Overview

Tell the Story of What You Make, or Tell the Story, is a visual communications course in which students explore different elements of graphic design through short projects, each consisting of discussion of precedents, initial designs, critiques, and redesigns. The course culminates in a longer self guided project with more opportunities for feedback and redesign, allowing individuals to continue exploring interesting forms of design, try something new, and/or apply learning to a real-world context. Below is selection of my designs from the experience, shown in reverse chronological order.

Final Project – MylesBen brand typeface selection

For my final project, I choose a brand typeface for myself and created posters using characters from the typeface as graphic elements. Previously, I had defaulted to using specific typefaces depending on the platform I was working with, but in many cases the text just didn’t look ‘right’ for the application. I restricted the typefaces to choose from to Google Fonts because they are available across every platform/program I use, eventually deciding on Outfit. Choosing a typeface to meet the criteria for my brand provided a chance to practice the process for future designs, while using characters as graphic elements helped me to better understand the details that make each typeface unique.

Infographics – in the style of 2009 Feltron Report

For the infographics project, students created infographic posters using personal data they had collected. I chose to combine miscellaneous data into a three-graphic poster based on the 2009 Feltron Annual Report by Nicholas Felton. The visual representations in Feltron reports tend not to be completely accurate to the data represented, and having room to tweak the data to be more visually appealing made the process more approachable.

Magazine Layout – Nest RetroMod advertisements

For the magazine layout project, I referenced two advertisements, one with a single image and minimal text, and the other with many images, to create ads for my custom smart speaker, Nest RetroMod. I found it interesting to think about presenting projects in different ways and/or to different audiences as I chose what details to include on each ad.

Logo Design – Nature School

For our logo design project, each student created two logos for Nature School, a fictional institution, following a class-wide sketching/brainstorming session. For a simpler logo, I started with a wordmark and transformed the ‘o’s in ‘school’ into eggs. The more complex logo options consists of wordmarks separated by a sapling growing up from the space between words. Since the logos were not intended for real world use, I used the opportunity to forego logo design best practices such as accounting for scaling, color restrictions, and print processes, to focus on being more creative with my ideas and come up with interesting forms.

Recipe with Knolling – phone camera setup in the style of IKEA Fika cookbook

Unlike my other projects, which consisted of custom vector graphics and existing photos laid out in Illustrator, my ‘recipe’ for a phone camera setup was primarily a photography project. Created in the style of IKEA’s Fika cookbook, the recipe consists of two posters, one for ‘ingredients’ and the other for instructions, both of which contain a base photograph overlayed with simple text lists. The recipe poster contains knolled items to be assembled, and the instructions depict the final setup. I had not practiced knolling for photography before this project, but as I shifted items around to find the best layout, I learned quickly to pick up on the space each item took up and where to include negative space.

Text-As-Graphic – typography portrait

Creating a self portrait using characters from a single typefaces as graphic elements helped me to think about the details that make a specific typeface unique. Finding the ‘right’ typeface to form identifying elements of my face was a challenge. Once I made a decision, it was surprisingly easy to get to a point where the portrait was recognizable before working fine tuning the details to incorporate as many different characters as possible and avoid overuse of a single one. The final design has eyebrows made up of stacked characters, rather than single ones, to make them more recognizable.

Branding & Elements – energy bar minis

Our first project was designing mini versions of a provided energy bar, which I found to be a good way to practice Illustrator. I felt that the there was enough structure (redesigning a specific bar) to get me started, as well as enough room to play around with designs that were in more of my own style, such as the ‘flavorless’ variant. The product I received, a That’s It. bar, has a recognizable look, so I challenged myself to see if I could remove significant graphic elements while retaining brand recognition.

Learning

Due to the quantity, variety, and turnaround time of projects throughout the experience, I got a lot of practice with Illustrator and trying out different visual styles. I also learned and practiced techniques and strategies for generating designs faster. I grew to be more comfortable leaving details unfinished and marking problematic parts of the design to get feedback on before going into the final version, as well as practicing the use of reference designs as a starting-off point for creating my own style.

By going through the process of creating quick designs, participating in critiques, and continuing to improve my work, I learned to think differently about and appreciate critiques. I had previous experiences in which instructors quickly looked at completed work to point out what was wrong, which I didn’t find helpful since I wasn’t continuing the work, I typically already knew about the issues being brought up, and I didn’t have a chance to have a conversation about the choices I made and how to improve my work going forward. In Tell the Story, I experienced conversation-based critiques and found them to be a lot more collaborative. I could bring up the challenges I was having with my work and get suggestions for how to improve it. In general, I have found guidance to be more helpful than a standard critique, but there were also times where other people would point out issues I hadn’t noticed, providing me with a chance to make changes before finalizing designs.