11.10.2009
Our last and final field trip of this semester was to paper plus. Just a hop skip and jump down the road and vwala (or however you spell that magical sound), we are standing in the paper heaven. I mean rows and rows of the crisp sheets just waiting to be filled with ink and gloss and to be cut and pasted and bound and oh the possibilities ☺. Our tour guide for the day was Alex. He gave us the lowdown on what companies are super in right now, and I’m not going to name drop… but lets just say, if you’ve got some Neenah, or Domtar or Mohawk in your printer, you are on the right track. Alex talked a lot about the market right now and how its super important to really know your paper. Believe it or not the paper industry is pretty competitive so its smart to really see what options there are out there. Alex also stressed the idea of having a great relationship with your vendor, though it’s something we hear everyday its good to hear others say it too.
But back to the field trip. Paper plus is a chain store that has a really nice small business feel. You get all the perks of personal experience and the corporate benefits. Instead of jacking the prices to feed the kids, paper plus can offer great competitive prices. And they get new shipments every day from the Atlanta warehouse, so if something is out and it’s in stock, you get it the next day.
At the very end of the trip we all got to bombard their paper sample books and I think everyone came home with enough paper to feel that all our fingers got a little chapped… wait that was just me? Oh ok well each page was different and beautiful and some where soft and others were textured and each book just got me more and more excited to actually print something on a sheet that’s the brightest white that reflects wavelengths in a way that it stands out from every other plain ole white sheet. So enough on that tangent, paper plus is awesome Alex is awesome paper is awesome… yea being a graphic designer is just awesome. Thank you so much paper plus, trust me I will be back!
10.23.2009
here it is the final logo for my website. for those who don t know im my web media class we are to design a site for a web conference called… WEB IN THE WILD!!! yaa woo hoo w’s are so fun to design a logo with… not they suck. but we all did the best we could. all in all im pretty ok with mine. i went for a natural feel, you know earthy chattanooga, seasons leaves… you getting the picture. well the web conference is going to be held in chattanooga so i tried to bring some tennessee in with my color scheme. the typeface is an altered version of jack fancy regular. i chose the word venture as my tag line because i wanted my design to express the idea of adventuring in the wild, but in a very exciting not a ohh lets not get lost in the wild of the web out there. i think the design will appeal to all the web and designers out there its pretty clean and simple. it works well in black and white and small scale which are definite musts for a logo. but what do you think? love it? hate it? i still wanna know 
10.23.2009
my last project for type 2 was to design a logo and poster and postcard and splash page for a website of a museum of collections. this museum was to feature a collection of my own and since i have about 30 pair of sunglasses i chose them. im pretty happy with the final layout of everything, ive been pretty simplistic lately black and white and one color… magenta!
poster
postcard front and back
splash page
10.21.2009
so as this blog title states, last thursday was our final guest teacher experience. it was a great day, we really just discussed all we learned the past few class and got to ask a bunch of questions about the professional life style. i was super inspired by this last class because it was really putting what we know in the perspective of the real world and i got a glimpse of how prepared i am/should be. emphasis on should… but i came out with some great nuggets of advise, wanna hear them? yes you do! ok great here goes…
personality counts when looking for a job
if you know front end developing you can get a job anywhere (this one scratches at my nyc nerve really badly)
maintaining good networks and relationships are really important
a quick response to any message or project shows you care, showing you care maintains a good relationship, and we just learned that …. relationships are really important
and my favorite running theme of this little section of classes… GIVE A SHIT
all of these seem really simple but so true, and i know leslie has told us this stuff a million times and is like duhh guys i say it everyday, but sometimes you need to hear it one more time to really sink in. so i hope to take all these new tips and try to be aware of them at all time, work on my online presence and be preparing myself for my real world in the design world, is it on the web? probably. print? probably. new york city? please oh please. final thought is that im not so scared of the web, these guys and girl (you go bekka) made the ins and outs of web approachable and really im excited! it’s gonna be a rough transition but im super stoked so lets rev up that web media engine and start a new phase in design
thank you thank you thank you great people at tubatomic and medium for coming in, im am soooo appreciative to the time yall spent with us, you really provided us with some great insight we would never get on our own. now there werent tears shed but i know everyone had such a great experience with the guest teachers and their homework assignments 
that we were very sad to watch them walk out the fac. please walk back in soon!
