How to make granola: a recipe template by lemasney
Regular followers of this site know that I like to mix a little nutrition in my design, and design in my nutrition. In this case, I thought I’d make a poster and infographic that showed the incredible flexibility of ingredients in granola. Systems that allow for variables, like templates, are a truly beautiful thing. I love that you can take just a few ingredients and make a delicious, nutritious, well-balanced meal. Design is a lot like that for me too. A bit of texture, a few fonts, a beautiful palette, and some layout and placement are the variables for a well-balanced design.
on the space between art and design cc-by lemasney
on the space between art and design cc-by lemasney
It may interest you to know that I have worked in the field of Instructional Technology and Design for 14 years, but that I have an undergraduate degree in Sculpture. This is the point at which people usually crinkle up their face and say “How did that happen?” I sometimes mention that I followed it up with a MA in organizational leadership, and I can see their hand twitch, ready to scratch their head.
A man with roots, firmly planted by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #creativecommons #design #cc-by #tree #roots
The answer is that I love technology, especially in organizational use. I am passionate about it. I adore the ways in which technology is an extension, a tool set, a solution to problems. My undergrad sculpture degree taught me about creative problem solving, visual structure and communication, and things like space, color, texture, planning, and their intersection between the arts, including graphic design. I started off studying drafting and architecture in high school, and through a series of events that will be its own post later, I went into the fine arts, but continued to use electives and other channels to learn about computers, design, printmaking, food, business, and networking. Those skills have made it possible to go in lots of different directions in my career, including graphic design, as much of a passion for me as technology itself.
A primary color study by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
I thought it would be interesting to look at the ways in which my workflow, choices, methods and outcomes change when I’m either working in the fine arts or graphic design. Others may have their own differences, and may even disagree with my divisions, but these are mine.
Graphic design is typically digital, the fine arts is typically analog.
I do most of my work in Inkscape and GIMP for graphic design. I create most of my fine arts work on paper. This fact informs the rest of these points pretty directly.Â
Graphic design is precise by nature, the fine arts are typically more chaotic.
I have always colored outside the lines. My sister used to tease me about it. My painting and drawing teachers encouraged it. My graphic design work allowed me to make choices about precision in my work.
Ampersand by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Graphic design is typically more direct and less ambiguous, the fine arts may create more questions than it answers.
Usually if I am working on a graphic design project there is a clear deliverable point that I am trying to get across, such as “Our name is Spacely Sprockets, and we make great gadgets”. When I work in the fine arts, I am typically looking to answer more fundamental questions about humanity, the act of living, or the experience of a moment. There is sometimes an overlap of these kinds of ideas between the two disciplines, but even then, the design work has less ambiguity.
Glasses off by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Graphic design work is highly portable, the fine arts typically create a storage issue.
All of my graphic design work is sitting in its original state on various hard drives, cloud storage services, and other portable media. Except for a show or two of my graphic work in which pieces were printed, framed, and sold, and a paper portfolio of some of my best graphic work, and excluding the prints, fliers, signs and other versions of client work, the work exists online. Most of my original fine arts work sits hidden in portfolios, discarded in moves, or only in photos where the work does not exist anymore. The photo is typically a sad facsimile of the work itself, and hardly ever captures anything of the experience.
A fiery line by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Graphic design work is easily shared in its original form, and represented well in copies. Fine art is best taken in with all the senses.
My design portfolio shows you the work in both its original and final forms. There is no need, in my opinion, to see it printed to see the work. My fine arts work, as well as most art, really should be felt in the way that a sculpture affects the air, tasted and smelled in the way that oil paint can activate the back of your tongue, heard in the sense of the way the sound of the space changes with the work in it, and seen in such a way that you can sense the texture of brushstrokes, the bend of a piece of metal in space, the thousand points of view in a site specific piece.
So, I just finished a project with a longtime friend and his wife who just launched a business. I saw their announcement of the new business, congratulated them, and quietly asked them about their visual branding, which seemed a bit… rushed.
He responded that they just needed to start advertising, and that they would work out the logo later. I asked him if I could create his visual branding as a way of showing my support, and he and his wife agreed. I decided to share the process here as a way of showing you what that typically looks like.
The first thing I did was ask them to fill out the design brief (on the navigation menu above) Â because it asks some key important questions about what their brand is in a highly structured way that works to begin the thought process about branding. The result was the following brand profile:
The Design Brief and a visual brand profile.
Paradise Productions and More sees their key audience as being most attracted to the following descriptors: feminine, masculine, colorful, playful, sporty, and adventurous. Their key deliverable product is personalized specialty objects, like printed mugs, t-shirts, and phone cases. They wanted to see these products as part of the logo and wanted to emphasize their t-shirt personalization. They liked green and purple for colors. They wanted to use the logo in advertising, on product samples, on business cards and in the media. They indicated that since they were just getting started they were creating rather than modifying their branding, and that any individual may be a potential customer, as opposed to it being a gender-specific product, for example. When asked what set their work apart from competitors, they responded that they “give more personal care to each and every item that [they] make”.
Getting started
So after discussing and confirming these results, I got to work in choosing fonts, symbols, and colors to match their wants. I sent them the following for review and confirmation.
Paradise Productions brand study, revision 0, by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Refining choices.
