or, an introduction to my portfolio and brand.

Hi folks! It has been a while since my last posting. I’m afraid that, beyond my own expectations, school has further ramped up since the final project. This is a bit of my own fault since I decided to add two additional classes with larger outside projects. As a result, I am currently involved in producing an online magazine, a branding project and all of my various portfolio-related projects.

While my portfolio is still being developed (Object Oriented Programming makes things such fun), I wanted to show off my business card. Hit the cut for various looks and information!

Front:

There are a few elements I wanted to talk about for the front of the card. First is my name. I chose the font Canterbury Sans for my name. I feel that it represents my handwriting to an extent, since I tend to have tall extenders (eg the “l” height) and tall capital letters paired with a small x-height (the height of the lowercase letters). I also think that the difference in heights helps enhance the personality of the font and makes it stand out strongly.

The next item is the nautilus shell in the upper-left corner of the card. The nautilus is the main representation of my brand and carries multiple interpretations. The first is that of evolution. The Nautilus is a sea creature that has a deep connection to the evolutionary process through its prevalence in fossils. Amusingly enough, the creature itself has not evolved, remaining much the same over millions of years. However, when shown the image of a nautilus shell, the sense of progression and change is inherent. Second is that of a logarithmic spiral which carries a strong tie to mathematics and programming. In addition, the logarithmic spiral is often associated with the golden ratio, even though the golden ratio is only a particular case of the logarithmic spiral. This association draws in the expansive history inherent in the golden ratio and golden spiral, a concept that has been used in everything from design to architecture to books to artwork in the belief that it is the “perfect” ratio holy to nature.

Finally, the small text below my name. I used small caps to help differentiate it from the main display font and included “>>>” to form a second connection to the back of the card (the first being the nautilus shell).

Back:

I mentioned earlier that the nautilus shell speaks on the concept of evolution. Here, I took that one step further to create my own “Evolution of Man” using a tadpole, a lizard, an ape and a human, with the “>” forming the connection between the three and directing the eye toward the natural conclusion. This sense of “The Origin of Species” also drove me to use wood for the background of the card. I wanted to capture the sense of those old books and the sense of a natural process. Thus, it seemed that a wood would be appropriate choice to convey those particular meanings.

Now, you might be wondering, “why evolution?” Well, this ties back to my “What is Design?” statement that is under the About section on this site (You didn’t know it changed? Well, I’m mentioning it now!). I’d highly recommend clicking on the link and giving the full document a read, but the cliff notes are that the world around us constantly changes so design does too and that design needs to look both backwards to its own history and to the future in order to be effective. I wanted to capture that sense and the concept of myself as a designer constantly evolving seemed to make perfect sense in that context.

Thus, my “Evolution of AaronBell” concept grew. Please look forward to seeing the portfolio when it is fully completed! It shall be put onto the second domain referenced in the business cards – AaronB.net (it currently takes you back to 10-yen).

In any case, I hope you like the business cards! I had fun making them and they turned out great even when digitally printed.

One of the larger projects I was involved in last term was the creation of a DVD packaging for the documentary, “The Memphis Belle: A Story of A Flying Fortress,” created in 1944 by William Wyler for the Army Airforce. It told the story of the 25th and final mission of the crew of the Memphis Belle, a B-17 bomber heavily favored over Europe during World War II. We could make a packaging as simple as a single disk, dvd cover and dvd cover, but I wanted to do something different.

I made a “special edition” version.

Foreword: The project wasn’t meant to create a “perfect” final version of the packaging, but more to generate a prototype of what the packaging would be like for a potential client to approve or amend the direction of the project. As a result, some of the elements are not as totally clean as I would look for in a retail project.

To start, I needed to conceive of what the packaging would include. Originally, I wanted to create a DVD and CD combination. The DVD would contain the main documentary and the CD would contain famous speeches, smaller video clips and other relevant media. However, over the course of my research and image gathering, I found the potential to make an even more significant package as seen in the final list below:

• DVD
  • The Memphis Belle: A Story of A B-17 Flying Fortress

    1944 documentary

  • Mission Accomplished: The Story of the Flying Fortress

    1942 propaganda film

  • U.S. News Review: Issue 5

    1942 news reel / propaganda / documentary

• CD
  • Popular and propaganda music from US and Britain during WWII
  • Propaganda Music from a Nazi Swing / Jazz orchestra
• 2 Plate, 6 Panel DVD/CD holder
• Mission Diary
  • Excerpts from Marshall E. Stelzriede’s Wartime Journal
• B-17 Pilot’s Manual
• B-17 Schematic Poster and Technical Data
• Cloth Case for all components

As you can tell, I had a rather large scope for the project and hope that it would turn out really well. Originally, I wanted to create a third, smaller booklet on aircraft identification and technical specifications, but that fell by the wayside as time became short. In any case, let’s take a look at the finished prototype of the project.

