Visual Communications Fall 2021

In today’s digital world, it has become necessary for communicators to use visual tools to communicate ideas effectively. In this course, I learned how to research, apply and critique typography, color strategies, digital imaging, design principles, and visual trends. Building upon past design experience working with adobe products.

Logo Improvements: Bay Magazine

9/26/2021:

Logo redesigns are interesting because they are up to the interpretation of the creator. Everyone can be inspired by a different aspect of the logos purpose. When working on this assignment I tried to imagine what Bay meant to me. Being from Maryland, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge immediately came to mind. I wanted to come up with a way to symbolically represent a bridge while keeping Bay as the main emphasis. I chose a serif font, similar to the style used in common magazines such as Elle. With a serif font I was able to use the shape of the lettering to create a bridge structure in the background. My biggest struggle came with if I were going to include the word magazine. So many of today's magazines have names iconic enough that they do not need the term magazine to recognize. Therefore I used the same font style in a slightly less emphasized way. Most importantly, the overall layout could work with or without the word magazine.

Typography Based Poster

10/24/2021:

For my typography based poster I decided to focus on my favorite holiday, Halloween. Freeform has a 31 Nights of Halloween showing throughout the month of October. The Jack-o-lantern has been constructed out of the showings for the 2021 year. This includes, Day of the week, Month, Day, Time in eastern/central, if the movie is a premiere, the movie/television series, and year it came out if provided. The main focal point of the poster is the jack-o-lantern which is the main symbol of Halloween. Being the symbolic heart of Halloween and main focal point of the poster, I deemed this most appropriate. In order to settle on the colors, I started by creating a spooky vibes Pinterest board, then experimented with creating color pallets from my favorite images. I chose the candles image because the color pallet was a simple analogous grouping. It had the tones I was going for. I wanted to color the pumpkin close to natural in color with illuminated face detailing. This was to be my dash of excitement, whereas the rest of the poster was muted with the monochromatic blue hues. Because the overall theme of this poster was meant to be spooky, I included a simple dark gradient in the background representing the sun slowly rising after a truly great spooky month.

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Logo Design

11/07/2021:

For this project I decided to work on creating a logo for my department at Spin Master. At Spin Master we are broken down into many different departments. On a previous internship at a toy company, I noticed that each department had their own logo. There is no logo for the department I work for, the Outdoor team. The team I am on is so new they have no icon identity. Therefore, I saw this opportunity to create a logo for my team. To start, I decided to take a look at the main logo for Spin Master. This is a simple look that has a basic color palette of Blue and White. I wanted to show that this logo could exist in the Spin Master family. And so I created a replica background of a Blue Oval with a Large White Bounding Box. The font I changed up slightly, but kept it as a Sans-serif. The biggest add to the logo itself included a literal watermark of water! One of the primary focuses of the department I work for is the pool toy and water sports category. Because of this I added the pool waves into the design. They act as both watermark, and underline for the “Outdoor” team type. This changed for my final draft. One of the primary focuses of the department I work for is the pool toy and water sports category. Because of this I added the pool waves into the design. In my rough draft the waves were mere watermarked and not the focal point. I changed this in the final draft to replicate the “S” feature to bring the water icon into a better visual hierarchy. While I wanted to explore more variety of options for this logo, realistically I had to keep it simple, and keep the coloring consistent with Spin Master especially with the individual brands being of greater variety.

Branding Trend Research Project: Craft Breweries

11/07/2021:

My interest in craft breweries stemmed from a previous internship with a glass packaging company. There I was introduced to branding in both physical form and labels themselves. It was not until this summer that my cousin married a craft brewery heiress did I discover the trend in label packaging solutions. Although I examined these breweries for both unwritten rules in place and how these rules are challenged and broken, it is important to note that each logo above had its own unique identity. As previously mentioned, craft breweries are a very interesting topic, in the sense their brand language and identity is unique in form and style. This is the case for many other industries as well. In the craft brewery case, there is a great importance on heritage, and self expression. Craft Breweries themselves are experimental in what they do, and so their logos must be creative and constantly breaking the rules of what we expect from beer itself. It is the unique bottle label that draws the eye of the consumer when looking for those hidden craft gems.