Left to his own devices…

Here are the wireframes of my proposed site for my video project, A House No Longer My Home.

Main site page:

I’ve added cars on the street and doors/frames to better suggest a home, and corrected the layout of the rooms. I considered overlaying real blueprints for rooms, but prefer this more abstracted look.

Each of the boxes would hold a short loop of a video connected to a given room in the house. Mousing over the room area would bring up additional videos connected to that area, as seen in these room examples:

Hallway:

Kitchen:

MIddle Room:

I also added a side menu to allow places to post videos/information relating to the project but not specifically tied to a given place in the house. Note that when clicking on one of these pages, the main house graphic moves up to the upper left hand corner to provide a “home” button that would take one back to the main page.

Introduction:

Parents:

Donate:

I included a donations page to spur people visiting the site to donate to organizations that are battling the diseases that claimed my parents: Pick’s Disease, diabetes, and kidney disease. I put Pick’s Disease on the top because it is probably less well-known than the others, and therefore most likely receives less support than the others.

My thanks to Katherine for a great and truly informative learning experience, and for my classmates, who made it worth braving the bitter cold of 406 twice a week!

Here’s the update for the site I’m planning for my video on my house:

Each of the blocks relates to a room in the first floor of the house, which is where I grew up and later cared for my parents. I’m considering having each page carry two videos, possibly titled “The Love” and “The War”, the former would lead to a nice memory tied to that room, while the other would be a video describing one of the difficult moments I had while caring for my parents.

(Obviously, I’d welcome suggestions for less pretentious headers!)

Each of the pages would carry through the main page graphic and the colored shape that corresponds to that area of the house.

Here’s an example of the page for the hallway, with the two orange squares representing the windows for the two videos:

I’d also like to have either a page or a link on each page which would allow someone to watch the piece as a whole, rather than in the segments that just relate to a particular room.

Following my awful performance in the color test, I’m looking to redeem myself with the following color exercises:

Here’s my attempt to recreate Pantone 356:

Here are my two Albers’ works, the first done by manipulating brightness, the second by manipulating the saturation of the color green.

Finally, here is my goofy design, which is a combination of my initials and three colors of the Gordon family tartan (blue, green, and yellow) all of which are analogous. I played with the saturation and brightness to vary the colors.

Here are the websites I found that provide examples of different color styles:

Complementary (blue and orange):

NY Mets:

Analogous (blue and green):

Seattle Seahawks:

Monochromatic (blue):

L.A. Times:

Triad (red, blue, and yellow):

Popsicle:

For the picture with new background I’ve chosen my childhood hero Carlton Fisk.

Original:

With blue border:

With red border:

With green border:

Here is the logo I made for ITP. I wanted to link the letters together in some fashion, since I believe what ITP is about is community and I wound up with this weird shape, which probably would work better if we were involved in aeronautics.

The designers I discussed in class were Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismer, who between them designed some of my favorite logos including the Mobil oil logo seen below, as well as the logos for National Geographic, PBS, Chase, and Barney’s, as well as the NYU Torch emblem. I like how they are willing to let the name of the company carry the logo when the name is particularly identifiable (like Xerox and Barney’s), but are willing to go with something more abstarct if it connotes the qualities one would associate with the company, as they did with their Chase symbol.

Here are some logos I really like (and yes, there are sports ones, and no, I have not included the Sox logo, because it’s a given that I’m fond of it):

I like how you can read the oil at the end of the word without the designer cheating by coloring the circle in the “b” instead of the second “o”.

My older brother works for citigroup, and they issued me my first credit card, so I’ve always had a soft spot for them. But I dig the simplicity of the logo and how the new design incorporated the umbrella logo of Traveler’s Insurance company by using the “t” in citi as the stem and handle of the umbrella.

This logo was actually a winner of a contest held when the team moved to NJ. I like how the designer didn’t overplay the religious iconography of the devil which could have presented problems with religious groups.

The Milwaukee Brewers wore this logo throughout the 70s and 80s. I love how the lower case “m” and “b” come together to form a baseball mitt.

The late lamented Hartford Whalers used this logo before their owner moved the team to Carolina and renamed them the Hurricanes.
I like how the negative space between the “W” and the fishtail forms an “H” for the city.

Here is the business card I developed for Visual Communication. As a take-off on the old saw about how one should always dress for the job one wants to have, I “dressed up” my business card to reflect my dream of someday working for my favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox. Accordingly, I gave myself the title of Director of New Media for the team on my card.

I found and downloaded the two fonts used by the team, MLB-Red Sox, which is the font the team uses for its numbers on its home and away jerseys and the letter for the names on the back of its road jerseys, and MLB-Tuscan, which is the font the team uses for the lettering on the front of its home and road jerseys and the “B” on its cap.

