Colegio Newspaper Advertisement

With alot of thought on what to create an ad for, I came to a decision of trying to promote a new and already known nightclub to the Pittsburg area. I am currently in the process of working with the staff of The Jungle as a DJ. I'm also going to use these to aid in this process to show that I can also help promote events graphically.

Thus said, lets get to the topic at hand, shall we? Once my decision of what I was going to promote was made, I began thinking of ways that I could utilize the $100 budget that we had with the correlating column inch pricing that the Colegio has. I thought about spending the entire $100 on one big ad and it hit me, "Wouldn't 2 or 3 advertisements throughout a newspaper be more effective?" I began to see what would be the best options to creatively and wisely use my budget. I chose to run two ads sized at 2x4 (3.79x4) and a third ad sized at 3x1 (5.75x1). The combined total of the ads was $87 which left me a decent ammount of money left over.

I began to draw my thumbnails on how I wanted to lay each ad out, and the ideas just kept flowing. The possibilities just never seemed to end. I still never settled on a few layouts that I could really like, so I picked two that I felt worked best, and tweaked them until I felt that they would be appropriate.

Some of my thumbnail sketches

Some rough sketches of the three ads

With the thumbnails and roughs out of the way, I began to lay my ideas out in the desired programs, of course keeping to the black and white requirements. The design process was very slow on this, as I did a lot of searching through news ads on things that I would like to try, and things that I felt would look well. Trying to keep several things in mind that will and will not work for the news print was quite a task, but also very useful in having such guidelines before creating one in the real world. The project turned out well, in my opinion. I basically promoted an event, and informed the audience that The Jungle will host an event called "Rumble in the Jungle" every Wednesday night, as well as a promotion for the new DJ. 

First ad

Second ad

Third ad

Brendan Murphy Symposium

Brendan Murphy

Brendan Murphy, a senior partner from Lippincott design firm in New York came to Pittsburg State University to speak to us students about how he has made it where he is now. Brendan was an athlete that became injured and began to focus more on his scholastic work than he had prior to his injury. Brendan had said that until his injury he never focused on school like he did after. It was then that he caught my attention, and I was intrigued by his story, because I shared so many similarities with him. He shared his story, accomplishments, and some of the work he has done with us.

I felt like I related to Brendan, having been an injured college athlete myself. I could relate in a big way with what he was saying about how he paid more attention to his grades after his days of being an athlete came to a halt. I also connected with him when he said he came from little to no money, as I also do. He mentioned that this was his major motivation, because of that he worked extremely hard so that he could better himself. It was very inspiring to see this, and to know that at one point he was in the same shoes that I am in.

Aside from his story, I also learned a few things while I was in there. Brendan touched on an area for branding that I have never heard of before that he referred to as sensory branding. Sensory branding, as he said, was not only seeing a company and identifying them by their logo and such, but associating a sound DNA, and/or smell with the branding as well. I thought this was very interesting, as I had never thought of this before. I also learned that in the real world, you will crank out typically 300-3,000 Identity designs before you typically deploy them to the client. I thought this was insane, yet he assured that it was very common.

In closing, Brendan was an inspiration to me once I realized that his story was so close to mine. He was a very great person to relate to, and I personally feel that some of the things he shared will be things that will have to be addressed in the future such as sensory branding, which was something that I did not already know about. Lastly, how he was motivated, really set in with me in a way that someone could not relate to unless you came from a background of little or no money like he or I have.

Photo credit:
"PSU Honors Outstanding Alumni - News Story - Pittsburg State University." Pittsburg State University: Home of the PSU Gorillas! - Pittsburg, KS. 14 Oct. 2010. Web. 25 Oct. 2010. <http://www.pittstate.edu/press-media/detail.dot?id=248849>.

Gap Logo a Fail?

Gap, as you may know, surprised consumers recently by launching a new logo on their masthead of the Gap.com website. While Gap, secretly developed this new logo, and launched it with no warning the company got immediate feedback, most of which was not good feedback. The company eventually, a week later, changed their “more contemporary, modern expression” logo of black “Gap” type with a blue box behind that was offset back to the classic “blue box” that we’re all familiar with.

