User Testing

I did initial user testing with my two sets of three design directions: the three primary designs and the three supplemental "gorilla marketing" designs. Here are the results of the three people I tested.

Random cereal box

Today in class, we used parameters and flipping a coin to determine aspects of our cereal box such as type treatment, rotation, and placement along a 4x4 grid. This first box used the following parameters:

flip coin once
H = roman
T = italic

flip coin once
H = normal
T = rotate 90*

flip coin twice
H H = 7/13 pts at X1 and Y1
H T = 14/16 pts at X2 and Y2
T H = 24/26 pts at X3 and Y3
T T = 48/48 pts at X4 and Y4

I then set new, expanded parameters

flip coin once

H: bold

T: Italic

flip coin twice

HH: 10*

HT: 30*

TH:60*

TT:85*

flip coin twice

HH: 12/14 pt font

HT: 28/32 pt font

TT: 48/56 pt font

TH: 106/100 pt font

flip coin twice

HH: X1

HT: X2

TT: X3

TH: X4

flip coin twice

HH: Y1

HT: Y2

TT: Y3

TH:Y4

Non computer explorations

Some process

These are preliminary experimentations with various typefaces, arrangement, some non-computer designs. This view just includes the front of the box and left side.

David Carson

David Carson is a very intriguing speaker, partly because he has a great sense of humor that comes across in his lectures. But he also has a lot of good points to make about design. At the end of this TED Talk, I like how he compares design to his father's life as a test pilot. Test pilots had about a 40-50% chance of dying on the job. Carson says as designers we don't face those odds, so why not take risks in design and experiment?



David Carson is best known for his use of experimental typography. He was art director for the magazine Ray Gun, which used typographic styles and layouts he was known for. His style has been widely imitated and loosely labeled "grunge typography."

Sketches

These are sketches I made for the second piece. The main ideas I had were a billboard that you would see while driving, buttons/ stickers that could be taken away replicating voter stickers that say, "I Voted," and a ballot box that users could interact with.

2D brainstorming grid

This is the grid I created for brainstorming the second set of ideas to go alongside my social poster. The Y axis is Places - where the item might be seen. The X axis is Media - what type of thing the item could potentially be.

My Mantra

Don't Clean Your Desk.
I've embraced this mantra, unknowingly, for just about my whole life. When I've tried to clean, I always get distracted, or find that I can't throw things away because somehow I know I'll need to use them in a project in the future. But, in the midst of design projects, cleaning my desk would just take away time from working on the project itself – not that searching for things I can't find doesn't.

Taken from Bruce Mau's An Incomplete Manifesto For Growth

Bruce Mau is a Canadian designer and, from 1985 – 2010, was the creative director of Bruce Mau Designs. He is also the founder of Institute Without Boundaries, a nine-month extensive graduate program through the School of Design at George Brown College in Toronto. Though he started out as a designer, Mau moved on towards architecture, art, film, and other forms of media. He has worked in various capacities at a number of universities in the United States. He completed his Incomplete Manifesto For Growth in 1998 as a method to help designers think through their creative process.

Social Poster - Rapid Prototyping

We are working on a poster project, using one of the posters from the Graphic Advocacy project and creating a supplemental annotation for the poster. I am working with the "Where's My Vote, Russia?" which deals with the suspected mass voter fraud in the 2012 Russian presidential election. The poster is here.

Here are some images of the rapid prototype models I created in just a couple hours based on brainstorming ideas I came up with.

This iPhone app would allow users to interact with various aspects of the election and learn about all the factors that went into the fraud suspicions and the idea that the Kremlin was organizing voter fraud on a large scale.

This website would compare and contrast the practices of the Russian government to those of our own system, in order to put the mass scale of fraud into an American context so that American viewers can better identify with the Russian people's outrage.

This booklet would allow viewers to see how political corruption is not only an issue in Russia, but also globally. Another idea using this same global scale approach would be to have an iPhone app or website with an interactive world globe where users could rotate the globe, zoom in on various countries, and learn more about corruption in those countries.

5 x 5 grid

This is a method of brainstorming we used for the beginning of the process.