I used MLB-RedSox for my name, title, and contact information, and MLB-Tuscan for the team name and the cap logo I placed on the right side of the front of the card. Because neither font had any lower case letters, I borrowed an idea from Trajan Pro by using different font sizes of MLB Red Sox to do my first name and title in “title case” by using 12 pt font for the first letters and 10 pt font for the following letters. To be consistent, I also did my contact information similarly, although I used 9 pt font for the first letter of each word and 8 pt font for the following letters.

Since the fonts also did not have any punctuation marks, I used spaces instead of commas where needed. It also forced me to cheat a little and bring in a third font, Lithos Pro, which I used for the periods and @ sign in my e-mail address. (I’m not a fan of its @ sign, but it seemed the best match for the MLB-Red Sox font I was using for that information.)

For the back of the card I used the “hanging socks” logo which the team adopted as its primary logo this spring. I debated between going with the cap logo on the back of the card and the “socks” logo on the front, but I decided as I did because I went with left-justified text, and the B logo seemed more at home on the right side of the card than the socks logo would have been. Plus I like the look of the hanging socks logo alone against the navy blue field.

While I’m satisfied with the job I did, after printing out my business cards, I kind of wished I had made my name and title just a little bigger to match the team name.

I also have to give thanks to Emily Ryan, who helped me with some issues I was having with Adobe Illustrator, which I used for the first time in making these cards.

Here’s the pdf of my name six ways.

Here are my two words:

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Vague

A problem with branding. I’ve seen Witness more than a dozen times, and while I remember scenes in which cows were milked and barns were built, I can’t seem to recall any scenes in which burritos were rolled or lamb was sliced for gyros.

I don’t drive, so maybe it’s me but I don’t like subtitles on my signs.

The swirly S cuts up the sign, so it reads as “GU-TORGANICS” which is obviously not its name.

This might be my catholic school upbringing at work, but the idea of naming anything involving young children as “hands on” sends a shiver of revulsion through me. And the creepy palm prints don’t help matters.

It looks like they ran out of space and then had to use smaller letters to get the whole message in.

The line leaving the D open made me read that letter as a P; I think you should try to avoid creating a logo that might be read as a pejorative.

They totally committed to the theme of the store as the only signage in it is that belonging to the liquor store that formerly occupied the space, but I imagine there are a lot of disappointed but well-dressed alcoholics walking out of the store.

This is a very nice, clear sign on an awning of a business that no longer operates at the location. Which is fine, except I have to believe that they must have a better way of communicating this information. I might be more than a little peeved if I fought downtown traffic only to discover that I had to go back through the tunnel to North Bergen, New Jersey.

I think the sign could do without the question marks.

Whether coming or going, these banners are a bad idea. The words are cut up in a ridiculous fashion, and the colors chosen are too close to one another to make the letters easily legible.

I snapped this one as the PATH doors were closing, so I missed the top part of the sign, which reads in full “Take your life off pause”. I’m guessing this is supposed to be what couples really living it up is supposed to look like: a dude pushing his partner around in a shopping cart!

Paging Dr. Nick from The Simpsons. Parentheses do not connote trust.

This was a handwritten sign, so maybe the author could be forgiven, but I’d bet in hindsight they wished the put a little more space between the “e” and the “b”, because all I see is a “turd” in the middle of their nature burger, which is far from appetizing.

Hulu is a site for television addicts (such as myself) which I have found exceedingly useful particularly since my new responsibilities as a student have cut into my regularly scheduled time for viewing TV. The site permits visitors to view shows that have been recently broadcast as well as “classic” shows like I Dream of Jeannie and Diff’rent Strokes. (Obviously Hulu has an elastic definition of what constitutes a television “classic”.)

The design of the site is very clean, with the top row devoted to a search box and horizontal navigation bar that allows one to choose between their TV and movie offerings.

The middle row is a scrolling box that displays featured offerings, usually recently added shows to the site. Under that box are four columns of highlighted materials, divided into popular episodes, popular clips, featured videos, and popular TV shows, which is sandwiched above by Hulu’s Pick and below by recently added shows.

The site uses a single font, with the exception of the scrolling highlight box, which displays the title of the shows featured in the font used by that show in its promotional material. Outside of its logo, which is done in lime green, the rest of the site uses only white, black, gray, and a very light blue for links. Scrolling over a link results in an underline rather than a color change.

Navigation on the site is fairly easy, although I miss the original layout which listed all the site’s material alphabetically. Now everything is organized by category, which can make it a little noisome when one is not certain whether show which crosses genres (like NBC’s Chuck) is listed as an action/adventure show or a comedy.

But I guess this change was necessitated by the expansion of content the site offers, so it’s hard to argue about that trade-off.