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?!?

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:

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:

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.