times free press

Chattanooga is the Cherokee meaning for “to draw fish out of water”. Chattanooga was the name for a small Indian hamlet near the base of Lookout Mountain on the bank of Chattanooga creek. During the Civil War, Chattanooga was a center for battle, the river helped on that aspect as well. After the civil war, Chattanooga became a railroad hub, and contributed to the industrial revolution and Chattanooga began to grow. One thing that our city has is a long history of our newspaper. Every community has one; they keep track of and document history. Ours is known as the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Started in the late 1990’s when the Chattanooga Times merged with the Chattanooga News-Free Press. The Times, which was started by Adolph Ochs who also started and owned (and his family still owns) the New York Times. The Free Press is an unusual newspaper in that it runs two editorial pages, one leaning more liberal and the other leaning more conservative, reflecting the leaning of the previous standalone Times and Free Press. Their place of print is located in an old mill on the Southside of the city. When they remodeled the old mill they kept the feel of the building adding to the uniqueness of the paper and the city.  The newspaper today uses what is called offset printing, “it is a technique where the inked image is transferred or “offset” from a plate to a rubber blanket then to a printing surface. When this is used with the lithographic process which is based on the repulsion of oil and water the offset technique employs a flat image carrier on which the image that is getting printed obtains the ink from the ink rollers, while the non printed area attracts the water based film, keeping the non printed areas “ink-free”.” – wikipedia.org. This newspaper has gone through a lot of transformations all to its advantage and is a huge part of our Chattanooga life.  

http://www.timesfreepress.com/ 

id guide

Moving on… from the original idea of what  the ID guide’s purpose was, we each took on certain parts of logo ID’ing’ but its becoming VERY conusing. It is almost like the blind leading the blind. We know what colors are. Duh. Everyone does but after taking color theory a few years back it makes you think of color in a totally different way. You see what shades can “jump” and what it mean when a color is on a slightly tinted paper it can change everything. So already knowing all these things about color, Leslie throws in Pantone color. “Pantone, as it is today, was founded in 1962, when the company—at the time a small business that manufactured color cards for cosmetics companies—was bought by Lawrence Herbert, who had been an employee since 1956. He immediately changed its direction, developing the first color matching system in 1963. In 2007, Herbert retired from the position of CEO, Chairman, and President of the company.The company’s primary products include the Pantone Guides, which consist of a large number of small (approximately 6×2 inches or 15×5 cm) thin cardboard sheets, printed on one side with a series of related color swatches and then bound into a small flipbook. For instance, a particular “page” might contain a number of yellows of varying tints.The idea behind the PMS is to allow designers to ‘color match’ specific colors when a design enters production stage—regardless of the equipment used to produce the color. This system has been widely adopted by graphic designers, reproduction and printing houses for a number of years now. Pantone recommends that PMS Color Guides be purchased annually as their inks become more yellow over time. Color variance also occurs within editions based on the paper stock used (coated, matte or uncoated), while inter-edition color variance occurs when there are changes to the specific paper stock used.” Wikipedia.org. She also explained to us what it means to have a color on screen but when you send it to the printer it can change completely. The cool shade of green you once thought would be awesome, is now this muddy poopy color on paper. (just like what Wikipedia said). What were working on now is to make all the DON’Ts for our logo.

http://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/colorfinder.aspx

fast.slow.visual?

So word pairs… where to begin? Get out of the box first of all. It took me longer than necessary to wrap my head around this project. I think that it takes me longer than most people to get a project but I just have the hardest time getting away from obvious. I had some ideas that felt cool I just didn’t know how to execute them but I still couldn’t think of how in the world I was going to depict a motion. Emotions are the best. You can create those in a photo in NO time. But you throw in something that depicts a motion; it’s like throwing a wrench into a bike. I’m completely thrown. I didn’t go with my first idea of fast food and using that as a play-on-words saying that it is fast, but it can make you slow if you eat it all the time. I began to stretch that one a little too far I think. So I abandoned that idea. I began to work with a more literal idea. I then google imaged the word fast and slow and saw some un-usable stuff but one thing that struck me was a running shoe with a weight in it. I began to think about shoes and a fast or slow thing and thought about running and how certain shoes are better for running, like a running shoe versus a high heeled shoe. I had wanted to make them live together sort of by cutting off the front end of the high heel and the back end of the running shoe but after evaluating my images the one of the high heel that looked the best was the shoe facing the wrong way. After taking these images and working with them like was instructed, they turned out looking really cool and gross at the same time. I was happy with my end product. It felt very “owned” by me. 

