The event “Leading with your Hispanicity” is described on the website as a part of the celebration for Hispanic heritage month. The list of speakers includes Ariana Stolarz, Isabel Sierra Gomez de Leon, Daniel Lobaton, and Rafael Esquer. Interestingly the event first began with a discussion on Cinco De Mayo. Rafael went into great detail explaining the actual history behind the holiday revealing Cinco de Mayo is actually the day Mexico went to battle the french. In the end, Mexico won which California, which was apparently going through a similar situation, had heard about and celebrated. Cinco de Mayo became a day, at least originally, of celebration associated with the idea “We are small but mighty”.

“Hey we got this” got lost in translation…and we can change [that] conversation.” – Ariana Stolarz

There was also conversation on the importance of representation, the relevance of the term “minority”, “Neutral Spanish”, and many other subjects. Overall, I really enjoyed the talk it was short and I learned a lot more than expected.

 

After reading the article “The 7 Best Budget Apps for 2021” by NerdWallet I decided I was most interested in the app PocketGaurd. However, after reading the reviews in the google play store it seemed there were many issues with the app after a recent update. I then chose to download Mint which had better reviews.

 

The thought of linking my bank accounts made me slightly uncomfortable so I decided to read an article on how apps similar to Mint keep your information safe. From what I read, specifically for Mint, the information is kept in a “separate database using multi-layered hardware and software encryption.” which would make it difficult to hack into.

After downloading the app it was nice to see what I was spending money on in an organized way and how much I had spent in the month so far. The app is very pleasant to look at too.

I hadn’t had the opportunity to attend a networking event required for the class so I was becoming a bit anxious. However, today I was able to attend an information session on MAIP! Professor Goetz had been nice enough to let me know about the session the night before through email but I’m sure it was also posted on the Internship page.

I was able to meet a few alumni from the program and learn about their experiences. Before this event, I hadn’t actually heard of MAIP so I’m glad I attended to learn a bit about it. From what I gathered, the program is extremely challenging but also extremely rewarding. It was exciting to hear the alumni talk about what they learned and what opportunities they were able to get.

During the event, I made sure to write down everyone’s name in case I forgot or wasn’t able to see it and by the end, I sent everyone a LinkedIn request! I wrote them a message saying I was there during the event and I would like to connect and I believe they all accepted. They were all extremely nice going so far as to offer me advice and feedback!

I would really like to try and apply but I need to think about it for a bit to properly plan out what I want to do. I’ll be working for MCNY for 6 months and I’d also like to study abroad if possible before I graduate.

Overall I was really thankful for the event!

Today I finished my first day at MCNY!

My internship is hybrid so I will be going into the museum once a week and I’ve decided today I’ll be coming to work every Monday. As soon as I entered through the employee entrance I filled out a health form. After I had completed the form I was introduced to a coworker, I believe he works in security, who had to take my photo for an ID. The IDs are very interesting, they’re pretty thick and I’ll be able to simply scan and enter a code to enter the museum as well as the upper restricted areas. They also count as you clocking in and out! As I was given a tour of the offices in the upper level I was introduced to anyone who happened to be in the office today.  Everyone was very welcoming and I was able to meet members in the Communications, Tech, and Finance departments.

I noticed there was not a strict dress code. Everyone was wearing clothing they felt comfortable in. However, I did see some people that dealt with transferring materials and such out or inside to the museum were wearing a shirt with the museum name on it.

After the tour, I was given the option to choose a desk! Which a member of the Tech department would prepare for me and explain what apps are available, which ones are used for what, and how often. As my first task, I was told to look through my welcome packet which was basically just an introduction to the museum, what programs they have, and what applications they use to complete tasks. There was a lot of information to take in but for the most part, I got it.

Before I left for the day I asked a few questions

such as “Do you end up hiring your interns?” and “What is typically required for someone in my position?” My supervisor said she hadn’t really seen interns hired but made it apparent she has not been working at the museum for a long time. As for the requirements, it seems interns are there to help in all kinds of areas when necessary. For instance, one day I might be researching and writing and others I could be doing general PR/social media work.

As part of the CUNY Cultural Corps program, we are required to attend events/ workshops educating us on different topics. The main focus of the workshop I attended was educating us on how to input payroll information and what sites would be used. The workshop was held through the application Zoom and it lasted about two and a half hours. Honestly, the way we have to input our hours is a little confusing and it got more confusing as fellow interns in the program, over 100, began to ask questions.

From what I understand at the moment, we would have to use RF Cuny, open the calendar, and input our expected hours for the week before we have actually worked. This would have to be input every other Tuesday and approved by our supervisors Friday. This process is different than the one used for CUNY Service Corps which I find interesting.

Ultimately, I won’t fully understand until I’ve done it a few times myself.

I saw the speakers were trying to do their best and I appreciated it. I went ahead and sent LinkedIn invites to the ones I saw spoke up many times. So far the main speaker Isa Mitchell, who is the CUNY Cultural Corps payroll administrator, has accepted my request.

