As final project for my Advanced Motion Graphics class, I produced the above set of 3 personal idents.
Stones
This was an exercise in synchronizing motion to audio. As a school project this past semester, we were all assignments parts of Anon Day’s song Stones to produce a piece of video for. This was the intro.
Scylla Absinthe
This was a project for my packaging design class, this past semester. Starting from scratch, I designed the entire story and identity. Illustration was done by the incredibly talented Brian Mutschler.
Scylla is said to once have been a nymph so beautiful that Poseidon, the great god of the seas, fell madly in love with her. Scylla, not reciprocating the feeling, fled to the dry land, where he could not follow. Angry at her betrayal, Poseidon cursed her and transformed her into a monster, to forever haunt the sea. Eons later, a mercenary of the crusades from Couvet, Switzerland got caught at sea in a terrible storm and wrecked onto Scylla’s reef. Scylla rescued and nurtured him and they fell in love. When another ship finally came to the rescue, Scylla gave him the recipe to an elixir which, when ingested, would instantly bring her image to life in his mind. To this day, his great great grand children distill this very same elixir.
In Advanced Motion Graphics, we were assigned the science fiction parable Scales, and instructed to design a title sequence for a hypothetical film based on the short story. The video is my interpretation, designed over three weeks in Cinema 4D and After Effects.
I came to this solution pretty late in the process. I spent most of my time working on this concept, before ultimately abandoning it:
A short one week assignment for my motion graphics class: a title graphic for a fictional indie band.
I’m also taking a Packaging Design class, in which my first project was to redesign a Soy Sauce bottle. This is my design—I’m going for a very clean and authentic style, featuring the Safeway house brand.
This semester at CCA, I’m taking an Advanced Motion Graphics class. This is my first project: a short video which visually illustrates the feeling one gets when going clubbing and drinking, and the night gets crazier and crazier, until it morphs into something that isn’t so fun anymore.
Partying is fun, but it’s important to know one’s limits. I’ve made that mistake many times, and have had many a regretful mornings.
At the end of Level 3 at the California College of the Arts, it’s not uncommon for graphic design students to spend twenty hours a day on campus, fueled by gallons of Red Bull and dreadful coffee (and for many, handfuls of Adderall).
Why, you ask? Because we to finish our projects for the semester, polish off all the work we’ve done over the past two years, and present it to an intimidating panel of faculty and design professionals. After presenting and talking about our work for 45 minutes, the panel goes away to deliberate and writes up a grade and a feedback sheet which sets the tone for the rest of our path through design school, and our design careers thereafter.
The day after the presentation, after the celebratory hangover has passed, we are assigned a 6’ by 6’ exhibition space, in which we curate and present our strongest work done at CCA. My exhibition is pictured above.
So I’ve been crazy busy with finals here at CCA, putting up pretty much everything else so I could get these done in time. But now that’s over, I’ll finally be able to show off my hard work. This is my final project for my Type 3 class, a class on information graphics.
Dangerous binge drinking in America’s youth is the result of a prohibitionist culture and excessively restrictive drinking age laws. This video is part of a fictional campaign aimed at parents to promote the idea of lowering the legal drinking age, while culturally fostering a more liberal attitude towards alcohol.
For a short 1-week diagram exploration project, I made an iPad app. The app is essentially a cocktail recipe book, and this is a quick screen capture showing its interface.
Level 2 Finals
I just finished my second year of Graphic Design at the California College of the Arts. What a relief it is to be done with finals… I really enjoyed this semester—and created some work I’m very proud of—but after 8 months of intensive design school, I’m ready for a summer where I can focus on personal projects and the cool stuff we’re building at Chartboost.
A small selection of shots from finals: (view the entire set on flickr)
My Type 2 final: a book on High Speed Rail, how it took over Europe and Asia, and why it didn’t happen in America.
Fellow student Christine Rode presenting her very cool GD2 final.
Kalee practically cut her finger off finishing up her awesome GD2 final book.
