A response from the National Park Service

Since both Leigh and I have the same National Park Service contacts and in a sense the same project (Muir Woods Winter versus Summer Solstice promotions), we received the same email from them tonight. An excerpt:

...often there is music and a local storyteller. In recent years, young people have enjoyed a shadow puppet play featuring characters from the woods. The event draws hundreds of people (many locals and most are families…the whole event is outside so those with small children often find it too cold)... a similar event, on Summer Solstice, is held but it is at Muir Beach to view the sunset and honor where Redwood Creek meets the sea. A bonfire is built, stories told and songs sung. Often there is an art activity...the event draws locals and families. We often think about how to do outreach to draw in more people to these events but since they are too large anyway, we generally conclude that we’d like to help others “sponsor” and organize similar events in their neighborhood parks.

Hopefully, I was speaking with earlier has access to her co-worker's personal photos, to increase my inventory of visual resources for building this site. With this new information from Mia Monroe (the quote above), I now have a new approach to promoting this event, in that I either have to create an informational backdrop for the event and not necessarily a promotion for it, or to promote the parallel events that they want to sponsor in San Francisco.

On the technical side, I hope to spend this weekend trying to animate with CSS, since it's more disability- and usability- compatible than Flash is.

Visual Resources

I'm still uncertain why my target demographic is specifically made up of urban children, tweens and teens. I'm still waiting to hear back from the Park Rangers about which photos are available to me as well. But I've been looking at materials and aesthetics that I thought might be considered traditionally appropriate for this client, so they are listed below.

Slightly twisted: Poked Studio produces graphics best described as youth-oriented graphics that have been given a subversive edge. For today's cynical youth:

[link]
[link]

Reacting to Urbanity: French graphics house E5 produced this infographic-heavy video for Royskopp a few years ago. I thought that contrasting the mechanical sameness of everyday urban life with the wonders of natural solitude might make for a memorable interactive experience.
[link]


The incumbent: Michael Schwab. Virtuoso with gouache. Need we say more?
[link]


Constructivist meets humanist: I've always liked Doug Fraser. He renders massive, tangible forms that are still warm and personal. Sort of a counterpoint to Mr. Schwab, above.
[link]


Aesthetic Apparatus: Nothing says event graphics like silk-screening or letterpress. Always liked this firm's work.
[link]

Minisites: I didn't look at as many minisites as I should have. But I love the tone and responsiveness of the Mini Cooper site, which spawned this mini-site. Find out what your car fun footprint is (get it, carbon footprint?):[link]

Hopefully a well-placed phone call tomorrow will get me some demographic targeting information that I am looking for from the NPS.

Research: Muir Woods

The core of what is called Muir Woods is made up of thousand-plus year old redwood trees. Naturally, other varieties exist but the oldest, largest, and most notable are redwoods. This time of year is supposed to be one of the best for visiting, as conditions in the forest are the warmest they will be all year. As the forest is overseen by the National Park Service (but partially operated by a third-party concessionaire), it has sought to preserve the character of the area by prohibiting bicycling, camping, and picnicking. A variety of animals, mostly nocturnal, are seen throughout the forest, but due to the density of the canopy, the shaded conditions make finding food difficult. The woods are named after conservationist John Muir, whose fondness of this park is widely documented.

I have not yet made the fifteen-mile trip to Muir Woods but plan on doing so very soon to gather photography, and to get a better sense of the messaging.

Portfolio Link, revisited

It turns out in order to get my DDS Session 2 notes in the right chronological position, it was easier to recycle my post concerning my portfolio work. I'm sure there was a way to backdate a post but I'm trying to keep the blogger.com hacks to a minimum (more on those later as I add them...woot!).

And before you ask...yes, I used crop marks as a design element for no good reason. In my defense this was back in June, while in the afterglow of Type Survey 2. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but almost certainly will change when I get any free time at all. On with the show:

[PDF portfolio link]

DDS Session 3 Notes

Agenda Our classes are more or less built on the backbone of a timed agenda, which is a refreshing change from any of the other design classes offered at the Academy. We don't stay absolutely faithful to these timelines but it does help to know what we are doing ahead of time...especially in a night class...keeps the neurons firing! So this class was 30/90/20/40: review, creative brief and questions, break, and a discussion over the next work assignment.

The creative brief This session featured a guest speaker, who also represents our new client, the United States National Park Service. George Su is both a designer at the National Park Service and on Wednesdays, attends MFA classes for New Media at the Academy. After a his presentation about the parks, George answered student questions about a variety of park events and services. These questions allowed us to select from the list of park programs, and determine the focus of our digital design project (a mini-site).

Choosing a client My selection was the event called "Muir Woods Summer Solstice." This annual event occurs on the longest day of every year, usually around June 21st or 22nd. George explained that this event targeted urban youth specifically as the primary audience for this event. It made sense at the time, though now I wish I'd asked why the audience was so narrowly defined. Fortunately, he did give me the contact information for the administrator of the event, Mia Monroe. Mia forwarded my information on to Sarah Koenen, a park ranger who has so far offered to gather digital photos from past year's events.

Insight Currently, my only concern is getting enough information about the event itself to build a conceptual backbone for the mini-site. Visiting a national park has a certain appeal to a certain population, but I think I'd be doing the client a disservice if I didn't delve just a little deeper into the minutiae.

