Linda McKenna, as a DS106 colleague, has an amazing flair for design. This is evident when one looks at the layout of her powerful blog entitled “Never the Same River“, together with her creative assignments that I have witnessed her submit and share as part of this amazing Digital Storytelling (DS106) course.

However, Linda is not laid-back to the point where she just picks and chooses typical assignments that others have prepared for the course. Rather she “pushes the envelope” and after great thought submits assignments that she has creatively crafted to challenge her colleagues.

Today, I will attempt to complete her “Design” assignment entitled “Minimalize Your Philosophy” which she outlines below:

Pick your favorite quote OR make up your own phrase which describes a philosophy that you try to live by. It can be about love, friendship, family, education, culture, health, charity, etc. Design a minimalist poster depicting the concept. Extra challenge: Try to include a unique element that makes it YOU. Don’t forget to explain your thought process.

Background
As a retired educator, I believe that I might qualify as a “Life Long Learner” and this favourite phrase might be what we hope all our students will become.

Like Linda, I struggled to find a domain name that I felt best represented attributes that my wife, who is also a retired teacher, and I shared. When I checked to determine if our proposed domain name was available, I quickly found that “lifelonglearner.com” and “lifelonglearners.com” were already taken. I had to unfortunately insert hyphens between the words so that “life-long-learners.com” was in fact a unique domain that I could register and purchase.

I started playing around with different logo ideas that I thought might best represent Life-Long-Learners.  Perhaps the alliterative nature of our domain name might be represented by “triple L’s”. Our younger son, who has a “creative eye”, created this 3-D cube representing the three “L’s”. However, our son was quick to point out that this logo was only “a short term solution”. He suggested that once we had thought carefully about the logo design, and what we wanted it to portray, he knew of a rather creative process that we could explore. He hinted that, with a small investment of funds, we could tap into the creative talents of designers from around the world who would compete to provide us with a powerful logo to represent “Life-Long-Learners.com”.

My wife and I spent at least a month deciding what images we felt best represented the idea of “Life-Long-Learners.com”. We agreed that we did not want any cartoon-looking design but rather we wanted a professional looking logo. Furthermore, we felt that it was important that the design have an educational aspect to it since both our careers involved K-12 education. I hoped that we would be able to acquire a blog header logo and perhaps a similar design for an accompanying business card and/or letterhead.

A World-Wide Logo Design Competition
Once we had a clearer idea of what we wanted, our son suggested we investigate how 99designs.com might facilitate our logo development. For readers, who want to get a quick overview of how the 99designs contest works, I recommend you watch the 1 minute video found on their web site.

We began by creating a design brief which helped to identify the components that we wanted in our proposed “Life-Long-Learners.com” blog header. We then submitted our brief and paid up-front for the design and the related services. We felt that this investment was reasonable because, if at the end of the week contest we felt that no designs were what we wanted, all our money would be returned other than a service fee.

During the contest week one should be prepared to enter into a very engaging, collaborative process. We had creative designers from all over the world including Afghanistan, India, the Philippines, the former Soviet Union, and the United States, begin displaying their proposed designs based on our brief. Some logos could be immediately rejected while we provided feedback, by ranking the vast majority with from 1-5 stars, indicating how pleased we were with the way the blog header was developing. In addition to providing the star ranking feedback, we were also engaged in additional messaging as we suggested subtle changes and asked for slight modifications as certain designs evolved. At the end of the design week, we were very pleased with the more than 75 innovative designs submitted and the dozen or so that we short-listed. Being somewhat anal, I prepared a PowerPoint slide presentation, which included each of the possible short-listed design choices on a different slide. We then invited several educators to form a judging panel. Each member viewed each design, on its own numbered slide, and wrote down a 1-10 ranking value. After all the potential designs were reviewed, we tabulated the panel results, and then through much discussion determined ranking on our the top three.

Our wining “Life-Long-Learners.com” blog header design was created by a very talented young woman, known as “ola-nik“, who is a Fine Arts instructor in the Ukraine.  Needless to say, we were very pleased with her creation and her willingness to make modifications to the design as it beautifully evolved.

Logo and Philosophy
Although, one may scroll back up to the top to see our “Life-Long-Learners.com” blog banner, I thought that it was important that readers be able to read both our interpretation and view our logo in close proximity. To better understand the meaning and philosophy behind our logo, I have quoted directly from my earlier April 15, 2010 blog post entitled “The Meaning of Our New L-L-L Logo“:

I am so pleased to showcase our new “Life-Long-Learners” blog logo. Obviously, the implied message in our title is that learning should continue throughout our cradle to grave adventure. As the font emphasis increases in the three words “Life”, “Long”, and “Learners”, so too should our knowledge continue growing during our lifetime. However, it is our new logo which appeals to the educator within me. The logo illustrates the three stages in our human development – child, adolescent, and adult. Learning should continue through each of these individual phases. More importantly, the logo portrays that through communicating, collaborating, and “putting our heads together”, each individual can benefit from the ideas that others share. Together, we can become true “Life-Long-Learners”.

Our header logo would not be complete without including our motto “Ancora Imparo!”  This remarkable phrase was made by Michelangelo long after he had sculpted the marble statue “David” or painted the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. At 87 years of age, Michelangelo uttered “Ancora Imparo!” which translates to “Still, I am learning” or I am still learning”. Imagine such a profound statement being admitted by this artistic genius who recognized that, even in his latter years, there was still much more to learn. As such, “Ancora Imparo!” seems to be a very fitting motto for our blog and a mantra for all “Life-Long-Learners”.

An old adage states that “A picture is worth 1000 words”. Without a doubt, our “Life-Long-Learners.com” logo and my related gravatar, convey much behind their minimalist design.

Now …  if I could only learn to minimalize my writing style.

Take care & keep smiling