Bubblegram

What I Discovered
So at the beginning of this week I tried to take a few ideas that I had pursued last week and refine them further and test out another idea:






What I learned was what I'd been told already both by Chris Pullman and a few others in small critique. The conversation seems more like a binary, and with the quote you can particularly see how it gets confusing. While with the key words it's really nice I can work the name it, not much is said by it. Near the end, with the multitude of thought bubbles and shifting hues seemed to be more expressive of the group.

So after talking with Erica for a bit, I started working on some new iterations, focusing on color, conversation, multitude, and networks:

I find these to be a lot more meaningful, it's more playful, more visually engaging, less rigid. I'm using the same style of tagline in both, both I still haven't settled on that. It's been evolving in response to the criticism I've had.





I also have to admit, it's kind of interest how indirectly influenced I was by the poster I did for the faculty exhibition:


All these thoughts about connectivity and overlap were circling through my head and weighed heavy when I created it. So maybe, I should instead say the faculty poster was influenced a lot by IP.

What Next
I'm not quite done with stuff for Tuesday. Erica had a really good suggestion about how maybe these word bubbles from different sections can play with one another, where the yellow turns to green, and the red to purple, etc. I also want to do another 13" x 19" with different tagline ideas. The descriptive route seems to be working more. But with a few more iterations I'm going to try to have 8–10 things to show on Tuesday to get feedback on.

How I Spent My Time
These past few weeks I've just tried my best to approach the problem from a different, more playful, more open direction. I've been trying to worry less about the level of refinement and just trying to put forth different ideas. I'm finding though, that a level of unrefinement might actually be valuable.

I also spent some time looking through my paper, since turning it in I'd really done nothing with it. I realize we are supposed to shoot for five pages, but the writing tutor was constantly telling me not to be afraid to expand and elaborate—I'd realized large passages I'd cut were actually quite useful. I'm just going to write more for the second draft, if it turns out to be ten pages, so be it. I feel like I need the room to really rigorously discuss my influences and how I found things weren't working. But, that's a couple weeks off, trying not to worry about it quite yet.

Group Groping

What I Discovered
I've been trying a new approach this semester.

Last semester I really enjoyed looking at other people's work and going through a list of blogs I love for inspiration—but I found I was actually becoming quite depressed about my own work. I think there's a point I hit where it became distressing to see other people's professional, finished projects each and every day. You don't have any context, it doesn't give you any idea of the struggle they went through to produce their work, and makes it seem as if it was effortlessly produced.

So I've tried to stay away from the daily blogs and simply focus more on creating new ideas for my own work and it seems to be working better.

I met with Chris Pullman today—a bit nervously I must admit—but actually his comments seemed to echo a lot of what the half-group said on Tuesday, that it seemed I had found something rich for investigation.








So I think the venn-bubblegram is a useful device, but I still want to push a few other ideas around simultaneously.

What Next
I think I've come across a really interesting idea, but I need to ensure I don't limit myself strictly to what I've developed. Be free, allow the elements to play around on the page and see what's successful. Some notes I jotted down between teh two meetings I had were:

1. Seems like opposing ideas
2. More about center area
3. Multiple voices, multiple bubbles?
4. Common hues, similar ideas
5. Taglines very instructive/helpful
6. Elements aren't all quite working together
7. Parts seem moveable/adaptable
8. Different shapes creating something more coherent?
9. Arrangement of bubbles

This is the stuff between now and next week I'd really like to explore.

Also, thinking about my timeline, I may not have made progress toward in selecting a logo, but I am working on the advertisements a lot earlier than anticipated. Through those and the concept of the tagline, I am actually making some decisions about the logo, so I'm fairly pleased with my pacing.

And for the record, I have to say, I really appreciated the time in class to work. I know not everyone used the time wisely, but getting some room to worry less about deadlines, papers, resumés seems to make me less tense and feel more confident about exploring.

How I Spent My Time
This week I didn't do as much work as last—I was more interested in feedback from people about the direction I was taking. I tried to work on another idea I was having (shown above).

