Sigh…as if I wasn’t already geeky enough just by virtue of being enrolled in ITP. I had to go and double my nerdiness factor by using science as a medium for departure this week.
For my ICM midterm I collaborated with Jacki and we decided right off the bat that we wanted to do something educational. We eventually ended up choosing an element compound game.
You can see for yourself what we ended up withhere. Drag the elements into the petri dish to try to make Sodium Chloride and Hydrochloric Acid; hit the space bar to refresh.
We came a long way considering that we were only given a week, but of course there’s still a ton more to do. As of now, none of the other compounds work (partly because we still have to resolve an issue related to compounds that require multiples of a certain element), and the button that’s hanging out at the bottom lacks functionality. We also have more ideas up our sleeve(s), so stay tuned…
The construction part of our little handometer was definitely the more challenging part, but ultimately it proved pretty satisfying. There were two parts that we focused on. First, the stuffing (and FSR-attachment) of the glove (materials pictured below):
And secondly, the construction of the actual device, the boxy part of it that would give the strength readings and also give our hand a nice steady support. We focused first on the board that would give the reading. We found some nice slabs of scrap wood that could function as the base and sides of the structure and then found another piece to be the top. On that last piece, we used the laser cutter to write in the three different levels: “Ouch”, “Firm!” and “Wimp”.
Those three ping-pong looking balls functioned as our diffusers. They were hot-glued to the wood and covered the holes we drilled for our LEDs. With the balls on top of them, the light from the LEDs would be more nicely diffused, and would give us the light-up effect that we were going for.
We stuck our little Arduino and breadboard into the box that we had created, making sure that all of the wires fit through (it took a bit of soldering to make sure that all of the wires were well-connected, just FYI)….
…and were pretty happy when we discovered that the wiring still worked:
(It’s impossible to show all of the troubleshooting that went on, but we ended up needing super-bright LEDs that would fill up the entire plastic ball, so we said sayonara to the ones that I showed in the first post).
Confident that the circuitry would still function correctly within our woodwork, we got another slab of wood and laser-cut the phrase “Nice to Meet You” onto it. This was the board that the hand would be stuck to…
like so.
So by the end of that day, we had the basic outline of our final product, minus all the bells and whistles:
Niiiice. So the next day was all about filling in the details. Like the color on the words….
And the filling in of the hand (we named him Ferdinhand, silent “h” of course), so that it (he?) would feel realistic…
Buying a larger FSR, drilling a hole for it through the board, and then connecting the FSR…
and finally, drilling all of the boards together.
And all of that work came together into one final product:
Nice to meet you, indeed.
Check out our final video to see little Ferdinhand working successfully from start to finish (or actually, finish to start). Credit to Alessandra for making it.
And for the curious, here’s a shot of the code. Click to enlarge.
Creating a logo in a week for the program that you are enrolled in is a bit of a daunting task. And if anything, the fact that the program in question is ITP only makes the task that much harder. I mean, come on…I have trouble defining ITP myself. Our full name (Interactive Telecommunications Program) doesn’t provide any sort of hint at the stuff that we actually do up on the 4th floor of Tisch. And though the official website describes ITP as “A Center for the Recently Possible”, that doesn’t really translate into an explanatory definition, let alone a centralized idea for a logo.
So I spent a lot of time brainstorming. Here are some of my failures, or the ideas that I ended up abandoning (all rough drafts, mind you). I should also mention that by the time I got to Illustrator I already had a notebook page full of sketches. I opted not to scan and upload that, so what you’re getting is just a small piece of the thought process:
This was where I started. I wanted to go for something that was reminiscent of building things from scratch, hence the wood-like design of the letters. But despite the ruggedness of building ideas, I wanted the block letters to bring an official feel to things, since ITP is part of an academic research university, after all.
A sandpaper-rough draft of my thoughts around playing with “ITP” in a lightbulb, to signify the creativity that is such a large part of ITP culture. I dismissed it pretty quickly as too literal. Plus, with all the issues around centricity that I brought up earlier, I thought it might be wise to stay away from an icon.
It was then that the “T” really started to bother me (just as our professor had warned us it might). So I decided to explore the idea of something handwritten in a way that could possibly break down the issue with the T just chilling in the center, taking up emphasis:
I wasn’t completely satisfied, but I felt like I was on the right track.
You can see where the rest of the track led me:
And finally, a little smoothed out and in purple (NYU color) and black:
Note: this is still,as many of my 2D Design assignments are, a bit of a work in process. You can see how though all of the logos above are similar, I was still playing around with the “t” bar height and the drag on the “p” descender. The two on the bottom are a bit rougher.)
I ended up really liking the design. It’s simple, which I love, and it gets across a feel for scrawling out ideas–like the brainstorming that leads to a creative moment. At the same time, the cursive really lets the “t” and “p” balance each other out and lends a little more substance and authority then it would have if it was a more full-bodied type of lettering.
It’s still a rough draft because I think it needs some smoothing and a bit more attention to detail, but it’s my logo design contribution for this little educational explorational endeavor that we’ve got going on here.
Here at ITP, we have a little thing called TNOs (Thursday Nights Out). Every week someone hosts it, and every week it is awesome. Except for this past week, when it was even more awesome than usual, because it was hosted by Roopa, Ali, and I. Want proof? Check out the video we made. You will either laugh appreciatively or have no idea what is going on. Either way, just go with it.