Virginia Sanchez

12/18/19

COMD 1112

 

The Museum Essay Assignment

 

For a field trip we were assigned to meet at the Museum of the City of New York. This museum is located in Manhattan. At the moment I am writing this they are having 5 exhibitions Urban Indian: Native New York Now, PRIDE, City of Workers/ City of Struggle, Who We Are, and Cultivating Culture: 34 Institutions That Changed New York. Although all exhibitions were interesting, I will be focusing on work from the Who We Are exhibition. 

 

Who We Are, according to the Museum of the City of New York site, was created in anticipation of the 2020 census. Through this exhibition contemporary artist and data analysts worked together to exhibit data in an educational and visually interesting way. The first piece that caught my attention was “Landscapes of Inequality: New York City” created by Herwig Scherabon. From a distance the piece just looks like New York city but upon closer inspection there’s something different about this landscape. The artwork is made up of a matrix of cubes using the data from the 2017 American Community Survey five- year estimates. Through this work Scherabon wanted to communicate the boundaries within New York in a familiar landscape.

 

The next piece is “Stimulated Dendrochronology of Immigration to New York City, 1840-2017, 2019” created by Pedro Cruz, John Winbey, and Felipe Shibuya. In this piece from the use of color to differentiate geography and the positioning of each colored ring in the direction of the groups home countries. This is a very thoughtfull piece of work. The work uses census micro data from the Integrated Public use Micro Series. 

 

This final was work was a piece I recognized from an exhibition held at my college. I don’t remember the name of the exhibition but I do remember this piece. “[The Georgia Negro] City and Rural Population. 1890.c. 1900”  was created in 1890 showing data from this time as well. The work shows 86% of black Americans lived in areas, represented by the red bar. This red part of the piece was actually coiled so it would be able to fit on the page. Unlike the other pieces in this essay this artwork was made ink and watercolor.

I really enjoyed my trip to the Museum of the city of New York. It was very interesting seeing how art and data could come together and create such interesting pieces. It is likely data will be shown this way as norm in the near future.

Virginia Sanchez

11/30/19

COMD 1112

 

Massimo Vignelli: Simplicity 

 

Massimo Vignelli was born on January 10, 1931, in Milan, Italy. Vignelli was a talented Italian designer that worked in “2D”, graphic design, and “3D”, architecture. Beginning at the age of 16 Vignelli was able to acquire a large number of internships with notable Italian architects and designers such as Achille Castiglioni, Giancarlo De Carlo, Ignazio Gardella, etc. In his early years, Vignelli seemed to focus more on architecture as he obtained his first degree in Politecnico di Milano for architecture in 1953. Around 1953 to 1957 he had also attended the school of Architecture and University of Venice. Despite his education largely focusing on architecture Vignelli would experiment and succeed with all forms of art. Around 1948 to 1950, while Vignelli was still a student at Brera Academy of Art, Vignelli worked for the photo agency of federal Toscani while in 1955 he even designed a house. As Vignelli once said “If you can design one thing, you can design everything.” a principal he seemed to follow for most of his design career. Vignelli would later move to the united states with his partner Lella Vignelli and establish Unimark in 1965, one of the first design companies to have offices worldwide. Under the company were talented designers such as close friends Bod Noorda and Ornella Noorda, Ralph Eckerstorm, and Larry Klein. Similar to Massimo Vignelli’s own design process, Unimark was strict on organization and emphasized the use of the grid as well as the typeface Helvetica to maintain consistency in all the company’s design work. Despite the number of talented designers working under Unimark, the company filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1977. Although short-lived the company had a large influence on American design and company aesthetics in general still followed to this day. Vignelli established a new company under the name Vignelli Associates for design as well as Vignelli Designs for furniture and objects. Vignelli Associates would go on to make designs for Bloomingdales and knolls. Vignelli is a designer that believed design should be simplistic and maintain structure in design. In his work, there is a trend of a simple typeface with thoughtful placement and bold color. As expressed in his most notable work for the New York subway. Vignelli had understood the consumer and created a simplified and visually appealing subway system to read. This type of design would later become an international standard. Massimo Vignelli had always focused on what the customer needed and created classic designs that would be able, and have been able, to withstand the years to come.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Vignelli

http://www.designculture.it/interview/massimo-vignelli.html

https://www.aiga.org/medalist-massimoandlellavignelli#slideshow-1-4

https://www.famousgraphicdesigners.org/massimo-vignelli

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unimark_International

https://thefutur.com/blog/massimo-vignelli-best-quotes

https://rationale-design.com/resources/vignelli-canon/

 

Video Project Short Response

For this assignment we were required to film a video of a classmate being interviewed by ourselves. This short video, about 1 to 2 minutes long, would require a title, our name, the name of the classmate, and incorporate music at some point. Before creating this video I had very little experience with editing, aside from some experimenting for a different class. It was through this assignment I gained a good amount of knowledge of editing using the software app iMovie. For my video I had cut a good amount of video and even moved some parts of the video around to flow better. To make this cutting more visually appealing I used the transition “Cross Blur” for the bulk of the video and “Fade to Black” in the beginning. I noticed listening to the video there was a lot of silence and it felt slightly awkward in some moments. To lighten the atmosphere and fulfill my music requirement I decided to add music to the entire video, making it slightly louder in the beginning and the end. I gave the video the title “A Student Interview” adding the name of the classmate, Abigail Moran, in the next slide. For the title I deliberately arranged the type in a shape to make it look cleaner. The type I used is a clean readable sans serif font without stroke, which was the standard for the title slide. To add emphasis to certain words I decided to use the accent color aqua, which is Moran’s favorite color.

