Designs in development

After about 25 tries I finally got the design Dan liked for the door. I'm not sure if I have the room number and the class that it will go to but I can change it to another. I wonder if they're going to ask Ron Pickard what he thinks about it or just put it on there.

I also did a rough composition of the banner design but it didn't go over so well.

Dan liked the border and the text but he didn't like the gradient or the way the graphic elements were arranged on the banner, he said that they were floating all over the place. He did give me some suggestions on how to fix it so the element were grounded to the sides in the border.

He also said that using a gradient too much only shows that you know how to use the tools in Illustrator or Photoshop. I'm not sure if he meant that when art directors look at it that's what they'll so they'll dismiss that design in your portfolio. It's the only way that would make sense, because I'm pretty sure if someone was walking by that banner hanging up on campus they wouldn't think that.

The other thing is after that I did walk by the posters they were using to advertise the art show and they were just black text on plain paper anyone could make in 5 mins a wordprocessor that showed no design at all. I figured that if that's what they wanted to use then why bother to go to all the trouble of making a good design?

Both Dennis and Dan were ashamed of that especially being used to promote an art show that was a nightmare of design in it and had harldy any art in it all. They wanted someone to do a better go since it reflected very badly on the art department, but apparently they weren't in charge of who was responsible for running that art show.

I worked on it for most of the weekend and I got the Sony video for Current TV. They wanted a video that showed how life was better in High Definition so I went with Dennis suggestion that I do an evolution from a line drawing to a blurring paninting to the full resolution and used the theme from 2001 to emphasize it. I hope it gets the point across. I still have to clean up the 30 second version and add the audio to it with the correct balance and fade to it.

I got a lot better resolution on Revver for the Angels on Patrol video, it shows off the titles and the composite but the while the soundtrack is bubbly it doesn't add as much as the one on YouTube. Plus it's over a minute shorter so I had to cut out some of the end that I was able to get on the other version.

The Chasing Cars song does and a lot to the tempo of the angel flights and I did work some of the lyrics into the titles so it fits better, the resolution is not as bad as some of the others. I might be getting better at what kinds of compression settings to use.

I've had to fix a lot of the videos on my blog today since a lot have been taken off of YouTube. They seem to be taking a big hit from Viacom and Mark Cuban suing them for copyright infringement. They've gotten tougher about policing videos since a lot of them are being pulled faster. It's a shame since I really liked using them to make points that would've been harder without visual examples to illustrate them.