Taglines and Ads

Unfortunately, this weekend has exactly been great. I sprained the SI joint in my back at the end of last week and have spent most of the weekend at the doctor's/in PT/in pain.

What I Discovered
I've been going back and reviewing some of the work I did last semester, searching for things that might have been useful, but ultimately I passed over. The first thing I began working on was just a name with a tagline


The first half I was just trying to move around the text and see what happens. I was playing with some different taglines, different sentences pulled out of the mission statement—I was thinking about it as being straight-forward, not cryptic. The second image is something I began to develop with more though, trying to think of the name and tagline as moveable components.

I was on the phone last week, just sort of sketching on a piece of paper, when this idea popped into my head as well.

It features a lot of the ideas of overlap I had been thinking about previously. So I tried taking it and spinning it into a few advertisements:



There's also another set of advertisements I have in my head right now, but haven't really worked them out yet. I'm hopinh by Tuesday I'll also have those.

What Next
I'm beginning to understand that the work I did first semester wasn't a hopeless endeavor, that a lot of good and unique ideas did come from my work—it's just that in working so close to a problem some were either overlooked or not quite fully developed. I've found that talking about my work can be really nice, but this spurt of just working on some ideas has also been really enjoyable, a lot more so than spinning my wheels in aggravation.

So for Tuesday, I'm hoping to have two different thoughts of advertisements to present and then more logo revisions. The tagline seems promising, but I'd like to take a few of the visual options I came up with earlier in the year and refine them more as well.

How I Spent My Time
I spent a lot of time hunched over my computer, looking through old blog posts, sketching in a notebook, and coming up with stuff in Adobe Illustrator. I still need to print a bunch of work off as well.

I'm glad I saw a schedule of what this semester was like, it made me realize we actually all have about two and a half months–not four months to finish.

I have a lot to do, and like I said in our half groups on Thursday, I can't let talking and writing get in the way of working. I feel last semester there were times I was trying to be so careful and so considerate of what I was making, it stopped me from working.

I need to be freer, partly because I think it will help me regain confidence in my work—but also because I can't afford to wait around.

This was the timeline I was thinking of, but it's going to need to be shortened up a bit:

January 6–12
- Redefine keywords,
- Describe tone for logo and advertisements

January 14
- Refine three disparate logos
- Test on various colors

January 19
- Show three logos on example advertisement

January 21
- Feedback on logos and advertisement

January 26
- Select logo (hopefully)
- Refine further
- Create black and white, color and reverse versions

Early February
- Formulate idea for advertisements (type of imagery, color, use of white space, repitition etc.)
- Use earlier research on campus to decide on color and size
- Start half size sketches

Mid/Late February
- Print full size versions of at least three different routes for advertisements
- Get critique on ideas

March
- Finalize advertisements, preferably in a series of three different ads
- Select suggested typeface to be used by the group (preferably that used in the advertisements)
- Begin writing design standards manual

April
- Write succinct creative brief for design standards manual
- Create guidelines for logo usage and advertisement placement
- Print run of the design standards publication and advertisements
- Present to The Roosevelt Institute

So this break hasn't quite been the renaissance I was hoping for my project, not exactly one of the more 'active blogs.'

Several times over break I'd tried coming back to my project to start working again and had found I just didn't have anything to say—not necessarily that there wasn't anything more to uncover—but rather that my mind was still numb from the process.

I think the question I'm still really stuck on is tone.

In many of my iterations, I'm looking at them now and it seems I'm trying to describe visually the group's actions (connection, overlap, people coming together to produce something new), but am leaving the motivation for the group ambiguous (progressive, forward-thinking, open).

It also seems like I've been trying to fight with the name itself, "The Roosevelt Institute." In my opinion, Roosevelt becomes increasingly meaningless over time as the generations in proximity to what he did pass on. In fact, Obama has maybe even replaced that identity for my generation.

I just finished the outline of the thesis of my draft, and these sorts of questions I see weighing heavily on it.