Here is the package as it comes wrapped:

The cloth case is made from green canvas that I purchased from a local fabric store and bound the different parts together with fabric glue. When I made it, I didn’t have the two books in their final version, so I was forced to estimate how thick they would be in determining the dimensions of the case. Due to time and ability constraints, the edges of the fabric are still rough and frayed, but should this become a commercial product, more time and effort would be spent on the case to really give it a good feeling. My aim was more to simply create a casing for the other elements of the package.

I also hand-sewed a button onto the front and cut a slit in the cover flap so that it could be buttoned shut. The button fell off once, but the second time around it stayed on well!

Opening the case, you see the 4 different parts. The two books are in the back with DVD / CD case in the middle and the poster in the front.

Taking all the elements out, they look like this. Let’s start on the left at the poster.

The front of the poster was originally an image from Flight Magazine that was scanned in and posted online. The image came from the internet and I added the text in the upper right. The poster size is 11 x 17 and was printed on glossy white paper. I’m afraid I’m not sure the weight of the sheet.

This poster brings up the issue of copyright that we faced on the project. Originally we were supposed to completely avoid copyrighted material when gathering materials for the project, but the instructors realized that if we were working on the exact same project professionally, we would likely have access to all the source material we needed to achieve the look we wanted. Thus, they let us use some materials as long as we referenced where it came from. I chose to stay with public domain materials as much as I possibly could, but there are a couple exceptions that I will note here.

Here is the back of the poster. It was an interesting challenge to keep all the data lined up in their individual columns as well as between the columns. I think the final product is easy to read and understand (I did all the type setting as well) and is organized usefully. Thinking back, I’m not sure if I would switch the two columns next time. I like having the “blueprint” of the plane on the left side, but it might also make more sense to have the “Specifications” column on the left since those are more general than “Armaments.” In any case, I feel I achieved my goal of making it legible and easy to read.

Next is the DVD case itself.

This is the front of the DVD case. The font choice here was Minion Pro. I chose it as a compliment to Baskerville, which was used in the flight journal book. I felt that the serif nature and upright feel of the Minion Pro gave the font a feel of being “proper” and “classic” as might befit a historical piece about heroism and courage. In addition, it has a wide selection of bold and italics that I made usage of throughout the project.

I really wanted the case to have texture and feel rougher, but I was unable to accomplish that goal with the time and materials I had access to. In addition, I wanted to deboss the vector outline of the b-17, but faced limitations there too. To give the sense of the texture and feel of the actual DVD case, I chose a paper called Navajo, which is matted, off-white. That paper was used later on the books as well to give the photographs an older feel that I couldn’t access otherwise, but we’ll talk more about that later.

Here is the back side of the entire DVD case where you can see the spine design and the back painting. The design was such that when one opens the outer flap to access the DVD and CD, one sees the left side of that painting. As you can see, there are some cuts through the images. They were due to a slight issue I had in my construction methodology. Unfortunately for me, I chose a more interesting, 2 tray, 6 panel DVD case rather than the regular case that everyone else used. As a result, I needed a way to back it with a hard material and still put the designed images onto it. As a result, I took a think cereal box, cut it to dimension and glued the images to it. I had hoped to be able to leave them perfect, but the necessity of bending the box made it such that I had to kiss-cut the images and box to allow bending. Unfortunately, the cuts didn’t always go as planned and one of my dimensions was off as well, causing other troubles. Thus, the case doesn’t look as good as I hoped it would and could in a final run version, but I think it gets the point across for the look and feel of the final product. Another slight problem was that the printer we used to print out the design was too small to handle the full length of the box art and I had to divide it into two pages, then recombine them on the box to make it work. All in all a very troubling procedure!

