Blog 9 (Because I’m a teeny tiny bit confused about Blog 8 and shouldn’t have waited until now)

My thesis is done! I just have to finish the x-book and graduate!

In summary, I have never been more excited about anything in my entire life. I finished this, it looks great, people have bought it, it’s for sale online, people believe in it, it’s going to something that I really care about, and it’s real. One poster seems small but it’s very seriously part of my story. I’ve spent a lot of time with those letters and those patterns. I’ve made connections with people from organizations like KBHC, IMAlive (who may choose to print it and sell it in the future), and even To Write Love on Her Arms (the organization that sparked an interest in helping out and even my interest in design as a whole back when I was in high school). Seeing this whole thing come full circle was really really rewarding and I hope to be able to keep doing projects like these. If not as a career, then as a hobby on the side. 

My poster is officially for sale on Etsy (http://www.etsy.com/shop/bethannadesign) and I’m hoping I’ll be able to sell these and make some money for a worthy cause.

Reblog it, tweet it, pin it, Facebook it, harass Justin Bieber until he retweets it. ANYTHING.

:)

Blog 7: Presentations

So, I was chilling looking over my notecards, waiting to give David my slides to put on the computer. So then he shows up and I look in my bag, and literally the only thing I don’t have is my flash drive with the slides on it. So I freak out and run out the door, drive back to my house and pray and yell at myself and speed the whole way, grab my flash drive, herd the animals back in the house and then drive back. I make it back completely flustered with about 5 minutes to spare. So I lost my mind and 30 minutes to mentally prepare for the presentation itself, but my slides were there and looking excellent to make up for my craziness. Other than that, the whole presentation day went fairly well. I did read from my notecards and didn’t really remember to look up. Probably not even once. But I didn’t die or fall down walking to the podium, or pass out, or even stutter really bad or anything. So that was a plus. 

And, after the presentations, some people actually bought stuff and it was literally the most wonderful feeling ever. People liked it and they wanted it. I really can’t wait to try to sell these and donate the proceeds.

In-class practice presentations!

I HATE PRESENTING. SO MUCH. I’m not sure if there’s a picture of this and I honestly hope not, yikes. And if not, I can just use a picture of the notes I wrote after presenting.

Here’s some feedback I got:

1. Slow down. Be very clear when you say what it’s for. I sped through phrases like ‘self-injury prevention’ which is pretty key to the project as a whole. (I know I’m very guilty of talking too fast when I’m nervous)

2. Don’t be shy about saying it’s pretty.

3. Use your images as a guide when presenting. You can use notecards to help but try not to read directly through them. (Whoops)

4. Talk about what you did do, not what you didn’t, and don’t make apologies.

So the actual laser cut original poster looks awesome, and I wish I could just make a bunch of those and sell them, but that would be way too expensive, and I’m having a lot of trouble reproducing this. I’ve tried scanning, and the line work doesn’t scan well, it’s all blurry and sad. But the shadows look really nice. Taking a picture seems like the best bet, but you can see the layers of board underneath because they went all shrinky-dinks in my car on the drive home for break. So now I go find Seaboard Signs and Engraving in Myrtle Beach to laser cut new mat board. Also, these pictures aren’t big enough to make an 18x24 poster. Not unless it’s like 120 dpi, which is gonna look like poop. I try a film camera, and scan the transparency to make a 300dpi image, but the colors are off and it’s grainy. So now I’m really panicking. Looks like none of this is going to work, until Jason suggests scanning each individual piece of the poster and faking the shadows in Photoshop. I’m a little upset with this because it doesn’t seem authentic, since I’ve been cutting from mat board all year, but it works. I get the files submitted to be printed at printplace.com 2 minutes before the cutoff. 

I’m not sure where to put this information in terms of the blogs. I connected with several organizations, and ultimately chose to go with IMAlive (imalive.org) the first online crisis intervention network. I exchanged several emails with Robert Mundy, and he’s excited and I’m excited and they might be able to print my posters. They can help me promote the Etsy sales through Twitter and Facebook and whatnot. Later, we decide that I need to do a trial run on my own first. Boingo’s quote was too high for me to make any money for IMAlive, so I go with Print Place, one of the places I was looking at having them printed before speaking with Robert. Working with them was still very very exciting and I’m still in contact with Robert about the progress of sales etc. 

(My pictures for this post will be the bad versions of the poster, but those are on another computer which is not currently in my possession. I can probably post them tomorrow and I promise not to forget this time)

Very Late Blog 4: Group Critiques

I actually forgot my password it’s been so long I posted on here. Yikes. Anyway, here’s what I should have written a long time ago. 

I brought in 2 versions of my laser cut prototypes to show to the class. I told them that I decided to go with the primarily pink version rather than the very multicolored one. The pink one is the one pictured, with the off-white textured foreground. Most of the comments from the class were things like “I wish the real version would be 3-D” and “maybe you can make a couple of those to sell” and “you could have the poster be customizable if you went with the 3-D” and “what if you had printed versions of both of these rather than just the pink one” I replied to most of that with “That would be super cool and also super expensive, but I like the idea of selling customizable 3-D posters but they would have to be wildly expensive.” 

David told me to get this out to some charities and decide which one I’m going to go with. To figure out the legal things and see if they would want to sell it or if I had to include their logo or whatnot. We also talked about making info cards to go with the poster as another possibility.

And then I did talk to charities. Let’s see what they said!

INSTRUCTOR MEETING NOTES

This post should probably go before the other one, but oops. I finally stopped procrastinating and I’m posting all this stuff though, so that’s good :) 

Okay, we first discussed laser cutting and how the person I find to do it should be my “expert” to interview for the x-book.  

