Here is the banner I created for the banner contest. I waited until it was over to post about it on my blog. I was inspired by the movie clerks for this banner. The prompt was “feelings about returning to campus” and the vibe was like kinda off, kinda ok, some good things here and there.
The typography training was more information with a short two question reflection at the end of it. Here were my answer:
I liked this font pairing. I couldn’t source what fonts they use but I like the combination of sans-serif with a slab-serif. In my own design work I have a particularly difficult time trying to pair my sans/bolded text with a serif font and end up usually with two sans-serif fonts. This one is an example of where I think they are working really well together despite being very different. It could be due to the fact that they are using two fonts for a primary text and then one other front for a secondary instead of only one for each.
For display font I tend to find myself liking really bold, tight, and almost western 60s groovy font. It feels really inviting and like a hug of a font.
For a serif font I love when they get really delicate and elegant with curves and thin lines:
For script fonts, I kinda hate these but the one that I saw was from a youtuber “Fran” who is an illustrator and she handwrites onto her youtube thumbnails and I found it to be really cute:
For sans-serif, I’m such a classic, I love the famous New York knockout font. I think it’s so cool and timeless.
For mono-type I feel as though I haven’t explored many to have a favorite but I like ALMA MONO because it doesn’t have the serif like the typical ones do.
I only found one step that needed an additional line of instruction which I noted above. Other than that this was a really good training. It’s very simple but a technique I had no idea about. It does a great job at keeping color and lighting consistent across images for a certain color range of a scene or environment. This was also kind of fun to just make and find images like “What would I see in a hotel? Or in a restroom?”
Here is what the end results of my iconography training ended up looking like. I did the scenario in the training of making it for the Design college page. That one calls for yellow buttons. I did 3pt strokes and no fills. For the most part I feel like everything turned out cohesive visually.
Project: AFR 303 Course Graphs
Client /Prof: Dr. Colon and Dr. Gordon
Completion status: Started September 21
staff guidance: Maddy Kaniewski
STA team members: Abriella Corker, Rachel Sacks, and Sheryl Long
Description/plans: Professor Gordon and Colon would like visual representations of content and stats discussed within their powerpoint lectures to be made into simple graphs and chart to enhance learning via a visual aid.
To be completed: September 27th
Maddy and I started off with designing and deciding elements of a template together. All the slides in the PowerPoints are on a black ground so we designed out template with that constraint in mind.
Once the template was finished, Sheryl, Rachel, Maddy, and I got together to discuss the first set of graphs to be made and went over together ideas on how to best represent the information within the slides. Here are what my two slides ended up looking like. They are two different shades of black background. Ignore that, it was just so I can work on top of a dark background. The actual assets were exported transparent for the professor.
Here is a chart that was already made but needed to be re-styled:
Athena originally spearheaded the creation of this KB. I did a review of the training and provided feedback however she has graduated and is now a full-time employee out in the world! To go over what heavy edits I did: I replaced the banner that was in there to one that was a bit more design-y and graphic book design-y to reflect the idea of the training. I cut out a lot of the written reflection parts and focused more on how to build out a brand system. I did leave in one important reflection and review of a brand she has in there because it was essential to getting a basic understanding before an STA does it themselves. I just didn’t think it was good use of time to do a lot of typing and reviewing and better for the STAs to jump in and start actively trying it themselves.
With that being said I did major editing to the activity itself. I made more clear what the brandbooks each need to include and what to build out. There are two different briefs to choose from. I also added my own example as the first STA example for this training so that our trainees can see what one of these prompts actually ended up looking like. Maddy looked over the edits and approved it so it is now ready for the STAs to start going through!