First, I would like to address that with the old logo, the company has/had a true identity; therefore, the consumer would not be familiar with a new logo after seeing the same one for so long. I believe that the old logo is timeless as well as simple. With the combination of those two, the logo is dynamic in a sense that it subtlety actually makes a larger impact than you realize, now, on with the new logo. Obviously, I am not a fan of the new logo that was created; I tend to agree with one comment that, “It looks like it cost $17 from an old Microsoft clip art gallery”. With that being said, from old to new, I can see what the company had in mind. With the clothing industry constantly changing, their clothes were evolving, and they felt that so should their brand. However, the follow-through of the graphic firm that so clumsily slapped this design together was terrible, as well as they really did no research on where the brand was heading, and how to develop a design that facilitated the style that the company was embarking upon.

With the unveiling of the horrendous design on the Gap.com website, the company’s viral feeds were inflicted like wildfire with comments and posts about how ugly the new look was, and rightfully so. As a consumer of gap, myself, I was shocked that a company would even consider this after them having such an amazing identity already. Yet, as the old saying, “Out with the old and in with the new,” must have been on someone’s mind, the purpose was not in the right area. Come out with new clothes; just keep the same old logo that everyone is familiar with. The unveiling being a total bust, Gap executives concluded that they would revert back to the classic “blue box.” Not a moment too soon, I am afraid, as the holidays are right around the corner, and I could only imagine just how much work it would be to do such an overhaul to such a large company in this amount of time. Aside from this point, Gap also has been down in sales 4%, which is very minimal in the retail industry compared to several opposing brands. Should this strike up the thought of a new logo? Perhaps, but why? Would it make sense for a company to spend that amount of money to overhaul their company when they had a fall in sales like this? These are questions that only the executives of Gap could answer, and apparently they thought it would have been a great idea until all of the feedback was given.

This feedback leads me to my final point. Social networking programs such as twitter and facebook; have they hindered the rebranding of large companies in a sense that the feedback can be given and taken into consideration unlike beforehand where companies would overhaul their identity and people would just have to settle for it? Personally, I think that there are many companies out there that have tried this, and they were shot down as well. After doing some research, I found an article talking about other identity flops like Tropicana a few years ago, and how they also reverted after catching flack on facebook and twitter.

Concluding that personally the old logo is a better piece, not only in design quality, but because it has a certain long term relationship with the Gap customer as well as being timeless. The new logo was scrapped and not used, and for good reason, the general public hated it.

photo credits:
Fuller, Elizabeth. "New Gap Logo Withdrawn: The 'blue Box' Lives on - CSMonitor.com." The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com. The Christian Science Monitor, 12 Oct. 2010. Web. 25 Oct. 2010. <http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/new-economy/2010/1012/New-Gap-logo-withdrawn-The-blue-box-lives-on>.

One-color Recruitment Notepad Project

The assignment was to create a promotional notepad for Pitt State to use in the recruitment process which would target high school aged kids. I began to ponder on the days of old, and the things that I did while in high school. I was immediately reminded of looking through old notebooks from classes in high school in which I had several doodles scattered throughout. This thought sparked an idea for my design as I began to brainstorm.

Word Matrix during the brainstorming process

After the brainstorming process, I managed to come back to the theme that had originally came to mind, doodles. I began sketching several layouts as thumbnails and how I wanted my layout to appear. This really helped my design by allowing me to decide how to lay my content out, although what I thought looked good in my sketches ended up changing again during the design process. Below are pictures of my thumbnails and roughs that were used to jump start my design process.

 Thumbnail sketches

 Rough sketches

I began to start laying out my designs relative to the layout I figured that would look and work the best that it could. With having many layouts narrowed down to what I had visioned, I could then concentrate on putting my idea down on the screen. I knew I wanted my Illustrator file of the crosshatch sketch to bleed off of the pad itself, so I created my files according to the bleed. I then placed my image, and began adding aditional elements in illustrator.  Once I was happy with the look of my notepad, I placed the file into my InDesign file. My InDesign file was constructed to the proper 1/8 of an inch bleed which allowed for my Illustrator file to be placed at 100 percent. I then added a web address in InDesign and my design was complete.

 Finished PDF with crop marks and colorbars