrong, eli brumbaugh, abby carr, ashley einspahr, collin rausch, and jessi wilson)

recordbar research & strategy

kansas city's a great town for food, drink, and music, and kc's own recordbar is a great pick for all three. with delicious food, easy drinks, and live shows almost every night of the week, it's hard to go wrong. the iconic decor is classic: it's cool without being trendy, and fits the mood of the place; and the crowds aren't there for social posturing: they're there for a good time. 

there's only one problem: you'd never know from the outside.

the recordbar is in the commercial and retail corner of westport, 43rd, and southwest trafficway. it's next to first watch. it's next to a cleaner's. a dollar tree. an ace hardware. the half price books. and with the look of its exterior, complete with the bubbly blue and gold typographic logo, you would never know that it wasn't a retailer itself. everyone who reviews it online says the same thing: "i was so surprised." or "i never would have guessed."

the recordbar shouldn't stay a secret. even just driving by, you should be able to guess what they do, and how well. they deserve it.

Recordbar Research and Strategy

ux reflection

user experience has been a great class for me because it goes so deep. i really struggle along the surface of design, but i am enthralled by the deep and the broad: the research and the planning. the amount of behind-the-scenes and background work in this class was very rewarding for me, and i feel like i've learned well how to use those methods in my future work. we must never forget that we're not designing in a vacuum, nor are we designing for other designers. we're designing for people, with needs and wants other than simple aesthetics. we're solving problems, and in order to solve problems, we must first identify them, and not only that: we have to see how people are already trying to solve those problems themselves, so that we can move organically into that space and support them, rather than pretending we can jump in as outsiders and impose our thoughts on other people.

hand built final presentation

Hand Built Play Clay

closeknit app presentation

closeknit is designed to help you find and connect with other knitters in your area. whether you’re just looking for a friend or two, a quick meet-up while you’re already out working, or a formally organized circle, closeknit can help you find companions so you can chat, teach, get advice, or anything in between.

tailored communication

what is being advertised?

Citizens in Charge is a "citizen-powered advocacy organization" that supports and educates people about their right as American citizens to participate in their legislative proceedings through petitions, ballot initiatives, and referendums. They offer information about each particular state's policies regarding public legislative action, and provide a forum for networking and making contact with others that can assist in the process of lawmaking.

why target this audience?

Research has shown that urban chicken farmers frequently must keep a careful eye on their local laws and ordinances due to the fact that raising chickens in the city is frowned upon by those who don't understand the benefits of their lifestyle. Even when chickens are permitted, there may be unnecessarily stringent regulations that should be rewritten. Given these circumstances, it is in their best interest to be well-informed and well-connected in their local and statewide politics. Citizens in Charge, while not directly related to chicken farmers in particular, is a great resource for the politically active and those who want to take action but need backup. This makes a relationship between chicken farmers and the Citizens in Charge organization a very useful idea.

how does this ad communicate this message to that audience in particular?

This advertisement uses the rhetorical methodology of pathos to strike a chord. First and most obviously, the use of the constitution as imagery, particularly with the upward slant, is a reference to American optimism and the democratic way; in one motion, it acts as shorthand for the political process and also delivers an emotional response in the form of pride and nationalism. The use of green and brown as the predominant colors speak to the naturalism inherent in a lifestyle of urban farming. The tailoring of the message comes not just in the chicken silhouette, which anyone can comprehend, but in the targeted messaging of the copy. I am appealing to the protective nature of chicken farmers by demanding that they step up to defend their chickens against the political obstacles they face. By comparing the call-to-action of utilizing Citizens in Charge to a common behavior specific to chicken farmers (ie: locking the henhouse to keep out predators), I hope to help them realize that collective civic action is just as important to keep chickens safe as keeping out foxes and coyotes. When describing the organization itself, I was careful to expound upon shared values between them and the farmers, such as hard work, grassroots effort, protection of the family, and well-informed sustainable living.

knitting book final reflection

we chose a small book size because it was conceptually relevant in the hand motion of reading a small book resembling the motion of knitting, small and intimate in your hands. it was a challenge to reinterpret all of our information into a smaller size, however, because it had previously been quite large. more to come.

info arch project one

i analyzed an online news source and reimagined how it could better function in terms of intuitiveness and customization. presenting: an icon-happy web-app for dallas news.

