occupy kc logo build

if the rock you've been living under still hasn't heard, there's a movement going on the united states, and even internationally, called and in support of "occupy wall street." in super-duper quick, design-blog-friendly terms, it's about how money works in the states and where it goes. more specifically, occupy is protesting economic inequality in the united states, corporate personhood, the explosively widening gap between the have-way-too-muches and the haven't-quite-enough-to-get-bys, and the role that cash plays in our ostensible democracy. (which is to say, it plays one. which is the problem.) the rallying cry of the occupy movement is very simple: the 99%, the overwhelming majority, have been taken advantage of for too long by the 1%, whose hold on the money in our economy keeps growing and growing and making it more and more impossible to ever reverse that inertia.

for more local info, or to get involved, may i please direct you to occupy kc's website, or for a bigger look at the movement overall, there is occupy together.

in any event, in our narrative in sound & motion course, tyler has given us the option to, rather than choosing a branding/identity project for which to create a motion logo-build, work with the occupy kansas city group identity.

we are creating 5 second motion graphic pieces to reflect the identity of the business/group of our choosing. my first four concepts, in extremely loose sketch form, looked like this.

wherein a chorus of we-s build together to form the 99%.

wherein tiny occupiers occupy kc, overtake it, and then liftoff.

wherein the hand symbols of "stop", "peace", and "protest" represent occupy.

and wherein a line of letters spreads defensively across the screen to represent resistance.

i ended up moving forward with the first idea, the we-chorus. my revised storyboard looks like this.

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!

packaging process

first ever digital things, when both catfood and mathkit were running:

math kit was the winner! i just couldn't get into logos cat treats. no offense, cats.

the next set are the pieces i printed and cut out to mock up my plastic kit holder.

still, i was concerned about that ugly plasticky thing that was my original package structure. it was in pretty poor shape even when i bought it in the first place, and it wasn't looking any better for the process so far. it certainly wouldn't be fair for my craft grade to go down because of the shoddy craft of my package being out of my hands, right? so naturally i did a quick total overhaul of my structural design, through trial and error and rapid prototyping of paper models. which suddenly gave me several new surfaces to design, rather than front and back alone.

the pages i printed to construct my new trifold package looked rather like these:

with the last one being folded up into boxes along the interior panels to hold the tools.

it may not be tremendously practical in terms of presence in store or in terms of fast production (okay, so it's not very practical...) but i do think it turns out quite handsomely and is not necessarily any easier to steal from than the original package i had purchased from target myself.

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.

koenig initial and revised grids

friday was one of those pleasant days when a professor reconsiders the schedule and gives you more information and more time to think before moving on. for which i am grateful. kidwell gave us another demonstration on page layouts and grid structures and ratios etc (and i got all excited about fibonacci, like i always do) and then, thankfully, gave us another shot to redevelop our grids. thankfully because here was attempt uno:

to quote kidwell, although not necessarily about this: "eeehh."

here is grid and implementation number two. much less painful looking. in my mind. i hope. 

half page sketches

the next step was half page sketches, building those concepts into a system for the rest of the package.

this set was based on the idea of building a character out of the tools in the kit.

the next set is based on the idea of my square as either a spokesman or a design element.

lastly, the cat treats that used the icon-set to illustrate four important facts.

both my classmates and i were over the first set before they were even out of the gate. and you can see which ones were liked in the last set by the little critiquestars. i couldn't let go of my square, though. i loved him. so i kept him in the running, too. and maybe even his little friend.

vislang packaging thumbs

step one for our package redesign (after the show and tell aspect) is to come up with 8-10 options for each mode of appeal that the package doesn't currently use. my bra package began as logos, so i have ten pathos labels, relying on feelings:

luckily, the beauty industry is pretty passionate, making pathos easy. then, ten ethos labels, relying on the authority of the seller:

which, also luckily, was pretty attainable because the maker of this bra is a division of maidenform, the company who patented the first ever bra in the first place.

next was my geometry kit. it started out as ethos, so i redesigned it as logos:

which was fairly boring in my mind focusing just on accurate depictions of the contents, and pathos:

which was a lot more fun, if a little tangential in places, filled with crazy geometry characters and "the human touch." (foreshadowing: i got to take two of these to the next step: the figure made out of the tools, and the little square character, or, if i may, squaracter.) next was redesigning my cat treats, which, unfortunately, started out as a really lame pathos. this left ethos:

which was all about the awards, and the seals of approval, and the established brand, etc etc, and then finally, logos:

which focused on what the treats were, what they were made of, and those facts and stats that riddled the old package. (i took the foursquare cat treat possibility along, too.)