https://youtu.be/ILJcnovrJ3g

 

Logo History Assignment

For this assignment we were required to write an essay on the history of a company logo of our choice. The essay would need to cover who had created the design and why some changes occurred as well as contain images of the logo and its changes. I had decided to choose the company Nestle because it is an old company with a rich history, likely to have many interesting changes to it’s logo.

 

 

Virginia Sanchez

09/15/19

CDMG 1112

NESTLE Company Logo History

 

Nestle was founded in 1866 by Heinrich Nestle, formerly known as Henri Nestle. The company had its breakthrough in 1867 when Heinrich Nestle created ‘farine lactee’, or flour with milk, with his medical knowledge as a pharmacist. This formula was created to combat high mortality rates among infants that could not be breastfed. At the moment the Nestle company sells a larger number of products such as bottled water, cereal, chocolate, coffee and much more.

The original logo for Nestle was based upon Henri Nestle’s family coat of arms. This original illustration contained a knight’s head, a shield, and a single bird in a nest.  The nest is a direct relation to Henri Nestle’s last name which means “Nest” in German. Although this logo was personal to the Nestle family, it wasn’t to the public.

 

To better promote their products, such as their famous baby formula and create a recognizable symbol to the public the logo was changed. This new logo was an illustration of a mother bird feeding her three baby chicks. The three chicks are especially interesting because they represent the three original brothers of the Nestle family. The mother bird represents their original target market. Overall, this symbolized a nurturing company.

 

As successful as this logo was at communicating the company message, it was far too detailed and was missing the company name “Nestle”. The company name was added to the logo to unify all brands under the Nestle company.  However, this text was added directly in front of the, now slightly lighter, illustration of the birds. Likely to improve legibility the text was moved below the illustration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Despite these photos having detailed illustrations of the classic birds, some ads would focus on the silhouette of the birds during this time. Others would focus more on the nestle wordmark. Looking at the ads for the Nestle company through the years, you can see there are a number of wordmark and color variations depending on the product. This was likely done to give each product its own sense of identity while still connecting it to the company.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the latest versions of the logo, there are only two birds instead of three. As the years pass the logo continues to simplify to adapt to new trends. Overall, the Nestle company logo was only slightly changed over the years because it so brilliantly connects the company to the consumer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

https://www.nestle.com/aboutus/history/logo-evolution

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nestle/14212774816/in/photostream/

https://brandculture.com/insights/using-right-ingredients-nestle/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Nestl%C3%A9

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9

https://1000logos.net/nestle-logo/

https://www.nestle.com/aboutus/history/nestle-company-history

 

For this assignment we were asked to choose a quote and visually communicate a message using type in creative ways. I chose the quote “Here’s Johnny” from the famous horror film “The Shining”. I chose this quote because it is famous enough when people see it they know where it’s from. This would allow me to mess with the quote and design in ways I couldn’t with an unknown quote.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For my first concept, I created an illustration of an odd-looking door. I was inspired to create an illustration similar to the poster by Saul Bass for the film “Anatomy of Murder”. Coincidentally, Saul Bass had also created the poster for “The Shining” from which I got the quote “Here’s Johnny!”. This door, along with the mirrored text, is a direct reference to the “redrum” scene in “TheShining”. Aside from the red “Johnny” and doorknob, the image is entirely black and white.

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My third concept is a reference to the “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” scene. In this scene it is discovered, by Wendy, Jack has been rewriting the same sentence a concerning amount of times. To replicate this scene I decided to use a typewriter font and repeat the quote “Here’s Johnny!”. To represent Jack’s state of mind is not well I made one of the quotes red in a different font.

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In this fourth concept, I reference the iconic scene from which I got the quote from, the “Here’s Johnny!” scene. I created an illustration of a broken object to represent the door. For the text, I paired different fonts and different sizes to represent Jack’s state of mind.

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For my second concept  I wanted to make the text “Johnny” seem threatening. To accomplish this I used the impact font, slowly increasing the size of the text. This way I could insinuate the text is coming closer. To throw the observer a little off I changed the letter “J” in the largest, closest, “Johnny”.

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For my sixth concept, I used an image. This image is a shot of Wendy looking over Jack’s work in the “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” scene. It is at this moment Wendy realizes Jack is not well. To represent Jack’s insanity I used two different types of fonts and sizes. To represent Wendy’s sudden realization of her situation, I made the text seem as if it is surrounding and weighing down on her. I was inspired to place the type this way by  Scott Townsin’s Design “You’ve Got Enough on Your Plate”

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