vislang final project thoughts

School of Dollars and Sense

things we have learned:
•how to speak respectfully and sensitively about the issues of poverty without patronizing or presuming.
•how extremely difficult it is to get the opportunity to take pictures of children.
•how there is no easy solution to poverty, but...
•how effective design can be at solving communication problems.
•how even a tiny, well-considered solution could make a huge impact over time.

what else would you do to improve/expand the project?
•we would set out a regimen to improve accountability to the teachers, saying that sections of the book must be completed weekly or monthly.
•if the students have their work done and bring it in, their teachers could give them fake money.
•the event that happens when the rep comes to visit once a year could use this money for an experience and let them redeem it for prizes.
•in terms of design itself, we would redo the inside spreads to make them more visually composed and interesting.

final narrative project

final occupy kc logo build

the big reveal of my 5 second logobuild.



the conceptual thinking behind it works a little like this: the many, working together to build a unified collective (e pluribus unum, america!) which then has the capacity to broadcast its motives, hopes, dreams, ideas, and solutions to the rest of the world. idealistically, once the new collective, formed out of necessity, has achieved its goals, it may dissipate. it remains, however, invisible but everywhere, willing to rejoin together again at the first sign of renewed distress. in this way, even the way the clip is loopable is conceptually significant.

things i have learned from this project include:

how to batch import images into illustrator! (aka: how to use scripts)

further after-effectation

how to explain, cleanly and cooperatively, what politics in question are all about so as to avoid conflict
how to tread lightly around people who disagree with said politics even within context of a design project

as i understand it, we will be sharing these with the people to whom they directly relate. this means my file can be provided to kc occupiers to tag on the end of footage, if they wish! although there are a good lot of us around here doing it, so it might get a little confusing trying to get them to use one choice.

enjoy! stand up in solidarity!

dare to be square!

let's be honest... at least half of us came to art school just so we wouldn't ever have to take another math. am-i-rite-guys?

but... what if math could be a little more fun? or at least, branded so adorably that you couldn't help but smile at it a little bit, and maybe even have a brightened outlook on the matter from that point on?

...this!

union station interactive timeline

over the course of this project, erika and i have learned a lot about being flexible, about the plasticity of concepts and the occasional necessity to gracefully scrap a great deal of research in favor of simpler models.

in terms of new knowledge acquired, i think i (eventually) got a better handle on what narrative means within the framework of graphic design. those very basic definitions of narrative and story from the start of class made slightly more sense now in terms of a literal, visual story, than they did through kinetic type. we've learned about editing, transitions, pacing, and structure from cinema, and had to consider the levels of order and complexity in cinematic storytelling, from the mise-en-scene of momentmaking, to the temporal and narrative structures, arranging events in space and time within their own context and also within the context of the viewer.

i also learned what the different stages of wireframing are, from skeletal all the way to pretty designed screens, and, of course, i'm always learning more about the ins and outs of the processes of making, including trying hard to grasp how to succesfully move an afx project from computer to computer and designer to designer without forcing it to populate with color-bars like a dead tv channel.

we also learned just a great deal about the sociopolitical & economic climate of kansas city in the 1990s, including the carrying-ons of one clay chastain, whose insistence for light rail has still not waned.





here's the storyboard for the linear narrative of the penny. obviously we deviated a smidge to make things look nicer digitally than we had anticipated but other than that, we followed pretty faithfully.

final peter nero!

here is where my folly poster has ended up! i'm really pleased with it. i was having a lot of trouble with type, and my imagery was just a little too flat and unfinished. i completely redrew all of my images to include better detail and specificity, and to heighten the angles, allowing my type to integrate more effectively and more interestingly. 


on a less formal note, the most exciting thing about my choice to use a bird imagery is how many different reads there are for its meaning. i began with the metaphor of piano keys being related to birds, and in this, you can see an allegory of music spreading its wings: music taking flight. then, there's the speed and agility of a bird, the lightness of its movements like a master's hands across a piano keyboard. there's also the read (my original intention, back in the rhetorical matrix) of the literal magical transformation from instrument into dove, this ability nero has to make magic from music. the dove itself, of course, is wrapped up in its own connotations as well: it's a stately bird representative of peace and love. the pianodove, then, is a symbol of the flight of music, the magic, when played by an artist as talented as nero, and the powerful good that can come from it. 