Here is the inside of the case with CDs in their trays. The left side shows the name of the DVD / CD, the contents of each and includes a description of the three films on the DVD as well as an introduction to some of the more interesting songs on the CD.

Taking the CD and DVD out, you can see the full background image of the inside. The image was taken from this site with color photographs commissioned by the Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information from 1939 to 1945. Discovering that site was an amazing coup for my project due to there being a photo that worked perfectly in my design and that the image quality was astounding. The photograph used of a b-17 at sunset was a 160 MB tiff file and came to me at around 6 inches by 9 inches with 1600 DPI. Not to mention that since the photos are government commissioned, they’re public domain. I was quite the happy camper. Similar to the front side, you can see the cut lines I had to put in to allow the case to fold as well as the line where one photo changes over to the other.

This is a close-up of the DVD I made. I wanted something simple and effective for the case – ultimately picking this photo which left a lot of space for me to work around the hole in the middle. Looking at it now, I am not sure why I didn’t rotate the photograph to make the B-17 fling horizontally. Oh well.

This is the CD I made of public domain music from World War II. The name came from the fact that much of it was made to inspire the troops and uplift the morale of the citizens. Playing off that theme, I found and used a collection of propaganda posters as the background for the CD. The images were from the internet and were pretty bad quality in terms of print; 72 dpi and not very big. Luckily, I hit upon the idea of tiling them, so I could up the resolution and let them get small since I would just be using a bunch of them anyways. I really like how it ultimately turned out. The posters are a mixture of American, British and German.

Here is one of the two books that was created. From the outside, they look identical since it was my intent to put a sleeve jacket on one and engrave the other, but time and cost prevented either from occurring. Indeed, I only received the books back from the bindery the day I had to present the final version!

Marshall E. Stelzriede’s Wartime Story was a site that I came across during my research. It featured, prominently, the full journal of Marshall Stelzriede from his training through the end of his tour of duty over Europe. I became excited with the prospect of creating a journal to include in my package, since it would allow me to flex my type setting, layout and typography skills. Contacting the webmaster, Tom Stelzriede, I was informed that while it would be ok to use small sections of the journal, but not the entire journal. I understood the reasoning, but was still disappointed. Of course, thinking back on it now, I realize how much more work it would have been to typeset out the entire journal and am rather glad I only used smaller sections!

The body text type face was Baskerville. I wanted a font that would feel more humanist since this is a personal journal and ultimately settled on it. To match it, I picked out Minion Pro for the captions and Myriad Pro for the Header titles. I liked the choice to put the section headers on the left side of the page in large font size. it gives the book a bit less formal and orderly feel, which I thought was appropriate. My the photographs here were put in conjunction with each header section.

Another interesting issue came from the method of binding. As a student doing a one-off print project, we chose to use French Folding, in which each “page” is actually folded in half rather than being printed on the front and back of a single page. The main reason for this is because it allows students to arrange the final print version themselves rather than the bindery taking care of it. The troublesome element came because when one prepped the file for printing, the master versions of each page (the master layout every page conforms to) didn’t switch around, so all the margins I had laid out for facing pages were now reversed! I had to spend a bit of time fixing that up. I’m glad I caught it though because it would have ruined the project!

I mentioned earlier about the reasoning for picking this off-white paper had to do with making the photos feel older. In early print tests on white paper, I tried CMYK and Grayscale versions of the same picture to see which would look better. Since they use different color modes, occasionally there will be important differences between the two. In my case, the Grayscale looked nicer and older, but the lines on the CMYK were so much cleaner and bolder, especially on the poster photo that I felt I had to use that color format instead. Thus, in order to offset the boldness of the color for these older photos, I used the off-white, matted paper. As ink is transparent, it picks up the brownish color of the paper to weaken the photo’s boldness, creating an older looking feel with stronger blacks.

Now, let’s move over to the other book, the B-17 Pilot’s Guide.

For this book, I chose a slightly different tact than the war journal. Instead of Baskerville, I used Minion Pro throughout the entire layout in order to give the sense of a no-nonsense government publication.

At the bottom of the page is a small logo for the Army Air Force, which the B-17 belonged to.