They responded that they liked the first and last fonts, as well as the baseball-style font in the middle. They liked the palette I chose, and the general look and feel of the symbols. As a result, and with confirmation by voice and an explanation that I’d be starting work on flow and layout of characters, I created and sent this response.
Paradise Productions brand study, revision 1, by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Refining further
I decided to move towards a monogram for their main symbol with the option to use specific symbols later, because the urge to use a repeated P as a monogram was just too hard to resist. They liked it, and we decided to continue to refine the work. With this set, they said that they preferred the stacked P monogram in the upper left, the wordmark in the middle right, and so I responded quickly with this to confirm, while we were on the phone.
Paradise Productions brand study, revision 2, by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Final revision.
And they said that they liked everything but the light green background. I quickly made another iteration that we are very likely to move forward with, below.
Paradise Productions brand study, revision 3, by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
I wanted to give them a square option, a horizontal option, and a vertical option as a starting point to get most social media and other advertising needs taken care of. I am also planning to share the SVG files with them, with all fonts as paths, so that if they wish to take this work to another designer to continue, or to work on it themselves in Inkscape or Illustrator, they can. This job took about 4 hours, including design time and confirmation/consultation. Some jobs move quicker, and some move slower, but very often they follow this pattern where the main product is a logo for visual branding. Congratulations to my friends and their launch of their new business, and thanks very much for letting me be a part of that process.
It is becoming more important to know how to create original images, videos, and other visual content. You need transliteracy skills.
20060410 (2) (Photo credit: nikontino)
In the same way that it has traditionally been important to know how to read, write and perform arithmetic as a basic skill set of  communication, it has become increasingly important for people to create their own images, video, and other graphics to communicate their particular message effectively. It’s almost as though people only recently realized their visual preferences, maybe as a reaction to the emergence of visually motivated social networks like Pinterest, a place for people to curate, share, and collect images with verbal content becoming secondary.
A more visual web of content requires new skills.
A screenshot of the GIMP 2.2.8 raster graphic software. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
As we move towards more digital interactions, and enjoy more visual web content from producers as a first introduction to their messages, we can see that they are creating a digital trail for themselves. Other people then find and interpret what they are about through quick visual assessments. If you look at my Pinterest boards, you will quickly get a sense of what I am about, because the cursory glance at a series of images does not carry the threshold of understanding that reading text does. We must slow down and engage our verbal brain to interpret the letterforms, then the words, then the combination of words to make meaning. With images, we need only recognize the items in the image to begin interpretation. We want to be able to leave our own visual trail, one with interesting, insightful, and communicative images, videos, and graphics that tell our story. If you do not know how to edit a photograph, make cuts, titles, and transitions in video and audio, or create a reasonable graphic, you will become more reliant on others to produce, edit, or change content for you. In the same way that you would not have to rely on someone else to create your word processed documents for you, you do not want to rely on someone else for mediating your visual content.
You can learn how to make great images and videos.
There are fantastic free tools and resources to begin to learn how to use these toolkits in the same way that you learned how to use browsers, word processors, spreadsheets, and operating systems. If you learned by spending time in the applications, the same will likely be true for visual applications. If you learned by reading a book, you may want to try the same for these applications. In order to learn Inkscape, an open source illustration application like Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator, by book, I strongly suggest The Book of Inkscape, by Dimitry Kosonov. You likely learned word processing and other  applications because a need arose for you to become familiar with them to do schoolwork, business, or to communicate with others. A new need has emerged in digital transliteracy: for people to communicate in person, on paper, on-screen, in images, in video, in voice, and in graphics.
You can be your own graphic designer, video producer, or photographer with the skills to support you.
English: An infographic illustrating and comparing the popularity of different geosocial networking services (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
With newly acquired video editing, image manipulation, and other visual media skills, you can begin to tell new stories that move people differently than a page or a voice can, take part in the remixed web, leave your creations waiting to be found and enjoyed, and have a kind of digital presence that engages, sticks with visual learners, and promotes you differently than text can because of the very nature of the media.
I’d like to help you to gain these skills!
Contact me at lemasney@gmail.com or 609-553-9498 to talk about how we can begin to acquire these skills for your organization, service, or product. Let’s do something great together!
I will be talking about http://365sketches.org, a daily design project using free software to the Arts, Tech, Community and Culture group at Artworks Trenton on Wednesday, February 27th, 2013. It ran between 2010 and 2013 with a break in the middle for two years worth of daily posts.
In this project, I made a design or image with free (libre) software, most often the open source illustration application called Inkscape. I started it as a personal venture in mastering Inkscape. But through social media, shows, requests, and demonstrations, the project became a community of practice, learning, and communication. In all of the various projects, collaborations, and work that I’ve done, I can clearly say that this one, costing only time and effort and returning my investment a hundred times over, has been the most rewarding by far.
Please come and learn how and why you should get started in developing a 365 project.
In this session, we looked at the reasons why infographics are becoming an important, highly popular way of presenting information. We showed how to find data, how to build your message, and how to put together your infographic using great, free tools. Below is the presentation for this two-hour session.
The Essential Cheat Sheet for Social Media Cover Photo Dimensions [+ Pre-Sized Templates]
A Crash Course in Inkscape