We also talked about creating postcards from the poster to send out to explain what my poster is and where it could be featured and why people should buy it. To supplement that, we discussed a card that could be displayed with the poster in clinics to help generate interest in buying it.

Which leads to where I’m going to sell it. We takled about Etsy and the possibility of a Google checkout from my portfolio site. (I bought a domain, but I don’t have my site created yet, so Etsy may be the best choice for now)

We talked about reproduction and decided scanning would be the best option to achieve a high enough resolution to make it at 18x24. I’m still thinking about Boingo for the poster and probably moo.com or something similar for the postcards.

Aaaaaand, lastly we talked about covering my costs before donation. I need to decide a price for the posters but that really depends on how much all of this costs to produce and ship, etc.

LASER ENGRAVING IS THE COOLEST THING IN THE WORLD!

Okay, so I searched for a while for a place that would laser cut mat board. I got a lot of funny looks, and a lot of “try this place,” and a lot of “honey, I can’t help you, but this is really neato.” Yes, seriously. A couple places that had laser engraving capabilities wouldn’t cut mat board because they didn’t want to risk it catching fire. Eventually, I found BrandPro.

They were able to cut mat board but it took a little experimentation to get it right. I was asked to create a file of red hairline outlines where the board should be cut. The machine only accepted Corel files, so my AI file had to be converted. It also had to be flipped, since the machine often scorches the surface of the board as the laser burns through it. The image was burned backwards so the front was less affected by the burning. The first time we tried, it took the laser five passes to cut completely through the board, so you can imagine how difficult it must have been to cut this by hand. MERP -_- Since the laser had to pass so many times, the front of the board was scorched and it kinda smelled like burnt marshmallows. Anyway, we adjusted the speed and the power of the machine, and the next four took only one pass. The whole process was a little tedious and took a little experimenting, but it was by far better than cutting each thing out by hand. I was able to get 5 images laser cut in 2 hours. The scorched surface wasn’t intentional, but it adds some interest so I’m going to make a few different versions of the poster for variety.

YIKES VERY LATE PROTOTYPE BLOG POST.

For the first prototype, I cut each letter and ornament by hand from illustration board (about 11 grueling hours or so) and taped watercolor doodles to the back. Pretty ghetto as far as the actual construction goes but it worked for a prototype. I brought in the actual piece for review and comments from my classmates but the final will be printed posters created with a scanned image. Since the cutting isn’t completely perfect and wonderful and took forever and I lost the feeling in my fingers, I decided to have the design laser cut for the next phase.

I don’t have any of my stuff to take pictures of right now because I’m not in Rock Hill. But I can try to explain what I’ve done so far and then add the pictures when I get back to all my stuff, if that makes any sense at all. 

I’m going to start with a couple of the decisions I’ve made since talking with you last. Most of these decisions have resulted from my experimenting with the techniques that I’m planning on using. Unfortunately, I’ve almost completely decided against embossing just because of budget, but I still wanted to create depth in some way. So what I decided to do is cut my design from illustration board. Yes, I know how crazy that sounds. But I’m actually pretty good at it and I feel like I’ll be able to experiment more with the patterns and stuff this way. Anyway, I’m going to cut my letters and some ornamental elements out of the actual poster, and use the holes as windows to the patterns that will fill up the letters. This does two things for me. I’m going to get the engraved depth that I’m looking for (the illustration board is pretty thick, roughly about 2mm, and I have a ton of it left over from freshman year) and I’ll be able to switch out the backgrounds of each of the letters until I get it exactly how I want it. This allows me some breathing room to mess up on the patterns. If I don’t like one color combination or how I’ve inked something, I can easily switch it out instead of freaking out and starting the poster all over again. Which is something I definitely want to avoid because it’s something that I know is going to happen. Probably a lot. At least from my experimenting with the background.

So now I’m gonna talk about that. As of right now, I’ve just been playing around a little bit with doodling patterns and coloring them in with watercolors. I’m using waterproof permanent india ink pens for the doodles right now. And then I place them behind the letters that I’ve cut out. I’m not so awesome at the watercolor yet, but I think it’s getting there. 

Everything I have is really rough now. I have some sketches of the layout of the poster, and I’ve tested the illustration board window idea on some sketches and doodles. The plan from here is to decide on a sketch for the final and create it digitally so I can make a stencil to cut the pieces from the illustration board.

Which leads me to the size. The only large format scanner available to me scans 11x16. I think this is too small, and I’m still planning on keeping the poster 18x24. The way I’m assembling it will require me to make it in one piece, and I’d prefer to have a complete hand-made version rather than piecing it together in Photoshop. So I decided to make a scaled down version at 60% (10.8x14.4) I’m going to scan this and enlarge it for the final. With the layout I’m leaning toward, I’ll be working with letters around 2.5 inches tall, so I’m confident I’ll still be able to cut them precisely. For the final, the letters will be around 4.25 inches tall, easily legible from far away like I had originally planned. 

I think that’s all I can really say at this point, and I’ll get the pictures posted as soon as possible. I think they’ll probably help to explain what I’m talking about, so I’m sorry I can’t add them now.

This week I worked on completing my X book. I’m almost done, I just need to finish filling in my weekly reports, write my report for the instructor meeting (I’ll email you specific questions for the meeting by Monday), have my meeting with my outside expert from Boingo Graphics (meeting on Monday morning) and write the report, and complete my visual comparisons. Since we talked about what the visual comparison include in class I think that will be pretty simple. I feel better about where I’m at in terms of finishing the X book.