AAD Community – Page 23 – Evelyn Thorne's ePortfolio

Collect and Analyze Materials: Newsprint and Magazine Ads

When I lived in Portland, I lived by The Portland Mercury and Willamette Week. I was running a blog on free and cheap things do to in Portland (Porltandia of the Free) and I spent a lot of time scouring theses magazines looking for events. When I moved to Eugene, I kept a lot of the old issues partly for sentimental reasons and partly because of the awesome covers.

Both of these magazines are well-known for their covers, but they have very different approaches to the style of these covers. I often mix the two magazines up. One magazine has better coverage of music events and the other of community events, but I can never remember which is which. What I can tell you is that while the Willamette Week’s cover always matches their content (main article), the Portland Mercury’s cover is all over the place. Let me show you what I mean.

Here is one of my favorite covers for the Willamette Week’s in August of 2012. The article was “When Stacks Attack” about the cost debate for the Multnomah County Library. The cover is a great piece of art but also very related to the topic of the article.

Here are some covers for The Portland Mercury. These covers not only have nothing to do with the main article, but they’re also confusing (and/or terrifying). I often spent a lot of time thinking about why The Portland Mercury picked these images. I believe that their goal is just to showcase local artists, but I also feel this sends a mixed message. The cover of these magazines are their main branding technique. And while I always read The Portland Mercury, I sometimes felt uncomfortable picking one up because of the cover. However…

This is one of my favorite covers of all time! It makes me laugh every time I see it. I loved it so much, I showed my friends back in California. Talk about spreading your brand through word of mouth. But also…

The Willamette Week sometimes also sent mixed messages. While the image did match the content for this cover, in order to hide the graphic content on the bottom, they put a giant add for Cirque Du Soleil over the it. Kind of an ironic choice. Stop being broke! Buy Cirque Du Soleil tickets! Either way, both magazines need to be aware of what messages they’re sending because it has a large affect on their brand.

Final for Info Design: Presentation

Assignment Description: Students shall create a presentation based on their flowchart.

I created a Prezi for my field guide website. Click full screen to see it larger.

Reflection: I really enjoyed using Prezi. It is a very intuitive product, so it was very easy to create a presentation event though I’d never used Prezi before. I especially enjoyed the Google images feature, which allowed me to easily plug in pictures (as you can see in the Informal Art Practices slide). I think the most difficult thing about Prezi is fitting all your information into such small slides, especially for the circular slides. I did have to use Powerpoint to create the graphs and then save them as jpegs, so I could plug them into Prezi. I tried my best to make every slide visually interesting and concise. I really feel that Prezi was the perfect choice for my website. It allows people to get a quick overview of the results of my survey with a quick interesting visual presentation. This also made me distill all my information down to these small slides, thus helping me filter my findings.

Display Ad

Assignment Description: Students will create a display ad using their brand to promote an event, activity, services, or recognition of their organization. Students are introduced to common advertising campaigns, venues, and specifications.

Here is my Display Ad for my Cultural Administration project Grapes of Craft.

Note: this is my old Display Ad. I have since re-done it for my Graphic Standards.

Click to see image better:

Display Ad

Reflection: This is the project I am least proud of. Hence, why I redid it. I had a hard time thinking of a design for this ad. In the end, I made a fairly simple ad. I made 3 planes and included the proper information, making the event and date the main focus. I had to edit the image of the wine glass in Photoshop so only the red color was visible. The hardest part was actually coming up with a short description of the event, but I think if I saw this ad, I’d go to the event. I actually spelled everyday wrong, which has been fixed for the new ad. Shows how important it is to have editors.

Brand/Logo Awareness

Brand/Logo Awareness

Assignment Description: This exercise is meant to create an awareness of organization branding and features that succeed in brand/log design.

I decided to pick political logos because these logos are not only designed to advertise but to mobilize. They need to be easily recognizable and transferable to any medium in order to reach such a large population. In fact, I’ve heard that before a presidential candidate picks his or her running mate, he or she first designs a mock logo with the Vice President’s name before making the decision. In the case of comparing Obama’s logo to Romney’s, I prefer Obama’s. This might be because Obama’s logo is more established, but I also think it functions better as a brand for his campaign. For example, the red and white lines look like a rode disappearing into the future while the upper half of the O looks like a sunrise. Both of these images connect to his campaign of “Hope” and “Change”. The Romney logo confuses the eye, which has the effect of making it look 3D, but why? Furthermore, the Obama logo seems to function better on it’s own. You could stick that logo on a button and everyone would know what it stood for, while the Romney logo would probably need further definition.

The “Rock the Vote” logo is different in that it is specifically designed to attract young voters. I think the bold sans serif block type face is a good choice for this purpose. Of course, what makes this logo so ingenious is the use of the V in “vote” as a check mark for voting. I also think the strong diagonal up through the lettering implies the power behind the motion of voting (both literally and figuratively). Although when I was looking for this image online, it seems that there are not strict graphic standards for this logo because the image ranged quite a bit. The one thing that remained consistent was the red and black coloring. It may be because this logo is designed to empower democracy that it is subject to democratic usage.

This logo is even more specific in that it is designed to target only Oregon voters. I personally think it is brilliant because the “OR” double functions as a symbol for Oregon and as part of the message: Vote or Vote. The message itself perfectly represents the Oregon Student Association’s full campaign slogan: “Want Change? You’ve got two choices: Vote OR Vote.” However, this logo was very hard to find on the internet and what I did find, was not at all consistent. I cropped this logo from a larger picture that included stars hovering around it (hence the little black triangle on the left). What’s great about this logo is that it’s very flexible (can work in any color or size), but you need to have some standards in order to make a successful brand.

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