The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 760 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 13 trips to carry that many people.
This was a little project I did for fun during school. It was intended as a self-promo item, but I ended up going with another idea. School was hard work, and lots of tears were shed over the past couple of years. I thought it would be funny to bottle them to give to people to prove how hard we all worked.
I finally got time to work on this some more so I made the bottle into a fake ad. I have gone through so many versions of this project, but here are some earlier iterations:
Here is the final version of the label and another version of the final ad layout with a brighter, more orange label. I drew the flourishes and graphic elements using Adobe Illustrator (except for the loop at the top, which was a glyph).
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It was early on a Thursday morning and I needed twinkle lights. Like the kind you string up on a Christmas tree. A bizarre thing to be looking for, it was nowhere near Christmas. But I needed a string of lights to act as lighting fixtures for my group’s scale model for a school wayfinding project.
The only place near my apartment that I figured might have them and would be open at that time was Target. A little tingle of excitement rushed through me.
I have a confession to make. I freaking love Target. Which is strange because I usually abhor the “big box store” shopping experience. It’s stressful. It’s crowded. It’s sometimes a little smelly. But I don’t feel that way about Target. The stores are bright, clean and airy, not crowded like most other box stores, and colorful. Target’s use of color inside and outside their stores makes me feel like I’m being transported to some magical carnival land of fun and savings. Even the logo, the happy red target, reminds me of a ferris wheel. They even have popcorn there! For me, Target turns the mundane shopping experience into a fun and transportive little getaway.
(I don’t even get upset when kids cry around me at Target. The tears just roll off my back. That is how you know I love Target.)
So I hopped into my car, my keys merrily jingling in my hand, and headed to Target on my way to school. I was in a hurry so I went directly to the electronics department. The place was bright and empty and had that quiet hunger of an empty store first thing in the morning. Most of the staff were stocking shelves. The girl working behind the electronics counter wore her blue hair in short pigtails and looked round and happy. I asked the girl where I could find twinkle lights, she whipped out her tablet and looked them up and a minute later she was showing me to the seasonal lighting department. As we were walking the freshly polished and gleaming white path, she told me that my twinkle lights were on sale and asked me if I had ever tried the Target Cartwheel app. As a student of all things mobile and a new mobile user, I got excited. She told me it was free and gave me a brief synopsis on how to use it. I am not going to lie, I was pretty stoked to check it out.
I looked the item up, added it to my list, got my discount at the checkout and I was on my way. Pretty slick.
The login screen and the screen the cashier scans so you cheapskates can save yourself two bucks.
Skip ahead a few weeks. I was doing a little late night shopping and brought my four items up to the cash register. However, I had forgotten to search for these items on my phone to find out if they were on sale. The cashier told me that she thought at least one of my items was on sale, but to get the sale price, I had to pull up the deals on my smartphone.
“You’ll have to do a search. You’ve got two Merona tops and one pair of Denizen jeans,” she said over her shoulder, as she was ringing up my order.
“Wait, um. Where’s the search function again…?” I muttered, as I fumbled with my phone. The cashier politely waited while I jabbed at my phone with my sausage fingers until I found the search icon. “Okay, got it. Just a sec, how do you spell ‘Merona’?”
The cashier walked me through the scan function on my phone (which I learned pretty easily), with which you can scan your items to determine whether or not you get a discount. I stood in the bagging area, digging through my stuff to find barcodes.
The man behind me in line looked either confused or irate, or both. He just stared at me. I apologized to him and asked the cashier to suspend my transaction while I juggled my wallet, cash, car key and phone, and proceeded to dig through my items to find the tags. It was a little embarrassing. I realize this was my problem because I should have remembered to look the items up before I got to the register, but it brought up a bigger question: didn’t these discounts used to just come off automatically? I never remember having to clip coupons at Target before. I also thought there simply has got to be a better way of streamlining this process. I can’t imagine how frustrating this would have been if I had been purchasing more items. Or, heaven forbid, I had been shopping with children.
