Savonne Andrews's ePortfolio

After the meeting from last week I worked on deliverable 1, which was the black women in literature flyer. I created four drafts for the clients(Normally my internship limits us to three drafts per revision, but I promised to digitize the clients thumbnail.) While designing I ended up liking three of the designs so I received feedback from my colleagues and they determined the second draft was the most popular among them. The client however, decided on the first layout which was fine to me as I felt the drafts were similar. Rather than following their initial template for the design that listed the books, I instead created a background collage of the reading material and then placed filters and opaque colors on top as I felt it was more visually pleasing. 

The drafts can be viewed below.

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This week saw me meeting with two Doctors from the African department of the college for a discussion about two deliverables.

Deliverable 1- A flyer promoting the black women in literature class. The idea for this flyer was to get an image of a black woman with dreadlocks looking fiercely at the viewer to portray seriousness while including a collection of the reading material in the background. This project was given high priority seeing as spring enrollment starts soon. 

Deliverable 2- A website banner for the African department site which contains a collage of professors and historical black figures. The idea for this one is that by hovering over or clicking each individual you can receive background information on them. This project was given a loose deadline so for now I am simply going to explore what I can do and if I will have to incorporate web design.

For deliverable 1 I was given a pre designed thumbnail from the clients and I informed them that I will try my best to keep the same thought process in my design.

 

Clients Thumbnail:

The circles represent where the photos of the reading material should appear.

In addition to brainstorming to rebrand the college’s social media, the Faculty Commons Design Team is now thinking about whether we should brand ourselves. We are considering a campaign where we make improvements behind the scenes and advertise what we have done more heavily. We are currently considering how to brand ourselves differently on our own site alongside the school’s social media. We are considering highlighting each designer separately and changes we have made to help the college which will promote our own portfolios and professional social media. One interesting idea a teammate had in our weekly zoom meeting was that we could each design a meet the artist post. Luckily I have one handy that I drew last semester as a class project.

Though we would need to make more professional versions, I think it would be a good idea to make these. I feel that including these alongside our portfolio to introduce ourselves may help potential clients to request specific designers on our team whose work and design style align with their vision when requesting a project. I also think it could engage students to look into applying with us or become inspired by the work of their classmates. We will discuss this issue further in individual meetings. This week we were also all tasked with adding social media components to our current client projects. I am awaiting my next two projects, but currently I am working on the faculty publication support program which helps faculty to publish their writing. By looking at schools’ social media, I have learned that people generally interact more with real life photos than design or illustration. Due to this I thought it would be good to perhaps take a photo of someone who has used the program alongside a confession in the instagram description. Another idea I considered was having a step by step of how the publication process works across 5 Instagram slides. That or making a tutorial video as to how the process works. To accompany the brainstorming I made a very simple thumbnail of how a basic post would be displayed.

Unlike my usual semesters, I haven’t worked with many clients on my own yet. Rather than an individual project, we are working on brainstorming to improve the college’s social media representation as a team. We are currently mostly focused on Instagram and I have made a few discoveries by looking over other colleges social media as well as ours. Highlights- Instagram story highlights could benefit our social media by including urgent news without having to scroll through tons of photos on the page. Visibility- Visually, the schools social media uses too much blue which is the schools color. I believe many designers are prone to representing the school in designs, but due to this thought different posts lose their identity and become visually boring and confusing. They get lost and seen as unimportant amongst similarly designed posts. Student Engagement- We could potentially increase student engagement by highlighting the achievements of current students or alumni in story posts. The pearl building tv’s which used to advertise student designers inspired me to think like this. Aside from this brainstorming, I do have one project where I am working on an OpenLab site for the faculty publication support program. It is a program that helps the school’s faculty to publish their writing officially. I have been working on this project for two semesters now, due to many changes in vision and time constraints even though it is just a logo. Essentially now I am just changing the current website’s theme as it does not allow logos. I prototyped a few different website themes to see how well the primitive version of the logo will look.

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I spent this week working on the banner for the Faculty Commons Monthly banner. This is used as promotional artwork for Faculty Commons monthly newsletter. We are currently working on creating monthly art for the newsletter to create interest for the readers. Though I am not the project lead for these monthly designs I worked on it because the team member assigned to it is not with us for the semester yet. She already created a design for the month in advance, but we received a complaint citing representation issues within the design. I was tasked with resolving the representation issue. For reference here is her original design:

I met with the original designer and we discussed our thoughts on the matter. We both figured that the representation was a tricky topic to deal with and that in its current form, the design didn’t particularly have a problem as the characters had no skin color and a variation of hairstyles. Despite this, I did see that there was the opportunity to add more characters for representation and fix some hairstyles. Additionally, I figured even though some of the characters’ hairstyles were used by many races, they looked like they could be wrongly perceived to represent caucasians in specific as the models were colored white with mostly straight hair. Due to this I decided to also change the skin colors, but since I did not want them to be too representative of race (which would likely cause another complaint) I instead gave the characters inhuman skin colors.

Ultimately, the change was liked and has gone live at this point.

I’ve been at my internship for quite a while, about two years now so I’m beginning to get different responsibilities. To give a summary, I work with the Faculty Commons Design team for Citytech. When I originally started at this internship we worked in an office in the Citytech building, but the pandemic changed that halfway into my second semester with the team. Since the pandemic hit, quite a few of the full time designers on the team have left and I am now starting to become one of the senior designers on the team. Since many designers have been leaving, we also have been hiring more and at this point I would say we currently have the most interns I have seen on the team since I joined. Due to this I now am taking more of a leadership role on the team. Me and 3 of the other senior designers now have the responsibility of overseeing the newer interns. Our roles include emailing them for status updates, joining them on zoom meetings and critiquing their work. Aside from overseeing the new interns, on week 2 I did not do much of my own work. At the beginning of every semester we generally re-contact our clients and wait for them to get adjusted before working. I’ve attached a photo of a discord server(messaging channel) that me and the senior designers created to keep in contact with the newer interns.

This week at Faculty Commonsjust like last week, I also have been engaging in more of an overseeing position. Every senior designer on the team has been assigned a specific intern to work with and check in weekly to mentor. Rather than receiving my own project to work on, my mentee received a project. She was tasked to update an already designed poster for the honors scholars program’s 23rd research mixer.

Since the poster was already designed we pulled it from our database of designs for the intern to work on. We used to keep our designs stored on a computer with a backup, but we have transitioned to using dropbox since the quarantine. I told the intern where to look to retrieve the file to start working on it using the info given in the clients email. After doing some work she sent me and the client a draft. 

In her client email, she communicated well introducing herself and requesting to meet on zoom as we had trained the new interns to do. During the meeting I joined her as her and the client discussed deadlines and expectations. After the meeting I gave her feedback on the questions she asked the client as well as on the draft she showed me. Moving forward she finished the update in under two days and the client was satisfied with the response time and final product.