Field Trip to Williams Visual Solutions! October 15, 2009

On Tuesday we, as a class, visited Williams Visual Solutions (http://www.wmsco.com/www).  Williams has been family owned and operated since 1947. It was started by Levie Williams and is now in the hands of his grandson, Bubba Williams. They work a lot within the Chattanooga community providing graphic communications. They are primarily a printer but also work with clients from the concept stage to design to completion.

They provide many different options for clients from digital printing to book printing and are Mac based. We had the opportunity to see all their different printers and plate makers. Digital printing was explained in full by their new business developer, David Smith. It was really interesting to see how the company has evolved since it was owned by Bubba’s grandfather. Not only did their business and technology expand, but also their facility.

They were super accommodating and it is clear that every member of the team is passionate about what they do as a company. They were even kind enough to provide us all with lunch! At the end of our time at Williams, they explained some of their future goals and plans and it seems that Williams Visual Solutions has a bright future in store for them. I can definitely say that this experience will certainly encourage me to use their services someday.

The Adventures of Class With No Proffessor: Episode 3 October 15, 2009

This is the fourth class without Leslie in town to teach us. We were visited by some of the front end developers/engineers including Stephen Bush (a former UTC student) and Noah Burney from Medium and Jason Fritz from Tubatomic.

They all had really awesome attitudes and introduced us to the behind the scenes work that goes into how a website looks. Meaning, they gave us a brief intro into HTML, XHTML, and CSS. All the technological stuff!

They started by explaining to us what different coding scripts mean and what they do. They explained the structure of the coding and differences between HTML, XHTML, and CSS.  We wrote some coding for a site that changed the text box color, background color, typeface, text size, leading, navigation bars, adding in images to be links in the navigation bars, etc.

The guys were really helpful and informative and definitely extremely intelligent. It’s so interesting to me how this kind of things comes to easily to some people and makes perfect sense. I am not sure how I personally feel I will react to it since this was only an introduction. Maybe it will totally work or maybe I am only meant to design…time will certainly tell!

The Chattanooga Times Free Press October 13, 2009

Thursday we had the privilege of visiting the Chattanooga Times Free Press Newspaper. The tour was led by Frank Anthony the Vice President of Operations. Although my carpool arrived a few minutes late (it’s a common mistake to find one’s self at the office a few blocks down; according to the secretary), we didn’t get to miss much of Mr. Anthony’s history lesson of the Chatt Times. He was a friendly man who has been in the business for many, many years. He told us that he even apprenticed on an old Linotype machine when he first started in the news printing business!

We learned all about the evolution of the news printing press and how it has changed from handset type machines to Linotype, Washington press, Associated press, to the hand fed Platen press and on to the rotary press. The history of the building itself was fascinating. It was originally a  hosiery factory in the 1920’s and then switched to printing when seamed hose went out of fashion in the 1950’s. The building has about 40,000 square feet of solid maple floors! This was necessary to hold the heavy machinery. The cost of building that way today would be outrageous! The building holds 300 tons of dead weight (when machinery is not moving) and it is built on an isolated foundation to prevent cracking and crumbling to ground due to the vibrations of running machines.

One of the most interesting facts is that the Chattanooga Times Free Press has history tied to the New York Times. I can’t remember it exactly, but in the 1950’s the struggling newspaper of Chattanooga was bought by the McDonald family which also owned the New York Times, I believe. They brought the paper back to life and it was sold within the family, but still has roots to the renowned NY Times. How cool is that?!

We got to see all of their printers, or “image setters”. Because they rely so much on being fast and efficiant, they have a back up machine for every machine in the building. The image setters themselves cost $130,000…each. Over all the building holds 5-6 million dollars in spare equipment alone!

The actual newspaper printer was 37 feet long and 10 feet wide. It prints on 11,000 tons of paper a year! We didn’t get to see it in motion printing, but even so, it was still quite the sight to see! They have huge tanks of ink including three 3000 gallon tanks of black ink. The ink is water based as opposed to oil based so that it dries immediately and doesn’t smear.

There was so much more that we learned and saw but these are some of the points that stuck out to me. Thank you Chattanooga Times Free Press!

Feild Trip!! A Visit to Allegra Printing of Chattanooga October 8, 2009

Tuesday we took a fabulous journey to Allegra printing company here in Chattanooga. We were warmly welcomed by Todd Oates. Todd started by describing the company and how they work. They are a small commercial shop and pride themselves on not being located in some random shopping center. They work business to business and have a pretty detailed filing system that contains all aspects of a job done for a client including the inks, paper, etc.

We met their in house Graphic Designer Heather Rickets. She talked about how they tend to receive work for a job that sometimes is less than…well sometimes they are terrible and don’t work. She’s had to completely remake logos and designs because of insufficient file sizes or file type. This can require additional time on a job of course and additional funding from the client. She said sometimes you just have to make it work, no matter what you get.