[jessi] language

through this project, ("a lyrical anthology...") i sought to find a new method for analyzing gertrude stein's tender buttons by charting her syntactical structures. this book is a musical score of 10 poems, generated through the intentional derailment of the flow of her text. the melodic nature of her poetry is revealed through her refrain-like repetition of sentence structures, both inside single poems and across all of her text. acting towards the text as a conductor might the orchestra, i chose to call out hierarchically words and phrases from within the pieces that, when read across the duration of the book, begin to construct their own poem. it was my intention that the experience of retrieving the book be a reference to old fashioned (victorian) music boxes, from which a rudimentary instrument could bring out a beautiful tune. ideally, when presented with the box-experience and the typographic compositions in conjunction, the reader will be unable to read the text without assigning some semblance of pitch to each word, given their height on the page. in this music box, the only limit of the rudimentary instrument is our own imagination. 

tender buttons: final motion graphic!

when we last left off with my gertrude stein animation, i was just getting started and just getting excited. in a few brief class periods i've gone from there to a final piece! that shouldn't be surprising. that's how this is supposed to work. in any event, for a quick catch-us-up, i've gone from this:

 through this:

to... (drumroll)

gertrude stein's tender buttons is famously believed to be an exercise in sound over sense, and meaning through repetition. i graphed her words by their grammatical parts of speech to see, visually, the repetitive structure of her syntax. the poems are graphed using a system constructed to maximize readability from left to right while the y-axis is organized top to bottom as follows:
articles
adjectives
nouns
conjunctions
prepositions
pronouns
verbs
adverbs

this structure i could convert into do re mi scales, apply to a musical key, and in so doing, produce the music of stein's poetry. a music box come to life!

that! my first ever after-effects trick. hopefully the first of many in a series of ever-increasing impressiveness, complexity, and technique.

as for an obligatory "what did you learn at school today, sweetie?" address: over the course of this project, i have gone from opening after effects once or twice by accident and panicking when i saw its icon bouncing on my dock to being able to actually do a handful of things in it with some level of accuracy and understanding! i've also really experienced for one of the first times how well a legitimate concept can carry you through an execution without as much waffling as when you're less sold on your own idea, which itself was a lesson about a new way to generate a concept: what kind of information can i extract from this source? through what new system can i look at this information? what, then, can i do with that information in the system? i would love to think gertrude stein, with her highly, dazzlingly combined analytical and instinctual creative method would be intrigued.

i just realized i never blogged the end of image class!

eli and i presented first in our class, and i had only just been shaken out of a coma-deep desknap, so while it was not a bad presentation, it was not exactly as stellar as it might have been. here is what we showed, in nifty scribd form.

for our "expressing a condition" work for national geographic's 6 degrees could change the world, we wanted to focus on the narrative of mankind's careless destruction of the planet. between the various applications of imagery, we sought to create an easily legible story from the  relationships between the images. from the figure and his gas can, to the oil-dripping globe, and the empty can, to the stopmotion staccato flames of the dvd menu, and eventually the charred husk and ashpile. this story is not just in the passive voice. it has an actor, an identity-free villain that represents the carelessness if not malice that we all demonstrate towards the environment in our quest for energy consumption and our domination of nature. it was critical to our concept of personal responsibility that we not only take our own photos, but also do our own physical damage, to remind ourselves that we are not excluded. our images are also linked through the use of a red screen bar, often with a sense of progression up or out of the frame, representational of the feed-forward cycle of warming and destruction increasing exponentially and getting out of hand. our image system has the push the national geographic needs. it's not neutral and distant. it doesn't candycoat. it may even be accused of being melodramatic because of the simplicity of its narrative, but it is not afraid to implicate the viewer, or themselves, because we are all responsible and we are also all capable of doing some good work to fix things. 