Building a house of cards with Man-Ee’s project.
This is yours truly’s version of the GD2 project: recontextualizing a poorly written set text into something completely new.
Fellow student Ben Du presenting his GD2 final.
Anna Chou modeling my new motorcycle helmet. I guess girls like bikes… :).
And last but not least, my very very awesome professor, Christopher Simmons, taking some shots of student work. Christopher is a awesome designer, (he even has his own wikipedia page!) and you should check his work out!
Working on Graphic Design homework again. This time, we’re supposed to take an object (I was assigned a belt) and a word (I got “social”), and modify the belt to become social. I’m making a belt that has a QR code to the wearer’s Facebook, its URL, and an RFID chip for quick automatic friending.
Caffeinated Nomad
For Graphic Design 2, we created a stationary system for a fictional company. All companies were a combination of two somewhat random adjectives, and mine were Caffeinated Nomad. This is my solution.
Information design mini-project for Type 2. We were provided with a dump of raw data, and were briefed to design a booklet for the data. This is the inside spread of my solution.
Van de Graaf Generator
If you’re a graphic designer, you’re probably familiar with canons of page construction. In book design, canons of page construction help you use aesthetically pleasing and balanced text block and margins. It has been used by many typographers throughout the ages, starting with the Gutenberg bible.
Constructing them, though, is somewhat of a pain. You have to go through a long series of steps, either in illustrator or by hand, constructing the text block geometrically. So I decided to write a small web app to do it automatically. Check it out online! Currently, only the most common canon is supported, but in the future I will add any canon I find the need to construct to the project.
If you’re more of a developer, I’ve open sourced the project on github under the Azure License.
On Saturday, I attended the Compostmodern conference on sustainable design. Sustainability is a fancy buzzword used by big corporations so that they can feel socially responsible. File it away with previous contenders such as Synergy and Trickle-down, and don’t ever use it. But beyond the ill-advised terminology lies an really important concept; which is that as we design, we have responsibilities that go beyond the client’s brief and balance sheet. Sure, those should always be the primary considerations—but we also have a responsibility to our environment and society. Sustainability is at the intersection of consideration for the environment, society and economy.
In order to get the most out of the concepts from the conference, though, design must be defined as more than any or all of the professions suffixed with the word design. (Industrial, Graphic, Web, Interior, Interaction… you name it!) Design is—or should be—everything a company does. Every interaction anyone ever has with a company, good or bad, becomes part of its brand. One of the first concepts introduced by several of the speakers was that of 360° Design. With 360° Design, the challenge is to design a product or brand across all aspects of its presence, whether web, print, physical, or even the experience of using it. The concepts of sustainable design, though, apply to more than design. You can draw from it in entrepreneurship, leadership, or even as a way of life.
For me, two nuggets of wisdom stood out from the various talks. The first one pertains to getting a message effectively across through what speaker Jonah Sachs calls the Myth Gap. A successful myth is the combination of explanation, meaning and story. Explanation serves the rational mind, while meaning serves the emotional. The last element, the story, is what engages the consumer. A successful story can be further divided up in three basic elements: freaks, cheats and familiars. Freaks are human characters that are extraordinary in some way. Cheats are those don’t follow the status quo. This includes both criminals (whom the viewer is against), or rebels (whom the viewer roots for). The last element is familiars: things which viewers can relate to. It is by combining all of these elements that most of the successful stories caught traction.
Secondly, Lisa Gansky introduced attendees to the concept of the mesh. The mesh is about the sharing of experiences and physical things among people. The new wave of popular services provide access to experiences, rather than ownership of things. Netflix, for example, lets people experience movies without having to buy and own them. Zipcar, similarly, allows for on-demand access to a car without having to own a car. Airbnb provides peer-to-peer access to other members’ proprieties without having to rent a hotel room.
