Design

Personal Credo and Commitments

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I’m reading yet another personal improvement book, similar to my adventures with The Happiness Project and The Element, this one is called the Speed of Trust and is written by Stephen M.R. Covey, the son of the gentleman who wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

The Speed of Trust contains a number of exercises for the reader. I will share some of the results of these exercises over the next several months here at exploring-art.

The first exercise is to create a personal credo then make and document some personal commitments to yourself. The Speed of Trust approach to these commitments is simple, so it captured my attention after the somewhat convoluted exercise of resolutions, goals and strategic outcomes that I proposed earlier this year. Basically the Speed of Trust way is to start with small, simple commitments that you actually 100% intend to fulfil, slowly train yourself to keep those commitments and build up to more challenging commitments.

This could potentially have been quite a dry, boring and un-visually appealing post. In an effort to avoid that, I took some photo’s from Photo Excursion 2, Posterino software from the Mac App Store and mashed up my very own Personal Credo and Commitments motivational poster.

Creative Challenge: Logo / Graphic Design

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Creative Challenge Number 3

This week’s creative challenge, design a logo or graphic for yourself, your neighbour, your business, your dream business, your baseball team, your secret super hero identity.

Here’s mine for Exploring-Art.com:

In addition to the weekly participation call; to create one yourself and post it online to share with us, I will also review the process I went through to create this graphic, utilizing the creative process outlined in Monday’s post.

Phase 1: Initial Idea
My super-concious returned the idea for a logo or graphic, in response to two loosely coupled asynchronous queries… A topic for a weekly challenge, and a graphic for T-shirts and business cards for shameless self promotion…

Once I had decided to design a graphic, where was I to start? Again my super-concious answered. Remember those coloured bars on old, analog, CRT televisions when there was no signal? That was the seed from which my graphic emerged.

Phase 2: Discernment
I googled for images of “no TV signal” to refresh my memory of what they looked like… I counted the number of coloured bars and sketched a layout in my unlined notebook. I had originally imagined the pictures on top of the colour bars but quickly realized that it would be better underneath. I was originally thinking there would be space for the URL as well as the name but quickly saw that would be far too cluttered.

I also wanted to soften the colours from the no signal graphics, going back to my notion of creatio collegiate, I wanted the colours to be more welcoming than abrasive.

I recognized the need for block letters to make the .com name readable, striking and similar to the current theme used on the WordPress site.

A one man search through recent photos for photos that would blend into the coloured bar above them…

Can you feel it? The fabulously fantastic frenzy of being in the flow of the creative process? If you don’t do this regularly you really ought to try it… If a graphic is too intimidating try the pen name, or poetic snapshot challenge. Look for a new Creative Challenge every week a exploring-art.com.

Phase 3: Refinement
I had to fix the white black space. I tried a dozen different fonts, switched photos in and out… reiterate, iterate, reiterate.

Phase 4: Completion
I got that warm happy feeling, and I was done.

The Artful Wall

Video | | Mac

The Artful Wall is our, Elaine Wu and my, response to the second assignment for FA350. The assignment was to go out into the UVic campus and find a location to build a wall. Design the wall and create a presentation to pitch your idea to the UVic board of directors. Attached is a movie of the presentation Elaine and I created for class… I have voiced over the presentation with a close facsimile of what Elaine and I delivered to the rest of the FA350 class.