Six Degrees Could Change the World Presentation


our final digital imagery, just so you can see a bit more clearly than in the context shots, are as follows:


outside covers, back and front

interiors, left and disc-tray right

disc label  

the poster 

and finally, here's a screen grab of the dvd menu. the background is a stopmotion animation of the globe burning all the way down to the grey pile of ash depicted in the tray under the disc. this stopmotion was a good example of what pros probably call "rolling with it" because we had a video camera that, as electronics often do, went from an ostensibly full battery to a low alert to dead immediately after we lit the globe, and that's not really a thing you can do twice. so instead we snapped lots of photos and stitched them together which, honestly, probably was a more interesting formal solution than just film in the background, anyway.

i really enjoyed this project because i love collaborative work. i just feel like two or more designers working together can create so much more than the sum of their parts, and eli and i reinforced one another's work and had a pretty excellent partnership.


now: summertime!

sophomore review

(this photo is appalling, but i haven't imported from my camera yet. i'll swap it out when i do.)

my presentation went rather like this:

good morning, everybody. i'm jessi wilson, and i think that design is all about storytelling.

this puts me in a good spot, because i'm a creative writing double major. i'd like to take these few moments to describe my experience and growth as a designer iand communicator through the lens of writing. 

i see there being four main ways i have been utilizing this design/writing relationship, heavyhanded or subtle. literal creative text, emergent narrative, character study, and type as image.

first came first: dot book. a project devised to teach us to tell a story without spelling it all out in words. i ran into immediate brick walls, so what did i do? spelled it all out in words, and then built my project from there. this worked really well for this project because my book is about growing up and family cycles and the story helped me get at the emotional heart of what i wanted my piece to be about in a way that mindmapping wasn't doing. 

i soon realized i could use my writing as more than a crutch, such as during process for the haiku project. i could use my writing to enhance my design! i blogged almost exclusively in haiku. the taxonomy of markmaking that matthew jacobs and i made first semester was heavily inspired by the cyclical nature of our haiku, and the looping animations we were building for it, which i'd like to show real quick. for our taxonomy,  we created a structure of categories not simply out of sets and subsets but along a storyline, and provided with it, a set of haiku i had written myself to work cooperatively with both the structure and function of the book. 

i've also taken opportunities to supplement my designwork with personal wordplay like this in places like my infographics. at this stage in my career, unweighted by provided body copy, i was able to give my information graphics, which detail a collection of facts and stats that new or curious djs might need or enjoy knowing, some extra personality. 

speaking of personality, an aspect of design storytelling I've really been excited about lately is the idea of character building. whether this is the character of my work itself, as in my pop star exhibition, or my roommates and me in my photo colorbook, or even if it's the constructed character of your target audience, giving a designstory a subject can heighten the experience so profoundly. i was able to make my formal decisions for my dj magazine only once i considered the sort of hip, young music fans who might want to become a dj that i considered my target demographic. luckily for my interpretation, the next step in this process was to develop some aspect of this same article for the ipad, and i from what i hear hip, young people are all about the apple technology. 

character development has a lot to do in my mind with the idea of emergence of narrative or information. since beginning the study of semiotics at the start of the year, the way i've conceived of imagemaking has certainly changed. i've gotten excited about the practice of building information around and around a shape until the shape itself becomes clear. my tolkien identity poster is a good example of this because the assignment itself was to use symbols and indexes to convey something that could much more easily but much less descriptively been gleaned from text or direct iconographic references. 

as for emergent narrative, eli brumbaugh and i really played with cross-platform relationships for our 6 degrees project. each moment of the system implies an aspect of a bad situation all on its own, but when everything is seen within the context of the rest of the system, the story of a character (character building!) dousing the globe in careless flammables and setting it alight. this was exciting to me because it represented a real push off from just starting with or even using personal text: it was communicating just as much information and even nuance as a story might, only instantly, and through only images.

finally, here's where it starts getting really crazy: when you take the text out of type, and let your type stand all on its own, as an image. this was a huge part of our typographic campaign and really shook what i had thought possible to do with type. the abstraction of text into just expressive letterforms that can still get across an idea, if you're paying close attention (perhaps the y letterforms of my neuron shape could stand in for the question "why?", favored as it is by both designers and scientists, the characters i had been working with as my audience for the campaign.

at the start of the year, i was clinging to my writing as a crutch, maybe even an  alternative to some amount of process, but by now, i've been exposed to and utilized so many different methods of communication, and witnessed so many different relationships between the writing process and the design process, that i feel empowered to intertwine them now, not because i can't work any other way but simply because i keep getting so excited about all the possible interactions and how both of my disciplines can strengthen one another

thanks!










the ensuing critique was really good and flattering, and gave me a few ways to keep pushing this writing/designing/communicating  dialogue with puns and specificity and lots of layers. also, i got a bonus compliment on craft, which was super exciting.


now i'm a junior! oh my goodness.