Then we go to the printers. They have printers that do jobs from full color printing, digital printing, signs, banners, posters, bindery and finishing, and all kinds of promotional printing. We were introduced to “Bonnie” and “Clyde’ the digital printers. They are exactly the same printers but have their own unique problems. All of the other printers were pretty much incredible. We got to watch a $30,000 printer make di-cuts on some stickers (that had our names on them!). My personal favorite was the printer that did the saddle stitching. It was pretty cool. I have never seen staples on a roll before! So cool!

So we went along got to see some more printers lamination machines and they were kind enough to make us personalized note pads and stickers and gave Allegra water bottles and a couple of other little gems. The best part was the people. They were really awesome and very kind and accommodating. Thanks Allegra!

The Adventures of Class with No Professor: Episode 2 October 8, 2009

Day Two: Web Media is left to fend for itself…

Today’s class was visited by Josiah Roe, president of Medium design and Bekka Reese a graphic designer at Medium (http://thisismedium.com/people/).

Josiah made a a presentation discussing information architecture, site maps, etc. and how the play huge role in their web site design process. The presentation included many examples of their work over the last year or two including sketches, drawn out wire frames, site maps, digital roughs, and of course, the finished products.

They gave us a lot of incite into how the actual design process works when working with clients who desire specific elements in their design and also how huge a project can really be. One specific example was the site that they are designing for a Japanese company that sells large engines and other sorts of equipment. They showed us only a small portion of the site map, but we were told that there were quite a few more. I cannot imagine working with that much content for a site and trying to make it easy to navigate and functional at the same time! No wonder it takes a team of designers and programmers and months to put the project together.

They also told us about how a beautiful design can be totally taken over by the company and changed into something it is not. I won’t name the site, but I will say they would have been much better off not making the changes that they did.

Josiah, even in his sleepy state, was kind enough to leave us with some excellent incite and some great resources on Basecamp.

Thank you Medium!

The Adventures of Class with No Professor October 1, 2009

Day 1: Leslie…Gone to a land down under

Web Media class today was taken over by some of the professionals of Chattanooga’s Tubatomic (http://www.tubatomic.com/) and Medium (http://thisismedium.com/) in lieu of Leslie Jensen-Inman’s quest to spread the good word of Web Education across the world.

Our guests were Alex Ogle and George Bairaktaris of Tubatomic and Mat Turner from Medium, formerly Tubatomic. They talked about how they got into their respective fields and what they currently do. All three of these gentlemen had something really awesome to say and all came from really interesting backgrounds. I always think it’s interesting to hear about how people who are currently involved in web design, and all the fun things that go along with it, got to where they are today. As Mat pointed out, we as students are at a great point because of all the progress that has been made in the last few years in web and technology. When they started, there weren’t these advancements so their climb is totally different from what ours will be. This totally blows my mind in a weird way that I can’t quite explain. There is no way I can judge my future by their past because things are so totally different!

They touched on all sorts of things from user interfaces, freelance and in house work, to cartoon cat heads and space. One thing that Mat said that stuck out to me, was the emphasis he put on the fact that being able to do good design and work and being involved in the world doesn’t matter where you are. You don’t have to go to New York or L.A.. This makes me feel a lot better in some way.

Something else he said that was really nice was, he felt heart in the room. I believe we each have a great deal of passion for what we do and I love  that someone from the outside can feel it too.

We plan on having a resume done by the end of their time with us an we even created our own social networking site called…wait for it….”GADZOOOO-K’S: Household Space Travel”. We even came up with a tagline: “Wet your biscuit”.

Look out for it.

It’s gonna be big.

Layers Magazine Contest Entry September 28, 2009

When we were first given the assignment for layers magazine, I was really nervous about the quick turn around. I read the article and checked out the two different tutorials starting with the text as image tutorial. I started with an picture I took of my brother to start testing out the tutorial. Once I got it down pat, I was pretty excited. “Hooray, for being able to follow directions!”

The next step was, how do I incorporate this tutorial into a fictitious film poster?  The more and more I looked at the image of my brother and the image used in tutorial and the treatment of text, I couldn’t help but be reminded of something I had seen before…AHHA! I was really reminded of the poster of the actual movie, Seven Pounds starring Will Smith. I could not get the straight on image of his face and the text serving as background out of my head. The image of my brother was somewhat similar so I decided to continue working with it and creating a movie poster parody.

I kept running into problems with the image being far too dark on one side of my brother’s face once the text “brushes” were used to fill in the image. It took a lot of time, but I finally was able to resolve the image in such a way that no important information on the face was lost. The brushes are made up of the number ‘7′, ’seven’, ‘7 pounds’, and ’seven lbs’.

There was another step in the tutorial that made the image up of horizontal text. I continued with this idea by using actual written information by myself and my brother (whose name is Kevin, by the way). I also used a random text generator. I have had some trouble finding the specific one I used for this project, but there are many out there. I combined the two techniches and also added an additional layer of text as background to mimic the original film poster. I continued by choosing a typeface that was as close to the original as possible and came up with a similar formula for my film’s tagline.

All together I feel like created a successful parody to the Seven Pounds poster and a peice that Kevin and I can laugh about for quite some time.