getting in touch with paper

Choosing a paper for your project to live on is a seemingly easy task. Wrong. I never knew how much paper varied and how important it was to know your paper and when it has to offer you. One thing you have to think of is the weight of the paper and what will happen to the ink when it is placed on the paper. What hue the paper is and if it is a white paper, does it have a green tint? If so you wouldn’t want to print peoples faces on it or they will look like have some sort of disease. Something else to consider when choosing the weight is how heavy it will be once ink is placed on the paper. Like if you are making a mailer, will it make it too heavy to mail then making it more expensive because of how heavy it now is? So pretty much you need to establish a good relationship with your paper, feel all the different types, it’s almost overwhelming. Last week we were privileged enough to get to go to a paper supplier and learn about the different types they had there and hear first hand what it means to love paper and fully understand it. He showed us tones of paper and samples and let us take some home to keep on hand for our own record. He talked to us about the different weights and what happens when inks hit certain papers and what it makes the paper do. It was a really good source to now have and to feel comfortable and welcomed there as a young designer.

 

http://www.paperplus.com/

P.R.

Growing up and always being told everyone’s different, your just better at other things like carrying a conversation with a brick wall, make people feel comfortable, and take something ugly or a plain idea and make it into some sort of meaningful art. Pretty much my entire life was “Liza your just a people person, your just not good at Math, Science, English, numbers, dates, etc. and that is ok. Everyone is different.” Almost as though from about the age of 10 I was schmoozing my parents friends making deals, working a room, I knew all the words to every song on the radio after hearing it one time had a lot of friends but if you asked me what 3×7 was I couldn’t tell you to save my life. Even today I would more than likely hesitate. The only good grades I made in school growing up were in my art classes and my volunteer “class”. I quickly learned that it was ok to be an artist when I came to college and stuck with it, putting the Personal Relations (PR) idea behind me.

 

Last night we were privileged to attend a workshop seminar at Create Here for a talk on PR. It was fascinating I forgot how much I wanted to do that when I came to school. Janis Hashe from Blush came and gave a great talk sort of outlining PR and what you need to do to accomplish great PR for your small business. I feel like some of the most important things she told us were the DO’s and DON’Ts. The things that editors hate, how to follow up on something, and what the best ways were to reach people (marketing). – the outline of her talk was a GREAT thing to have to walk away with because it is an nice tool for us as young designers to have to go by if (when) at some point we need to promote ourselves. It was a great thing to get to be apart of.

http://createhere.org/

identity stds guide- harder than it sounds

When we found out our groups for this project I think there was a bit of animosity towards our assignment. We get to just process the rules for this logo? Didn’t sound all that meaningful and a bit unimportant considering the amount of cool work all the other groups got to do with the posters and the emails and advertising but after looking into all the things that go along with an identity guide, we kind of are one of the most important parts or this campaign. We make the rules, based on other things but essentially produce the guide that everyone has to go by when reproducing anything with our logo or name on it: how close to the edge it is, how much green and blue and red and black is in the actual colors and how big it can be and when it is that big what are the rules then? (All of that kind of stuff that I never used to think about when looking at a product or corporation, but now I’ve become slightly obsessed with.) After looking at so many different types of ID guides I feel like ours will be on the more simple side, mainly because were not making it for a huge international business, where as some were so large the needed a 5 inch binder just to hold all the information. After looking into what responsibility we have, makes our job feel more important.

printing…

When Gutenburg invented the movable type press I’m sure that he never thought that one day we would be printing in mass with huge machines with lasers and in color! Printing by definition is a process that applies ink or varnish from a printing plate to a substrate through the application of pressure. Modern printing technology also includes inkjet printing whereby the ink is sprayed onto the substrate. There are four main types of printing used today. It almost becomes too overwhelming having all of these options and having to choose one that best suites your design and feel you are trying to portray is exhausting. web printing is another type of printing and it uses stock that is supplied on massive rolls rather than individual sheets. There are problems however with these types of printing that make it a bit of an annoyance. Because when you get into a high print runs image quality can start to wear on the plate so that is when rotogravure comes in and is used instead. Personally screen printing is my favorite type of printing. originally this screen is made of ink and the viscous ink passes through the screen and onto the paper to display the design. It lends itself more to a type of aesthetic craft, and takes more time to reproduce. than say a laser jet printer etc.

what to say. what not to say.

