Assignment 03: Informative Series

INSPIRATION

Facts

American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine

This page presents several startling statistics about prescription drugs such as "51% of FDA-approved drugs have serious adverse effects not detected prior to approval and prescription drugs cause 100,000 deaths annually."

Prescription for Trouble: Common drugs, hidden dangers. Tens of million of people at risk

The article on this page explains some of the adverse effects of some prescriptions and also attempts to explain why these mistakes are made in prescribing these medications. Both article listed add effective statistics to the issue that when citied in a poster or ad will grad the attention of the viewer and increase the validity of piece.

Grids

Redesigning The New Yorker, Pt.2: A Visual Critique

by KT Meaney

Throughout this article Meaney explains the influence grids played when the redesign of The New Yorker took place. What is most interesting is how the author writes of need to break away from the grid to add interest and update text. Adding the idea that breaking a grid can be effective in adding interest is important when designing to avoid becoming locked into a specific area or idea.

Design Campagins

The Hardest Working Presidential Candidate Logo

by Armin

This page explains the Obama campaign logo and how it is slightly manipulated to reflect different areas of voters. Also, there is a line of Christmas ornaments and each state has the logo represented within it. An article such as this will help to keep similarities between the different pieces within the series while keeping it simple and distinct.

L'Oreal Poetry Harp

Small Design Firm Inc.

The colors used in the campaign for the L'Oreal Poetry Harp is a good representation of how using a limited color scheme can be extremely effective. Also, the monochromatic color scheme changes in hue from piece to piece. Each piece is still connected because the hue chose are similar to each other.

Assignment 02: Persuasive Poster

Beginnings: 

For this assignment I set out to design a poster that persuaded viewers to think more carefully about what prescription drugs they are putting into their body. In order to achieve this, I utilized a parallel of the fairy tale Snow White and the connection between the poisonous apple and the witch with her drive to become beautiful. I chose to stay simple with the elements and draw attention to the image of the hand holding the prescription drugs by allowing a large amount of space around the image. Also, the hand is the brightest element of the piece, this in turn draws more attention from the viewer to that area as it sits forward.

Critique: I really would have liked to use a much larger image and poster size to create a large impact on the viewer. This would help in enforcing the severity of the issue. However, the image began with a photograph that was then manipulated in Photoshop to create the witch look, the original was not large enough to satisfy a larger poster.

Moving the secondary text lower and reducing the size of the type would help with the hierarchy of the overall piece. Also, making the hand look more like a hand, such as adding an arm would help the perception of the image.

Assignment 01: Informational Book Review

• Beginnings

For this assignment I focused on the intensity of the strong works exemplified throughout this book. In doing so, I arranged the pieces in the Microsoft Power Point presentation by the sections outlined in the book. To do this, I pulled from the colors and layouts utilized by the original designer of the book. 

• Critique

Given the use of Power Point as an application, I feel a strong sense of accomplishment in this design as a whole. Throughout the presentation, there is a strong sense of unity in how the similarity within color and text is repeated in each representation of the chapters within the book. Also, there is an attention to detail that was followed when presenting the images pulled from the book. Each image was scanned in at a high resolution and brought down to be suitable for screen presentation.

However, the limitations of Power Point left me to decide to create layouts in Illustrator and then utilize a PDF format to display them. This turn, left a slightly less crisp look, although on screen is less obtrusive.