The overarching theme of the conference, though, was sustainability. The common perception of sustainability is that of radical green-activism such as Greenpeace. Many, including myself, find this kind of activism off-putting. Not only does it alienate me with its holier-than-thou attitude, but it often does much less good than what can be achieved through friendlier means. The key to getting people involved in a project that benefits the greater good is to incentivize the better option. Give them an alternative that does not compromise their experience of the product.
Green is not absolute. The goal should not be to have a green product, but rather a greener version of what people currently have and want. Sure, the warm feeling one gets when doing something good can be an incentive; but don’t kid yourself, people will always put their quality of lift first, and rightly so. After all, that is the whole basis of the american dream and the founding of this very nation—the pursuit of happiness. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.” Rephrasing his quote, I will boldly claim that those who sacrifice the pursuit of happiness for the hope of a better future deserve neither.
Some spreads from my Graphic Design Tools project. We made a small-format magazine on a subculture of our choosing. My topic was Gyaru girls.
Download the a pdf of the whole magazine here!
Second assignment for Graphic Design 1 class. The brief was to make an agitprop poster, and I chose to promote Prop 19 (marijuana legalization) from an angle that would appeal to voters who dislike marijuana. I want to show the social and economical benefits of Prop 19, because I am personally not inclined to promote drug use.
Third and last personal logo for GD1.
The last logo had to show the meaning of my name. I went with my middle name, Olivier, which is the original french version of Oliver. Originally from the nordic name, Áleifr, meaning “elf-host” or “elf-army,” the spelling was later changed to associate it with the latin word oliva, meaning “olive tree.”
Second out of three personal logos for a GD1 project.
For this one, we had to create a monogram using our initials. I went with a bitmap-y lowercase “kb.”
First out of three personal logos for a GD1 project.
The assignment for this one was to create an “idiosyncratic” logo. In other words, something that reflects an aspect of my personality. Those of you who know me know that I like to drink and go out a lot. I’m particularly fond of cocktails—represented here by the martini glass—and of electronic music—the sound waves.
A whole typeface designed on a minimalistic 3x5 grid for my Type 1 class. Some of the letters were quite hard to resolve, but I think I managed to come up with a pretty good solution considering the constraints imposed.
A logo I was asked to design by my Illustration teacher. For an alphabet book.
Illustration: Digital Media, 1st part of the 2nd project.
This is the first part of the project. We chose a work from before the year 1800, and had to re-create it in vector using Illustrator. I chose this piece of ancient Japanese art.
16” * 28” full-color print.
Part of a project for 3D class. Abstract ink drawing on trace paper.
A quick drawing exercise for my Illustration 1 class.
Illustration: Digital Media project 1.
The brief was to digitally create a recognizable portrait of someone famous composed of other images stitched and manipulated together. (Kind of like a collage.)
18.5” * 24.5” full-color print.
Drawing 1 final project. 20” * 30”
(Sorry about the terrible picture. iPhone camera sucks.)
Intro to Graphic Design final project.
The brief was to design a poster for an design exhibition. We were each assigned a well-known designer or artist and had to create a poster that would display his or her style, without using any photography or direct reference to his or her work.
Intro to Graphic Design project 4.
The brief was to design a book cover for a book which had been assigned to us. I personally am not too happy with the result of this project either.
Intro to Graphic Design project 3.
The brief was to design a CD cover for a single. I personally don’t like the outcome of this project very much, and neither did my instructor: she only gave me C+ for this.
Intro to Graphic Design project 2. The brief was to make a word design that would convey the meaning of the word, using only letters from one of six typefaces. The letters could not be stretched or edited in any way. They could only be cut into, overlapped and used multiple times. I was assigned the word transient.
transient |ˈtran sh ənt; - zh ənt; -zēənt|
adjective
lasting only for a short time; impermanent : a transient cold spell.
Intro to Graphic Design project.
Brief was to design a logo / monogram based on my initials, using one of six typefaces as a starting point. We had to represent a personality trait within the design. I chose to represent being bold & modern.
Third dead body I’ve found today.
Funny thing is, I made this… Crazy weird art projects.