So were meeting with our client tomorrow morning and we are presenting the best of the best logo designs we have been working on. Since we are presenting to a real client we had to look at what was good client presentation etiquette and what is the best way to go about it. I thought of my own obvious points but I found a list online.

1. Tell a story. -You do your research in categories, i.e. competition, the market… But the client will understand more quickly if you organize the information to support your overall message.


2. Present only what the client needs to make a decision. – Don’t inundate the client with data just to prove you’ve done your homework. Put backup slides in the report you leave behind.


3. Be flexible. – Even when you’ve pared to the bone, the client may not need to see every slide or march along with you in order. If interest flags, move on. If he’s ready for closure, do so. Adjusting in midstream proves you are responsive as well as confident.


4. Never overestimate eyesight. – If the client can’t read the slide, she certainly won’t get the message. Slides should support the spoken message, not be the message.


5. Don’t tell what it is; show what it means. – Create conceptual visuals to illustrate major relationships; use message heads on graphs and charts; explain the graphic in terms of the story, not the axis.


6. Deliver; don’t read. – The last time someone deliberately read to you, it was your mother, and she was trying to put you to sleep. A comatose client cannot be a happy client.


7. Look and listen. – Most of the content of any communication is nonverbal. Body language, facial expressions and tone of voice may reveal far more than the client’s actual words. When you sense hesitancy, probe until you know what is on the client’s mind and have responded. Too often we are so busy talking we take the absence of outright hostility as acceptance.


8. Act like a professional. – Your body language counts, too. Maintain an “up” posture; use open hand gestures (with elbows away from the body), look directly at the client and show him (through facial expressions, voice, energy) that you feel confident and positive.


9. Be a person. – Too many of us become abstract and machine-like when presenting. Use a conversational tone and spoken (not written) language. Smile when appropriate and let your natural sense of humor come through.


10. Plan ahead. – Consider whether one additional day of analysis is worth the potentially devastating impact of sloppy slides and uncoordinated delivery that can result from handing your partner transparencies warm from the copying machine on the way to the airport, or discussing who will play what role in the taxi on the way to the client’s office.

Well as you can see we have our work cut out for us. I think that just having these guidelines and having commonsense is the only thing you can do and go with it and know what and what NOT to say.

List found at http://www.strategiccomm.com/tencommpres.html

SOLD

Sold

A logo is something that 2 years ago meant nothing to me. The brand name and logo on clothes and cars mean that it cost a certain amount of money and some were better quality than others but that’s about the extent of logo thoughts I had. Not anymore. In one of my classes we are working towards “branding” and giving life to a local food guide for Chattanooga. As a class we are designing logo’s for this branch of Buy Fresh Buy Local. We have been going through this painful process of picking the ones we like better for weeks now and its finally coming down to the best ones. Personally I think that a good logo depends on the thing you are trying to sell. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be to come up with one. Your first instinct is to make it say was it is with pictures or something and then when you realize how gross that looks you change to something super simple (which in most cases is always your best bet) and then you want to embellish it with little things cause you think you need to when sometimes the best logo is  BLANK/BLANK and that looks great! But I think the hardest thing most people in my class including myself is that this entire thing is so “natural” that we want the logo to feel “natural” and one with the plants that we are selling with this food guide so we keep wanting to make it flourish when maybe the best design is one that is simple and to the point.

“i hope you understand”

where to begin..? we blog through my classes (my professor says it’s important for networking and getting used to being online) I agree. We have her class every tuesday and thursday so as a weekly assignment we get on here and write about something (a topic she has been over with us or something we are working on just to talk about it, what we’re thinking etc.) Today’s post for one of her classes was to talk about our buttons and postcards that we were doing for a websites design competition as a fun assignment and something different than the usual projects to strengthen our portfolios. The past few days have been a bit stressful in that class because not only is our professor out of town speaking at a conference, but the website got a little bit confusing and rejected a lot of our designs saying that it was jeopardizing the integrity of their competition. Long story short..? I’m not sure where it starts or ends.

http://10.netdiver.net/postcards/Eliza_Daugherty.jpg.php