I should probably just staple this to my forehead

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Procrastination Station

Yeah. It’s pretty self-explanatory.

The assignment to create a warning sign was by far the easiest design assignment from this week, but I also learned a surprising amount getting it done.

Creating the sign was easy enough: I found a simple Hard Hat Area sign, drew over the original text with white and red, respectively, and then slapped some new words on there (and yes, that is Arial. It’s a warning sign, it needs to be readable, not pretty). A few adjustments with the scale tool and voila! One more assignment down.

Like I said though, I learned a lot here. Attempting to fit the word “Procrastinating” on the sign made me realize that not only does a warning sign have to be legible, that legibility depends on what words you’re using. Words that are too long won’t be read, especially on street signs when people are whizzing by in cars. There’s also the ever-important issues of color and placement; if you don’t use colors that stand out in contrast to each other and if your message is cluttered, it’ll also make it impossible to read. On a warning sign, that’s more than essential, it might actually be life-saving.

It made me realize just how much work goes into creating the little design elements we see around us every day and take for granted. Somebody (or a couple of somebodies, or a committee of somebodies) had to sit down and figure out what would be visually striking, clearly readable or understandable (in the case of signs that just use images), and could be easily replicated over and over again. Someone figured all of that out, spent hours or days or weeks designing it, and now it’s become part of our cultural landscape.

How awesome is that??? I think it’s awesome.

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So much digging we’re gonna hit China!

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I FINISHED AN ASSIGNMENT FOR THIS WEEK. I REALLY DID.Except I screwed it up and did a general bumper sticker instead of one for our radio show because I thought you were supposed to do both. Hopefully I can do the second poster and it’ll count as 4 stars overall? Maybe? PLEASE?!?

I CAN DIG IT

This is my ds106 radio swag. It’s pretty… well, okay. It needs work. But there’s a lot of thought that went into this somewhat lackluster design.

My inspiration for this bumper sticker came from the website itself. Behold:

Inspiration

See all that gray and white? The similar font? The fairly minimalist design? I am in love with all of that, and I really wanted to try and incorporate it into an effective sticker.

The makeup of the sticker was already pretty clear in my head starting out: I wanted to use the phrase “I CAN DIG IT” in big capital letters (after the iconic intro bumper you hear every time ds106 radio starts up), and I wanted to separate the first and second half of the phrase, and the top and bottom half of the sticker, with something akin to the line on a heart monitor. That symbol is often used to represent a musical “beat,” and it also implies that whatever it’s representing is a life-sustaining force—perfect for ds106, right?

My first challenge was creating a sticker that would look good on a car with a dark or light paint job. You can’t see it on my white-themed blog, but the sticker has a white border around the gray, meaning it’ll show up just fine on any color of car:

Look ma, I've got a border!

The next big challenge was choosing a font. Font is right behind placement in terms of importance when you’re designinganythingwith words on it, so it had to be perfect: easily readable from a distance, interesting and quirky to reflect the course. I went with a font called “EXCESS,” which also mirrors the one used on the website. As I was adjusting the text to fit snugly against the border, I realized I rather liked the way the whole sticker looked when the text was attached to the border at the top. I’m not sure I quite like it anymore the longer I look at it, but it might be an effective design choice for another project someday. If nothing else, I tried it out to see how it would work and learned from that.

Speaking of font, I used a differnt, smaller font for the “#ds106″ phrase because I wanted it to be distinct from the rest of the sticker. It needed to stand on its own as a unique element so people would understand that it signifies something else—a new piece of information that’s related but not the same thing. The goal is getting people to realize that the hash symbol should be used to find more information about ds106 on Twitter. I chose a font that was similar geometrically to the main font I’d used (it takes up space in the same way) if not stylistically so that it wouldn’t be too jarring having both on one sticker.

Finally, the stupid heartbeat monitor symbol. I looked up how to draw straight lines in GIMP and, after trying to freehand the lines from memory, ended up finding a reference for the heartbeat monitor lines as well. Turns out there’s a very specific way a healthy heartbeat looks on an electrocardiogram, and it’s so prevalent that it’s been ingrained into our cultural consciousness; we may not know how to draw the lines from memory, but man is it obvious when they’re wrong! Definitely reinforced the importance of using reference images, even for little details.

Overall, I think I’d like to keep tinkering with this till it’s perfect; for design stuff that’s especially important, since the way you use every pixel of space changes how your message will be viewed. The heartbeat line needs to be a little lower, mostly, and I’d love to come up with a bunch of these with different background colors. For now, onward and upward to other assignments!

… like maybe the one I was actually SUPPOSED to do this week. Bleh.

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