I finally got all my items scanned and checked for discounts, and saved myself a cool 4 bucks, which was totally not worth the effort.
As the cashier was handing me my receipt, she said, “You should download the app for more savings.”
“Um, I thought this was the app,” I replied, confused.
Then this was the kicker: “Yes, but there is another app for coupons.”
Wait, what? Two separate apps? This can’t be true.
When I got home I did some research. I discovered that Target has their main app (just called “Target”), which performs functions more in-line with the brick-and-mortar store, where you can make online purchases, locate which aisle a product is in, access the weekly flyer, find store locations and look for coupons. In June of 2013, they launched Cartwheel as a separate app and microsite (cartwheel.target.com) that just takes off additional in-store discounts. There is also a Facebook app, which I believe performs the same function as the Target mobile app, but I am unclear about the value of having a Facebook app for this purpose.
As a new mobile user, I am also confused about why everything isn’t all in one app. It is hard enough for me to remember to check one place for savings, and now Target is asking me to sign up for two. This is definitely taking the fun out of shopping.
Sure, it’s easy enough to add items to your savings / coupon list, but the search function isn’t great and the fact that the customer needs to remember to browse multiple apps in advance of a visit to the store in order to take advantage of savings doesn’t work.
Don’t get me wrong, this won’t stop me from shopping at Target. I still think it’s a carnival fun land of amazing savings, but this app issue is a head scratcher. After all, they have robots that return your shopping carts. I am really surprised a company of this size doesn’t have a more integrated system. We can only hope that Target does some further revisions and works out the kinks soon.
Target, I think a wheel just fell off your cart.
Target’s Robot collects their shopping carts for them so lazy Americans don’t have to.
When a friend of ours from Vancouver, T. Paul, passed away, I hadn’t been to a funeral or memorial in a very long time and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I didn’t know whether it would be dressy or casual. I didn’t know if there would be a formal presentation or if we would just all hang out or what. It took me a long time to get ready that day.
The memorial was hosted at a friend’s home, and the attendees were each asked to bring an item to share. I didn’t know what to bring, but I had never tried to make butter tarts and I thought they would be perfect. I got all the ingredients together and made a huge batch. They weren’t just good — they were a miracle! I felt like a domestic goddess! I was so proud of myself for learning how to make them for the first time! I was super excited to share them with my friends.
On the morning of the memorial, I carefully packed them into a big huge box and waited for my ride to pick me up.
At the time I didn’t own a car, so my friend, Bill McNamara, offered to carpool. I was the last person to get picked up. As I was cramming myself and my huge box of butter tarts between two other people into the back seat of Bill & Diana’s 2-door Volkswagon Rabbit, Bill said, “Whatcha got there, Padge?” To which I proudly exclaimed, “I made Butter Tarts!” Bill raised his eyebrows and without skipping a beat, he said “You can’t get drunk on butter tarts, Padgett.”
Recently, a staff member at my school (who happened to be Canadian) suddenly and tragically passed away. I was asked to bring a dessert item to share at his memorial. The choice was obvious! I had to make butter tarts. I told my classmates the story above and Izzy and Kim made this for me! What a thoughtful and amazing present 🙂
This is a movie poster I created for ad class. We were asked to come up with a one-word title that was a noun and use photo and illustration. In my brainstorming process I came up with way too many words (I love words) and ended up with a short-list of probably 15. I couldn’t make up my mind which one to use. On the day of class, I decided on the spot that it would be a movie called “Souvenirs” and it would be about hoarders.
I had a lot of fun curating the objects on the “shelf” and coming up with a graphic solution for this poster. Turns out maybe I’M a hoarder because I found most of the items in my junk drawer at home (including the teeth), and the “wallpaper” is a piece of paper I had bought for another project from last year. The composition was photographed together in cool, very late (bordering on too late) afternoon light, using a piece of tin foil as a reflector. I then used Illustrator to manipulate it to look like a painting, and added the finishing touches in Photoshop. I was hoping to achieve a “paint by numbers” look, as if these objects were precious to the collector, but trashy and a little creepy to anyone else, to whom these items didn’t carry the same emotional attachment.
