Student at NYU's ITP program
After an exhausting couple days/weeks/months, I presented my safe cracking game at the ITP Winter show on December 17th & 18th. I’ll be updating my blog with photos, videos, and code shortly. But first, I’m going to take a nap. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me!
Let’s start with a test:
The task is to arrange the colors from one end to the other in order to create a seamless gradient. The lower the score, the better. How’d you do? Here’s my score:
I did pretty well! I found that if I stopped looking at the individual colors and looked at the whole range, It was much more apparent which colors were in the wrong order.
The next part of our assignment was to create a sketch to explore 3 different aspects of color: hue, brightness and saturation. I created a pixel mirror that would use only 1 of the three from the original pixels and set the other 2 values to a constant number. Here’s the original, reflecting the correct hue, brightness and saturation:
Here’s what happens when you keep the brightness and contrast constant and only reflect the hue of each pixel:
Here’s brightness:
and Saturation:
The sketch I made will cycle through these when the user clicks the mouse, and the value for the other 2 variables is set by the mouse’s y position. Here’s a video:
and here’s the code:
The next step of our homework assignment was to create a new ITP logo. I had been thinking about this all during the weekend so when I sat down with my pen and paper today I was ready to go. I started with brainstorming ideas about what ITP means to me and others. I wrote down things like Creative, Flexible, Technology, Art, Experimental, etc. I was very inspired by the flexible systems in my last post so I got to work.
I first thought about the typeface. I initially wanted to use the negative space, so I knew I’d need a chunky one. I decided on Helvetica Bold for the iconic shape and the weight. I then started thinking the flexibility. ITP stands for a lot of things to a lot of people, and everyone’s experience is slightly different. I wanted that to show in my logo and give users the ability to customize their logo for different use cases (such as business cards, etc.) Here’s what I came up with:
as I was making the pdf and scrolling through, I loved the way it looks as it flipped through the colors so I made an animated gif of it (Click to view):
I really enjoyed this assignment to study logo design a bit. We were asked to find a logo that we liked and feel is successful. In thinking about modern logo design, I remembered a few that I really liked that were flexible and changed depending on the many different circumstances a logo is used for these days. After some searching I found this blog post from last year:
A few of these I think are really successful (Brooklyn Museum of Art, City of Melbourne, Museum of Arts and Design) and a few I think are pretty terrible actually (Bay Area Library Information Systems, MIT Media Lab) – yet all logos are flexible, changeable but still consistent. I particularly like the Brooklyn Museum of Art logo.
This logo was created by 2×4, a design firm here in Manhattan back in 2004. I love the color. These 8 designs around the standard “B” show the different aspects of the museum and the diverse content there.
Next up: my ITP logo redesign
Front:
Back:
I really like the pixel caricature I use as my avatar for my email and other sites, so I wanted to include that with a friendly greeting on the front. I wanted to use a vertical format, but knew that my long name (and email, and website…) would pose a problem. I decided to solve it in a couple ways; first, I put everything at an angle to keep the font size large, and make it a bit more visually interesting. I also combined my name, website address and email address instead of writing it out 3 times. That did, however, introduce a bit of confusion with the twitter handle, so I added the twitter bird to make that more clear.
The “code + design” was an addition to remind others what it is that I do, or am interested in. I made a version without it as well. I’m trying to decide which I like better.
I wanted to keep it very clean and to the point, but I’ll definitely make a few more versions before I finalize this.