Note Pad Project

The assignment was to create a design for a note pad that was to be distributed to high school students:

WORD MATRIX

 

The word matrix served the purpose of brainstorming what the target audience (high school students) were interested in.

THUMBNAILS

 

5 vertical and 5 horizontal thumbnails of different ideas of how the note pad could look.

ROUGH DRAFT

 

The rough draft shows the exact size of the notepad as well as the margins and placement of the design and text.

FINISHED PDF FILE

When designing the notepad, I knew that it needed to not only catch the eye of high school students but also make the department seem appealing.  The main idea I had was to convey a sense of imagination, freedom, and simplicity with my design.  High school students are young and have the need to express themselves.  Using the word "create" as part of my design urges the person to scribble whatever they want all over the notepad.  Part of being in the graphics department is having the ability to be creative.  The design being positioned on the top of the notepad allows a person to have more blank space to use.  Also there is confining lines no worry about writing in.  I wanted the scrolls and circles in the design to express the opportunity to grow and be creative with the Graphics and Imaging Technology department.  The scrolls stretch across the page showing the growth.  In order to help promote the department, I placed the scroll design to end around the name of the department to draw the eye across the logo and focus in on the important information.  Also, the circles are large and then grow smaller which helps pull the attention to the focal point of the text.  The font American Typewriter was used because it fit well with the simple creative theme.

Gap Logo: Old vs New



Changing a logo overnight would cause some commotion among customers but when you have had the same logo for over 20 years, people just get angry.  In my opinion, Gap should have never changed their logo.  From a design perspective, the new logo just looked horrible.  The boring black Helvetica font and the tiny blue gradient box made the overall appearance seem cheap.  Even though the original design is uninteresting, with a blue box and plain, white text, at least it looks as though it was created by a designer instead of someone just using Microsoft Word. 

Gap made a huge mistake by switching their logo without warning their customers.  With the amount of brand loyalty that this company has, the customers are the ones basically running the show.  They are the reason it is successful so changing something without their approval is actually just not courteous.  It was interesting to see how much effect the social media had with this case though.  Gap has over 700,000 Facebook fans that all wanted to express their opinion.  I think this new technology is great, especially for companies because they get instant feedback on their products and performance.  Gap was able to see the negative response to the new logo and fix it before too much damage was done.  Before social networking, it may have taken much longer and their sales would have dropped much more drastically.

If Gap wants to take their company in a new direction and have the logo be a part of that then they need to do something completely different.  But they don't need to make it look so forced that they are stepping outside of the box .  No pun intended.