10.15.2009
After a great adventure into the behind the scenes of web design, the class all got to go on a tour of Williams visual solutions. It’s a printing company right off the highway and It’s big. What started out as small business in one building, has expanded to five or six big buildings. Our tour guide bubba has been around the printing business his whole life. The company was actually started by his great grandfather. It was really awesome to see and hear how a family business has grown from just a small layout and printing shop, to a full service, one stop for all your printing needs, any paper, and size, and mailing, labeling, designing, packaging, printing… well you get the picture Williams visual solutions does it all! With all this work to be done, its crazy to believe that they are just down the street. After our very informative tour we were whisked away to a lovely lunch followed by a power point and discussion. We talked about where Williams visual solutions is going and how important it is to utilize all the avenues of marketing there is available, which right now is the web. Seeing and hearing a real print company stress the importance the web is furthered my excitement to figure out where I want to put myself in regards to my future! It was a fun and inspiring tour, we really got to see how print and web can work and function in harmony. Print doesn’t have to move over for the web, i just need to figure out how to manipulate them to where whatever output I come up with will be stronger because of the unique integration and opportunities this provides. Thanks so much to Williams Visual Solutions, you inspired me and fed me I can ask for nothing more!
10.15.2009
Our third day with guest teachers was definitely one of my favorites. We talked about back and front-end engineering. Oh you know it’s no big deal just the complexxxxxx coding behind making a web site. The whole idea of html and css is a bit overwhelming to me but totally intriguing. I never really thought of myself as a coder but, these past few weeks I have been thinking about the future of web and looking at a bunch of websites that I love and how I could make some improvements. Fashion magazine websites for example are super complex and busy and there is just too much going on. Also I love where a lot of fashion designer sites are going, a lot of integration of video fashion and design. I could totally get on that train! But back to the point of this post, which is web media and our guest teachers, yes that’s it! We got to really get hands on in this class and we played with some coding and personalizing a simple web site, just to see how things worked. I like the idea of having one piece (a website) and being able to change it anytime, and if you mess up, its no big deal. But, along with the ultimate freedom, comes the ultimate possibility to mess up. It seems to be a real challenge to be able to utilize all the web has to offer in a very elegant way. We only have one guest teacher session left and im really excited to jump into the rest of the web media class. Though it may not be the end all be all of what my future holds, it has a definite possibility of a major career path.
10.13.2009
So you we all know about newspapers, and that there are a lot distributed each week and blah blah blah but really unless you have toured your local paper you know nothing about newspapers. Can you guess where our second field trip took us!? Yes yes the one and only Chattanooga times free press, aka the most beautiful building in downtown Chattanooga, we are talking 160thousand square feet of solid maple, exposed brick… they just don’t make em like that anymore folks. anyway, this adventure was great. We were given a fabulous tour by the vice president Frank Anthonay and started in the museum (I know… who knew we had a news museum!) after an intro to the history of newspapers (linotype, associated press, hand fed type etc.) and the infamous roots of the Chattanooga times free press (the building used to e a hosiery factory and yeah the guy who revamped the new york times totally did the same for the CTFP!) we roamed all through out the floors seeing the many many desks of the people behind ads, and sales, and the actual content. And of course the machines… yes yes yes crank em up boys! Let me tell you these things are massive and there are two of each, now not in an Noah’s ark kinda way (even though I like to think they are all in love) the extra is just in case one messes up there is a beautiful back up ready to slap some text and send it through! Not to mention all of these babies costs start at around a million dollars each, so you can imagine the total cost. Also these machines weigh sooooo much, the printing press is 300 tons of dead weight! Well that’s to be expected when its 3 7 F E E T T A L L yes it is huge. So there are definite reinforcements to hold all that weight. They go through 11 thousand tons of paper a year and they have these huge silos for the ink. Its really sobering to see how much work goes into this small little paper each week, I don’t feel like I should ever complain about my one person job of 50 hours on a logo, this team cranks out so much material every week and they do it the coolest way possible. Even though I may not agree with all the content per say in the Chattanooga Times Free Press, I have much respect for their process and materials… hummm fancy that! thank you so much beautiful people at chattanooga times free press, for letting us come for a tour you were very lovely and hospitable!