What surprised me the most about this project was the emotional connection I had with the composition. It took me several hours to curate the objects and several more to compose them in a way that I hoped would show the character of the collector. I sat for a long time looking at it and even left it for a day before photographing, allowing time for a few final adjustments. I even told my roommate that looking at this composition made me feel sad. I really hope that sentiment is translated to the viewer.
And here is a “the making of” photo 🙂
Introducing Hermit Kingdom Wildfire!! This is the final version of my layout for the book cover for my Art Direction class. The assignment was to shoot a photo ourselves to present to a theoretical client to show our idea for a book layout. Upon approval of this mock-up version of the book cover, a professional photographer would then step in and perform their magic.
My hand-drawn type was inspired by 1960s album covers, specifically Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass, but I also wanted it to have a sweeping, adventurous, western feel. I had so much fun creating this type. I scanned the final inked versions and image traced in Illustrator. I then pasted them as a smart object into Photoshop and applied various effects.
My original concept for the photo shoot was to have it be a crazy hippie guy who was on a spirit quest. Here are a few photos which I used for inspiration, followed by another iteration of the cover that I didn’t end up pursuing.
I learned a lot about composition of a photo for layout purposes. Mainly, that many of the photos I had taken were actually no good for a book cover because out of habit I had shot them in such a way that there was absolutely no blank space to feature the typography. Total bummer, because I got some great shots of Dustin in a shopping cart that I wasn’t able to use.
Here are some further iterations of the cover. I quite liked the first one with the bright light of the skyline bleeding into the letters, but felt that there may be readability issues so I opted to darken the type. I then decided to make the type a little bit smaller for the final version.
For the final version, I will probably revise to move the figure into the shot a little more, but I am pretty happy with how the layout turned out and look forward to doing more hand-drawn type.
Introducing River Hog Flapjacks! This has been the most fun part of my school experience so far — this making up of companies. For my second package design assignment, I decided to do a pancake mix. In Canada, sometimes a pancake breakfast is called a “lumberjack breakfast”, and so I decided to incorporate a lumberjack concept. In my research, I found that “river hog” is a term for loggers that use river water to transport wood, and I thought that sounded like a great name. I wanted to design something hip and sophisticated, something unique that would stand apart from the competitors on the grocery shelves. I opted for a dark color for the box and a modern typeface combined with a more old-fashioned looking script typeface. I even cooked the pancakes and took the photo myself! This was my first time photographing food for a label, and I have to say I was pretty impressed with the results. Thanks to my teacher Tom who challenged me to find the button on my computer that makes things look good.
This is my latest project for my Graphic Productions class. It was a poster for an exhibition called “Question Reality” for an art gallery called Space Between. This was totally the coolest and most fun thing by far I have ever made on a computer, and I had so much fun making it. I even bought a really cool book on how to tell stories with photoshop compositions, and I can’t wait to make some more.
Whoop whoop!
Our first task for our package design class was to pick a jar or round container and come up with a product name. I chose cocktail sauce, because I knew it would be challenging. In my research for my creative brief, I discovered that the American version of cocktail sauce was invented during prohibition and it is suggested that cocktail dishes (shrimp cocktail, fruit cocktail, etc.) were invented as a creative way to make use of unused stemware. For my concept, I decided upon 1930s supper clubs, which was the birthplace of cocktail sauce.
And so gave birth to Diamond Horseshoe Cocktail Sauce, named after a well-known supper club of the 1930s.
I had a lot of fun sketching for this concept; looking at art deco, movie posters, billboards and a lot of 1920-1940 signage. I picked up the typeface “Lemon Chicken” for free on fontsquirrel and altered it to give it more of a vintage flair. The flourishes, fish and diamond logo and shell seal are all hand-drawn. The two bottom images are the seal for the lid of the bottle and the wrap label for the neck of the bottle.
Here are a couple of my final sketches:
And the finished product:
