What is e-Communications?

As the year draws to the end I've been reflecting to the past few months in e-Communications. I could type an artistic piece about what it means to me, but I'll give you this instead.

Story of my Logo

The End.

eMagine

eMagine is basically the oscars for digital media. Only more important. Which is why it was an honor that my entry in the category "Commercials" made a top 5 finalist. Granted there were only seven entries, I was pretty pumped. I went in with the attitude that I made it this far and I wasn't looking for an award. The fact that they were playing my video on the big screen was enough.
My escort and I walked into the school in our finery and took it all. The red carpets, the sorrie refreshments and the big guys in my field.

Best picture I could find.
I'm in the black dress and blue sweater.
Cute right?

We were all seated and listened the host's banter and laughed nervously while waiting for the results. When my category came up my heart sunk. My submission title was messed up so instead of hearing "Grow-a-boyfriend by Meg VonFeldt" I heard "MV commercial by Meg VonFeldt." I was horrified.  The first entry was amazing and so was the one after that and the one after that. The results:

So I didn't place but I feel proud of my work and I can't wait to receive the judges comments.

Kern ya not?

Kerning in graphic design isn't the the act of eating corn in the southwest but the spacing of letters. Kerning is sometimes confused with letter spacing, but kerning is the space between two different letters to correct visually uneven spacing. The word 'WAR' below looks visually wrong when typed normally, as the 'W' and 'A' look too far apart. Auto-kerning has been applied to the second word and it looks a lot better, but the third word has been adjusted manually, bringing the 'W' and 'A' much closer together. This kerning makes the word look correct.

It has been proposed that the act of incorrect kerning should be called "keming" 

Graphic design puns. Am I right? 

To try to get the hang of this interesting new idea I played a game creatively called "The Kerning Game." The point of the game was to take un kerned words and kern them. I was not good at it. Thank god for auto kern. 

Googling Google Doodles

Google.
I'm 97% sure they run the world.
I mean, they see everything.

But that's beside the point. Google is on of the most memorable brands in our time. Clean, crisp, powerful, and fun.

But every now and then they switch it up. Here are a few of my favorites

This one is really neat because it doesn't say google but you still know that that is what it is. 

I really like the whimsicalness.

Van Goug + Google = what's not to love?

I just really like how it looks so effortless and minimal

The Great Wave is one of my most favorite paintings and I think Google did a great job incorporating it.

Saul Bass the Boss

As I go through my education in graphic design I learn more and more about what I have deemed "The Greats" Basically the best of the best in graphic design. One of these such artists include Saul Bass. As a pioneer in minimalism he was sought after in movie poster design. He had several characteristics he stuck with. He had a very blocky and textured way of representing parts of the story that tell the whole thing. For example.

In my favorite poster of his, Bonnie in Clyde, He used the tire tracks and two bullets to make a dollar sign. Those three elements, money, a runaway car, and bullets capture the essence of their story.

For my poster I first chose Alice in Wonderland, but I realized that there are so many elements to the story that it would be hard to narrow it down to the most important, but of course I didn't let that stop me and tried anyway.

It was subpar.
So I tried the Wizard of Oz

Yeah, not quite yet.

I tickered around and finally got this

This is my final project and I'm pretty proud of it. I included just the hair/hats of main characters to scale down the details and put the "yellow bricks" over where their eyes would be because their eyes are always on the road.

Overall I think I could have added white somewhere and made the heads more minimalist. But I like it anyway.

My Values.

For the past few weeks we've been working on a project to make a poster that included a list of ten things that reflected ourselves as a person.  I titled my list "Ten things I can't live without" because it would be a lot easier than a list like "10 foods that reflect my personality."

I made my list and it wasn't too hard, but then I went to take pictures and that's when the challenge began. As I walked around my house I realized that I value a lot of things. Come the next day when I was trying to add the pictures to my poster I realized I had about ten too many. What started as a simple project lead me down a path that ended with me sitting at my desk contemplating life.

At first I put on stuff like the song "Deutschland" by Die Prinzen and the color blue. But I realized if we are going for just the little things, narrowing it down is going to be pretty much impossible. So I went to opposite side of the spectrum and take it in a really literal sense. Now my list consisted of things like oxygen, water, and the letter "t." But then I started to wonder, do I need the letter "t?" This are the questions that haunt me.

So I had a dilemma. I wish I could say that I picked out the stuff I ended up going with after meditating for an hour, but I'm not that creative. Honesty time. I made my choices based on the quality of the picture. I know. I know. But as I wrote the little paragraph for each item, I realized how import they really are. I think that fate put those things on my poster for a reason. The next question is what to friends, sneakers, fish, music, family, an old mini van, tomato soup, space, Pope Francis, and notebooks have in common?