All in all, this was a giant project for me to take on by myself. When I talked to Robin, the teacher for the class, she was worried that I was taking on too much and might not be able to finish the project. I did scale back a few elements that I originally wanted, but pushed forward with lots of extra effort to finish off the packaging. There are areas that I feel could be improved and cleaned up as I mentioned before, but all in all, I’m rather proud of the work I put into it. The feeling of unwrapping the books for the first time and holding them was wonderful; especially knowing the hours and hours I put into designing them.

What an effort!

“Twenty three” was the grad project for one of the VFS writing students. The writing student’s scripts were produced by the VFS film department and we were given the task of developing title sequences for one. Myself and Asuka picked “twenty three” out of the bunch and developed concepts for it.

(I apologize about the choppiness of the video. I’m not sure why it is so choppy and am looking into how to clean it up some)

The film itself is about a boyfriend / girlfriend that are about to meet the lady’s parents and talking about some of their fears in meeting them. All in all, it is a rather funny little film with a bit of an indie feel to it. To adequately capture the feeling of the film, we struggled greatly with concepts. Eventually we settled on the idea of a roadtrip as one of the lines from the film indicates that the couple just drove half-way across the country. From there, the idea of using a map was pretty straightforward. The execution, however, took a lot more effort. Building the entire setup in Cinema 4d. The pen and camera moves took a while to work out properly (and as I remember, I lost the file partway through and had to redo them). However, the real kicker was in the rendering.

In order to achieve the motion on the pen ink as well as the other additional elements (the drawn-on heart, coffee stain, crumbs and sun), I needed to access them directly in After Effects. Since the methodology of export from Cinema 4D is flattened image sequences, I needed to attach an object buffer onto each element I wanted to animate and render it in particular. That rendering generally took around 3 – 6 hours per object. I also had to repeat the rendering of a number of objects repeatedly due to problems or mistakes. All in all, I believe this project had somewhere near 3 to 4 days worth of rendering put into it (that’s hour-wise). I wasted a lot of time and learned a lot about the best way to work in Cinema 4D, so that was really good, but it was awfully frustrating. Extremely frustrating. However, finally, finally, all the rendering was done and then I had to face the spectre of rotoscoping all of these individual layers in After Effects. That itself took a significant amount of time, but I’m rather happy with how it came out finally. At last, I exported out of After Effects with a few additional effects added to heighten the quality of the work.

Finally came the audio. As a student of VFS, we have access to an online database of music from a company called 5 Alarm Music. I generally like to produce my own music for these sorts of projects, but for this one, I didn’t have much time available to me and I was looking for a very particular sound to the music. Searching around, I found the one you hear in the background; a nice piece of “traveling” music. At last, I added in some sound effects to reflect the car and traveling nature of the title sequence and produced the final piece seen above!

In terms of things I feel could be improved, I was never particularly happy with the shadows of the crumbs as they fell. At first, the shadows are all squares, which didn’t make sense to me, but I didn’t have much time to fix it and I had already gotten the timing right. Also, I had a lot of trouble with rotoscoping the pen ink to the pen itself; an issue that thinking ahead would have solved somewhat. The main stroke of the pen especially was difficult to match up and I eventually just re-rendered a part because I didn’t want to do rotoscoping for it (and it would have looked bad anyways). Also, I feel that the coffee stain could have been better, but I wasn’t sure what to do and ran out of time. Finally, I wish I could have added more texture to the map itself. I feel like it is a bit clean for the piece and the film itself, so a little more texture and “dirt” would give a better feel.

I think my proudest moment on the project was figuring out how to do the pen stroke. Originally I had a lot of trouble conceiving how it would be best to make that stroke and be able to animate it at the same time. Then, I was hit by a stroke of genius! Taking a screen shot of a top-down view out of cinema 4d, I made the stroke in Illustrator, exported it into Cinema 4D and applied a extrube NURB to it so that it would be a solid. From there, I attached the object buffer to it (to create an alpha channel) and rendered it out to bring into after effects. In after effects, I applied the alpha channel to the clean render to be left with just the stroke! Then I can apply a mask or whatever to the footage and all the camera angles will be kept perfect. I liked the technique so much I applied it to three other objects in the piece. That one solution made my day on this project. It was wonderful.

However, all in all, I’m rather pleased with how the project turned out. It was great and I had a lot of fun figuring out how to work between three different programs to bring the whole concept together. I hope you liked it too!