Kelly Goto on design, getting things done.

I'm still going through the Web ReDesign strategy videos on lynda.com. Though I'm closer to the end of the series, it is really insightful on so many more levels than just digital design. My favorite parts of this series involved billing, time management, audience ethnography, and usability testing.

The first two of these segments have an obvious appeal. When it comes to justifying creative time and managing those resources, painful decisions are often involved. Some of these include when to discount jobs for new clients, or setting up which clients' work should be a priority over another.

The third segment I listed, concerning the ethnography of a designer's audience, is especially resonant with third/fourth semester MFA/GR students at the Academy. One of the thesis-development-related methodologies we are exploring in Visual Communications Lab involves this same building of audience profiles, in order to more effectively focus the appeal and relevance of our respective messages. As noted in the discussions of that class, the AIGA itself had produced a primer on ethnography, and sent it to its members about a year or two ago. Without any formal training to understand it, it simply sat on my shelf. I'm excited to be able to tie in these myriad resources that I have apparently been overlooking for too long.

The last segment listed doesn't specifically relate to user testing as I noted, but rather speaks to task prioritization. Goto notes Stephen Covey's "Secrets of Highly Successful People" and uses this table to explain why designer's don't do user testing:



The "a-ha" moment occurs when she notes that, by this diagram, most people are said to be actively ignoring everything that is both important and not urgent. I think this is a terrific insight. I'm going to start evaluating my time usage based on this standard, with the goal of moving more items onto the "urgent" list that I can accomplish quickly.

Like cleaning up this blog, for example.

DDS Session 2 Notes

Software surprise We started class by noting the number of students who had dropped the course. I guess there's something really discouraging about a class that takes place the night before the "widowmaker" of MFA courses (Vis Comm Lab). Overall, there was a lot of good news in this session. First, Mauro told us that our class would actually be learning to use software-specific skills in addition to our introduction to digital design strategy. This was a good news for all of us, who did not want to use more elective or directed study units for an introductory DD course. Through specially discounted and limited accounts at lynda.com, we would have access to lessons on Photoshop for the web, Dreamweaver, Flash, CSS, HTML, and a bit about planning and interaction design. We also learned that we would be doing some campaign work (more on that later).

Presentations This class was also where everyone showed the first stages of their blogging efforts. Blogger.com makes it easy to add widgets and sidebar elements that tie in different parts of your digital life, with access to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, RSS feeds, or anything else you can think of. Overall, lots of eye candy and inspiration from everyone's pages.

Brief for week 3 We learned that we would be meeting a representative from the National Park Service the following week, to discuss which events we could pick to develop a mini-site for. The time spent on this project could be counted as volunteer service time, and could lead to implementation if enough money could be budgeted for it. A real world project in an introductory course was a pleasant surprise. Then we were shown this project development diagram to give a better sense of how the next few weeks would proceed:



Let the fun begin.

digital design studio goals

Since we won't be working on any software-tool based training or exercises in the Digital Design Studio course, my expectations are solely in having a better idea of what digital design is, and what it can become. I'm really interested in the MIT Media Lab/Negroponte/McLuhan/Wired theories about the effects of interactive communication and how to leverage these ideas to better communicate with an audience. Even though we won't necessarily be doing any code-based work, I hope to get some ideas about effective interface design, setting the pace of a story or message, and similar concepts.

online design inspiration, 1

What prompted my interest in Flash-based design years ago was the work of Joshua Davis, who built a website called praystation.com. The site, designed very minimally, was an almost-daily showcase of visual effects techniques built solely with Flash technology. As time went on, the daily experiments (which were included with source code) that existed as components to use in the interactive products of others became increasingly more complex and expressive.

What John Maeda (formerly of MIT, now department chair of graphic design at RISD) began years ago with his programming-based graphic experiments for clients like Shiseido lives on in Davis' myriad animations and exhibitions, in the same pioneering spirit as well.[link]

design inspiration

"My ads [for the film "The Man With The Golden Arm"] were so reductive, they became metaphors."—Saul Bass

Few designers really work like Saul Bass anymore, as a storyteller and illustrator first. How fortunate, then, are we these days to have New York-based designer James Victore around to make our metaphors sing. [link to hillmancurtis.com]

personal inspiration

For one reason or another, I have yet to fulfill a small fraction of my traveling goals. Matt Harding, on the other hand, has accomplished a lifetime's worth of world travel, twice, six months at a time. For those with a sense of unease about the state of world travel as an American, he offers this:

Melissa and I got in a car wreck last week...I turned off I-90 and was merging onto I-5 when a car zoomed up behind us...we felt a bump from behind and had an instant to brace before the car spun around in the left lane and the tail end smashed into my door, hard...The experience has reinforced my conviction that I am not going to die while visiting mountain gorillas in Uganda or chasing humpback whales in Tonga. I am either going to die in a car accident or from heart disease or cancer.

And so are you. And you, and you, and you. [link]

first things first

Hello! I'm a working/learning designer living in Oakland and doing everything else in San Francisco. Normally, I'm posting to another blog or to Twitter, either of which may show up in the sidebar as RSS feeds in the near future. For all class notes and projects related to Digital Design Studio at AAU, I'll be posting here. Welcome!