Business Card 2.0

Front

For my next re-design, i decided to create a "business" card for myself. I use the business term lightly because it's more of a social thing, and less of a formal one. Being a giant geek and gamer, i like to go to comic conventions, and also make connections with fellow gamers wherever i can find them. In addition to that, i am also a huge fan of social media, experimenting with many of the available ones. I felt that i could create a "contact card" that would let people connect with me easily, and it would be something i could easily share with people. I call it 2.0 because instead of a traditional card, this one has my gaming tags, and social media addresses, and also a QR tag on the back. Since the way we connect is evolving, i felt it was only fair the business card did too.

Back

I tried to really implement rhetoric into this design. What i mean by that is that i really tried to persuade the audience to find and contact me online. How so? well by providing 5 different ways to find me. I included 2 gamertags, 2 social media websites, and my email. By giving them so many ways to reach me, i am basically saying "HEY DO THIS". In addition to the 5 ways, i also include "Find me online" to just outright state what they should do. The rhetoric is strong because there is only one propose fr the card, and i make it very clear.

I think the most important part of this design is culture.Culture plays a big part in most designs now because of our rapidly evolving internet presence. As you can see, none of the traditional ways of contact are on the card. I have no address or phone number, since those are the old ways of communicating. I include only the most popular current ways of communication, email, Facebook, and Twitter. As part of the 2.0 you can see i included a QR (quick response) tag on the back of the card. By snapping a picture of this code, you easily get all of the same information provided on the card. By including this, i give the recipient the option to simply discard my card and leave all the information stored on their phone or mobile device. Culture also played a part in changing the orientation, since i felt it should be horizontal unlike traditional cards.

Now for the more design-y parts of my card, i chose red and black for the colors because they are my favorite, and this card should represent me. These colors also create a great contrast, which is always a plus. For the font, i had to use two different ones. My main font was a sans serif font, that was all uppercase, as i felt it looked more futuristic and modern. I had to change the font for providing my information, because some of it is case sensitive. I had to keep a similar theme so i chose a font that was similar, but had lowercase letters. And finally, to add my personal touch, i included a flame symbol, and a motto that i use to represent me.

EDIT: Craaap. My pictures came out tiny for some reason. I made sure to make my canvas the same size as a business card but somehow it shrunk incredibly.

Graphics

Visual culture is a very important factor when deciding on what graphics to use. One such example would be the book cover i plan to design. We use two books in this class, and neither have very exciting cover art. The reason i feel culture is important is that these books should be designed to appeal to current college students. Our generation has a growing trend of more and more people using photo editing programs and becoming interested in design. In order to appeal to the culture, i plan t create a cover that looks like a work in progress. One of the corners of the design will be peeled away to reveal the grid-lines underneath, there will be dashed boxes around some parts, there will me measurements and icons. By doing this, it will be easier for the readers to feel connected with the book because it will seem like something that the could do themselves. Another idea is to present the cover as it would look in the program itself, with toolbars and such. By doing so, i can create a very cultured cover, one that appeal to the masses interested in design.

Texas Tech Typography

Quite a title. Texas Tech University has and incredibly detailed and thorough  set of rules and guidelines which help to create a solid sense of community. Texas Tech uses only 2 kinds of texts, a Serif by the name of Charter, and a Sans serif called Helvettica Nue. Charter is used for any headings and material with lots of university information, while helvettica is used for subheadings and body text. I think the use of serif and sans creates an amazing contrast. By using red headings with charter text, with black helvetica font for the body, the contrast created becomes instilled in the reader's memory, since the same style is seen repeatedly in various materials. While i think that the use of the oldstyle serif to pay homage to the traditional ways of an old university, i think it could be replaced with a modern font style as a way of showing progress, a way of updating the university's style.


I for one love the Tech Identity Guidelines, i feel that they have been thoroughly thought out and researched, and they are very strong, and present a great style for the university.

Resume - Gaming Industry?

For my third redesign I decided to do my resume. After seeing those very interesting examples from the internet, I felt I should try and create a resume that was different. Instead of staying with the traditional black and white boring formal resume, I tried making it more uniqe. This task turned out to be harder than I though, as the Technical Communication doesn’t really lend itself to uniqe design as a Photography or Art Design based one would. I thought I would try anyway, and I tried to use gaming as a sort of goal for the resume. What I mean by this is that I tried to create a resume that was inspired by video games. While it didn’t work out exactly as planned, it managed to retain a fe aspects from my idea.

The first and foremost principle I covered in my re-design was contrast. Because most resumes are usually black and white, I decided to keep the colors, but reverse their use. I made the background black, and used white text. I used grey as a compromise between both, because it would allow for the contrast between the two to be softened.  The gray was light enough to offset the black, but dark enough to have a great contrast with the white text.

The second principle I applied was alignment. I decided to base the placement of objects in a layout I had seen in a magazine. It had 2 pictures, with a bigger picture under it, and another two of the small pictures.  You can see this in my design as I have the objective in a wide box, while the objects below it are half as wide and fit perfectly under it. I also made sure that the document had a evenly spaced border around it. I also spaced the objects on the space evenly from each other. These elements combined allowed for a great alignment.

Using what I learned about type from both books, I decided to pick a sans serif font. In keeping with my game related theme, I decided to pick a font called Futura. The sans serif font was great in my game related resume because it feels kind of futuristic. Because many of the video games I play are based either in the future or in science fiction, any font besides a sans serif would have looked bad. Futura worked great because it consisted of perfectly straight lines, and reminded me of the Helvetica style “plain” fonts I find in games like that.

Something that I did in my re design but don’t have a category for is the use of a 3d effect. The four bottom objects had the 3d effect applied to them. The effect took the outer edge and used it to lift them upward, toward the center of the page. This effect makes the objects look wrongly shapen at first glance, but upon the closer inspection, it looks like the objects are held in the 3d space eminating from the page.