To gain experience with the concepts of wireframing and prototyping, and to become familiar with app design for smart phones and tablets, we were sent out onto the streets of Austin to find a mobile vendor that could benefit from using such an app, and come up with the app.
The vendor I settled on was Fry Baby (recon can be found here). I felt that they would greatly benefit from a management app, and that designing it for iPad would be most practical.
I also felt that in addition to taking orders and keeping track of inventory, the app should also be the gateway to various social media networks in order to boost business.
We were given the hypothetical situation that St. Edward's University was about to hike parking prices to decrease the traffic congestion currently experienced on campus. Our job was to come up with an alternate solution, and use our design skills to create a proposal that could exist in a real-life situation.
With classmates Becky Escher and Barrett Kincheloe, we created a proposal that emphasized public transportation and biking through methods such as installing a bus pass kiosk in Ragsdale Center, and installing/moving bike racks to high traffic locations.
I created a guide to the signs of South Congress by going out and taking a lot of photos, processing them in Adobe Photoshop, and creating the map in Adobe Illustrator. I decided to make a sort of novelty map that is often found in tourist traps, for South Congress is often frequented by tourists, and it is a spot that is uniquely Austin.
Most of our time in History of Graphic Design was spent listening to presentations on various art movements, innovations in art and communication, and the creation of various art/design mediums. At the end of the semester, we were expected to use what we learned to trace the origins of a recent work of design.
I decided to do one of the international posters created for the 2010 film Black Swan. It reminded me of film posters created before 1970, and of posters typically designed for the European market. For a time, I was interested in pursuing the career path of film marketing, so my choice for this project was influenced by personal preferences.
This poster was created in Adobe Illustrator. The poster images were processed in Adobe Photoshop.
This children's activity book was designed to educate Sunday School students on fair trade chocolate. We were given the text content, some photos, and some map vectors, but it was ultimately up to us on how the content was distributed and expressed in the imagery. I decided to hand draw illustrate the photos because when I attended Sunday Schools at Methodist churches in Northern Indiana, many materials used to instruct us utilized hand drawn illustrations.
This was designed in Adobe InDesign. The illustrations were scanned, processed in Adobe Photoshop, then put in InDesign.
Dada was an art movement that was a reaction to the carnage of World War I, and the imperialistic society that caused the conflict. It started at as anti-art, but as late as the lead up to World War II, it was utilized for anti-war propaganda purposes. When it came to designing admission buttons for a hypothetical exhibit at the Blanton Museum of Art, I decided to emphasis this later development of the Dada movement.
The American War in Afghanistan is a forgotten war; you hardly ever hear about it, though it is still going on. The Afghan people have a long history of enduring wars involving the West, though more recently, they are involving radical Islamists. The country has been left in a pile of ruins, and is considered one of the most devastating humanitarian crisis in the world.
One of the most iconic images of the plight of the Afghan people is the portrait of an Afghan girl taking by a National Geographic photographer during "Soviet Vietnam" (Russian invasion of Afghanistan).
For Operation Enduring Freedom, the Afghan theatre of the Global War on Terror, I decided to use a U.S. soldier. Since middle school, we've been subjected to images of U.S. soldiers fighting in tan camos against enemies in civilian clothing.
For the Anglo-Afghan Wars that occurred throughout the 19th century and early 20th century, I decided to use the image of William Brydon from the Elizabeth Butler painting "Remnants of an Army". He was the sole survivor of an evacuation of the British army in Kabul; the army was of a size around 16,500. The initial wars were the result of a territorial grab race between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia.
The Queen's Palace has become one of the symbols of a rich culture that was destroyed seemingly overnight. However, it has actually been slowly destroyed since 1979.
This button design variation was created for the B-scene events at the museum.
This poster was the most difficult aspect of the project; it was the end of semester, we didn't have much time, and I was burnt-out design-wise. This was not my best work, but it was a valuable learning experience for it helped me later on develop a more efficient process of generating concepts in a short period of time.
The images on the buttons were manipulated in Adobe Photoshop. The whole buttons were designed in Adobe Illustrator, as was the poster.