some visual refrences by my dear friend tj bowman
10.08.2009
After a lovely morning with the medium people, our little design team jumped on down town to the lovely allegra building and had a great tour. we were led by Todd and spent the afternoon meeting the whole team, and seeing how each department functioned on a daily basis. i think i can speak for all my class mates when i say, we were impressed. their printers put our poor epsons to shame, but beggars cant be choosers, and i do love our eppys in the fac. allegra is a national printing company but our chattanooga branch has only 11 employees and still manage to get so much work done. i really got a sense of team work and that they all push and pull together to help whenever needed. allegra has been around since the 70’s and do a great job at balancing the new technologies and practices and the old idea of hard work. some machines have been there for a few years, enter the paddy wagon (aka giant clamp that holds down stacks of paper so you can use a pant brush and can of glue to paint on the binding, ghetto and o so fabulous), these older machines arent the new automatic shiny ones because they work better than the new stuff, because if it didn’t they would have the best one out there. some of the machines are massive 7 foot long printers, and you can only imagine the paper jams. they had huge laminating machines, die cutters and digital plate printers, basically everything there is digital, and they get the job done. it was so interesting to see all the different areas of a print shop, from the normal black and white printer to the plastic banner printer each are just as important and useful as the next. i felt so welcome on this tour, they made a very strong effort to make us feel special, even gave us water bottles and personalized stickers and note pads THANK YOU SO MUCH ALLEGRA, YOU ROCK!
some great shots of the trip courtsey of the one and only tj bowman
todd showing us how a book is made
the beautiful roland printer
one of the more “classic” models, the inking machine
the most beautiful people in the world
10.08.2009
the past few days have been very chill around the fac, i dont know if its because we have finally made the transition into fall, or that we are just used to our schedules but chill doesnt mean not exciting. on tuesday we had our second group of guest speakers, Josiah Roe and Bekka Reese, both repin the medium life, a very awesome one i might add. they came with some clear perspective on what its like to really make a website, start to finish. we looked at site maping (what is going into the site, what is on the home page, tabs, the look and feel etc. etc.) pretty intensely and all the thoughts that go into just the planning stages of a site, and let me tell you its a lotttt. wire frames ( linear moc up made of lines and boxes to show the spaces where the individual pieces of content and pictures will live) come next and then the designer jumps into the fun stuff. bekka is a previous utc student and also a designer at medium, she got her start as an intern and did such a great job they kept her on board. i really enjoyed both josiah’s and bekka presence it was very calming and inviting, great auras all around. because i havent really jumped into a lot of web stuff it was good to hear a designers perspective on what its like to just straight design, no coding just design.though there are set backs to not doing the actual building of the site on the coding end, i will venture to guess that my interest will lay on the design side of the web world, but who knows i may the next stephen bush, visual artist turned graphic designer turned master coder extraordinaire… josiah and bekka talked some about client relationships and how it’s so important to gain their trust because everyone is going to think what they want is best…. errr wrong thats what a degree is called people hello im not going to tell my doctor… sorry i digress, anyway we talked about grid systems and information architecture, and all that great stuff. and all that happened before 10 am!
10.01.2009
while teacher’s away, students will play … and still learn
our web media and processes and materials teacher is speaking at a few conferences in oh you know australia and so while she is gone, she convinced some local web professionals to come teach the next 4 classes…. awesome awesome alright! today was a great first day we had some guys from tubatomic, alex ogle and george bairaktaris and mat turner from medium come and we all just sat around and listened as they gave really casual honest talks about why the web rocks and how they got into the biz… none with college degrees… i know whatttt you can really be successful without a degree…. not to say im jumping on that train anytime soon i loveeee college way to much to go for the self-taught route. ANYWAY they all had great inspiring things to say and got me really excited about the next classes, where they will be covering a lot of different avenues of the web and ending with us making a pseudo resume of our ideal resume of our future… so basically this week i get to really think about all the paths i need to take and skills i need to learn in order to be the next jensen-inman. i have been wanting for the longest time to just think about where i really want to go, i never thought web was really in my future and granted i havent really jumped into that pool yet but i got really excited today thinking about somehow incorporating graphic design, with fashion, and web and ohh lala here i come chanel. so we shall see in a few weeks i may have my four step program to landing a spot in the online interactive world of fashion.
ps i love love love my design classmates, seriously i adore them all, we went to good dog after class and experimented with hot dogs toppings, investigated the ingredients of the amazing dog dust and drank fat tire from a can… well i didnt but others did and loved it. you should be jealous of how much fun we have.