DIY Summit Reflections… September 22, 2009

My overall experience of the DIY Summit (http://www.environmentsforhumans.com/diysummit/) was pretty interesting. It was quite unique being in a room listening to people present live that were miles apart from one another. Although a lot of information was over my head, I still took a lot away from the talks.

First of all, all of the speakers were incredibly good. Not only did they present well via web cam, but there actual slide presentations were great. I also appreciated that the majority of them gave the URLs to find their slide show. I can imagine it would be difficult to sit in front of a computer screen and present while not being able to see or hear your viewers. I know Dan Rubin felt a little crazy, and I’m sure I would too!

I took a piece of inspiration from just about every speakers presentation. One thing I picked out from Kelly Goto’s (http://www.gotomedia.com/index.html) speech, was to be fearless! Also finding a flow with yourself and others within your work flow has nothing but a positive impact on your productivity. I’m definitely going to try and find more “yoyu” time for myself to reflect and think between projects or process to continue the creative flow.

Dan Rubin (awesome) gave an incredibly informative and exciting presentation. Although I took a lot of notes and listened to his advice about mastering details in interface design, the one thing that truly stuck out to me had nothing to do with his topic at all. He said the more advanced you become as a musician or singer, the more time you spend on the basics, practicing vowels and consonants and warm up exercises. This is an easily transferable metaphor into design, but it reminded me that I really needed to practice my voice and songs for my lesson and actually spend time on those little things to become better at what I do.

Lea Alcantara (http://artofselfbranding.com/) was one of my favorites. She gave a lot of useful tips and rules to follow when creating a self brand on the internet and as a designer. I took away that it is okay to cater yourself to clients you know you can work with and that is actually better for you and the client because you’ll do better work and they’ll get what they want. Creating a “brand promise” was something she stressed. It’s a professional and personal persona that can live up to the expectations of potential clients. My favorite thing she said was that in order to fully develop your personal brand is to persist through the CRAP. C-criticism, R-rejection, A-assholes, P-pressure. And also find inspiration off the web!

DIY SUMMIT Speaker: MATT HARRIS! September 17, 2009

Matt Harris, a web developer from Hampshire, South England, is one of the DIY Summit’s speakers. He will be speaking on the topic of Using WordPress for Content Management. He makes use of his talents and time making websites for different people and schools making use of internet linking tools and utilities, or wrangling PHP, Python, CSS and HTML.

On top of being a brilliant programmer and web site guru, Matt Harris is also a promoter of web standards. He is a consultant for many different educational facilities and helps them further their development in IT departments and expanding their web systems. He goes beyond just helping schools build their infrastructures by being a promoter of standards based design directed for the teaching and learning of the schools and also by promoting all sorts of new technologies. His goals include for pupils to have their own personal web space and to eventually for all schools to have integrated learning and management systems. This would allow for broader educational opportunities, web portfolios, collaborative working and parental involvement.

His passion for the web and techy geekiness extends off the screen. He enjoys teaching his AIBO (Artificial Intelligence roBOt) to dance and speak. He spends time traveling between the US and England promoting and speaking at professional web conferences like DIY Summit, Web Directions North and dConstruct and also dropping pearls of wisdom at smaller venues  like Barcamps and Geek Nights. Even further beyond the computer screen and keynote presentation, I hear Matt is known to cook a mad Beef Wellington.

Matt Harris’s personal website, http://themattharris.com/, holds archives of troubleshooting, plugin and other sorts of web tutorials. He hopes it will be, “a place that will, over time, fill up with my experiences in network administration, education and web development, oh and life in general. It is my hope that the things I share here will, in some way, be useful to you in some part of your life; or at the very least give you an interesting read.” The site’s design was done by colleague, Cindy Li. For those who don’t know Matt, you can learn a lot about him and what he does by visiting his site. Looking into Matt’s work and presentations, I noticed that he very easy to follow. The posts on his site are reader friendly and he gives a lot of information in a few words. Although I don’t understand the first thing about plugins, meta elements, or any kind of web coding, I feel like I could learn something from his experience and lessons.

One of Harris’s main topics of education and what he will be speaking about at DIY,  is WordPress (hey, guess what I’m using?) It’s a free blogging tool that has a variety of uses in the web world. It is among the most popular blogging platforms available today, but if used as a Content Management System (CMS). CMS is a computer application used to manage work flow needed to collaboratively create, edit, review, search, publish and archive various kinds of digital media and electronic text and it can support a large range of websites such as a portfolio, small business intranet and educational websites. Matt Harris will discuss CMS and also share techniques he has used when managing content using WordPress and the plugins that can help you. He’ll delve into the admin interface and the structure of themes, and even toss out a few bits of helpful code along the way.

To learn more about the DIY Summit and their other speakers, visit their site at, http://www.environmentsforhumans.com/diysummit/.

September 16, 2009

Hooray for logos! I looked at a variety of logos for museums primarily I looked at ones that used geometric form and ones that used more gestural forms and also some that used simply text.

I have used this inspiration in some of my ideas thus far, but so far i have not come up with a solid solution or track.