I had oddly enough decided to do a geographical map. Initially I was leaning towards doing a concept map, but decided against it. I chose a fairly simple geographical location to map because I have never mad a map like this before. I did not want to broad topic. I chose to map a small section of Bristol. My first step was finding map of Bristol that showed a close-up image of the town. I used the website Mapquest becase the site allows users to type in very specific locations.
I began mapping out the street I live on, State Street. I made that street name the most prominent because it is the most important street to me. Despite the map being geographical, I wanted personal touches added to it. Another location I marked on state street was the restaurant Nacho Mama's. I love the food there and frequented the restaurant often during the summer.
My map only extended to the portion of Hope Street in the direction towards the Roger Williams campus. The other streets included in the map are prominent Bristol streets. Included in the streets is Hope, Church, High, Wood, Constitution, Union and 1st. On each street, with exception of Union and Constitution, I put marked a specific place in Bristol. To find the exact locations of each business or restaurant I searched for their addresses on google and then on mapquest. It was tedious, but the purpose of a geographical map is accuracy.
I wanted the map to have a lot of color. Since geographical maps are often times dull in color, I wanted to do something different. I really enjoyed this project. I thought that it would be easier than it was though. I thought that I new the exact locations of all of the places I chose to highlight but I did not. This map was completely different than a mind map, but still compeltely useful to further my knowledge about the importance of Visual Communications.
My problem in the center of my mind map is Post-Graduation. The first mind map I did was very practical. I was thinking of tangible things such as location, people, and money. I did have difficulty letting myself think freely. The 20-minute mapping period went by very slowly. I took a lot of pauses and time to think instead of just writing. After waiting an hour, I returned to my map and added a little color to it using colored pencils. In my mind though, I knew I did not love this map or particularly care for it. I think that is because I didn't allow myself to fully reflect.
I returned to the project 24 hours later. I had the same problem in the center of my mind map, post-graduation. This time I decided to use a different approach. My subtopics were from the emotional side of me. My key terms were Stress, Fear, Change, Strength, and Loneliness. All of these ideas are abstract an intangible. My new approach proved to be more successful than my previous mind map. I was able to think more freely and let my ideas flow naturally. I got better results from the second mind map than the first, possibly because my concepts were driven by emotion rather than practicality. I do feel as though mind mapping is a helpful tool for problem solving. While my problem can't exactly be solved by mean of a mind map, it made me feel less overwhelmed. I was able to organize my thoughts in some sort of way. Rather than having all of these thoughts floating around in my head, I wrote them down and now have a firmer grip on my worries. While I do still have stress about what I will do after graduation, like most seniors do, I know that I should not let my fears get the best of me.
The small town charm of Bristol, Rhode Island is hard to resist. The open town green is complete with a picturesque white gazebo and small playground for children to enjoy. Bristol, located half an hour outside of Providence, is a small beach community. The perimeter of downtown Bristol is edged by beautiful bay views. Sailboats bob in the water as they overlook the adorable town.
Along Hope Street, downtowns Main Street, are beautiful homes overlooking Bristol’s calm waters. Hope Street is home to some of the most historical houses in Bristol, and each street is decorated by scenic colonial style homes. Each home, although architecturally unique, is banded together in a special and tasteful way.
Driving along High Street, a road parallel to Hope Street, may seem frustrating, but the beauty of Bristol redeems itself for the redundancy of the six stop signs lining the street.
At the end of High Street and the corner of Oliver Street is my home away from home. I am currently a junior at Roger Williams University and have been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to live off-campus. I live on the third floor of this three-story home. Aligning every inch of every street in Bristol are vibrant green trees and sidewalks.
Bristol is home to some unique cuisine. Amongst my favorites are Leo’s, a delicious but affordable Italian restaurant. The Wrap Shack, a hole in the wall sandwich shop, it has the most amazing wraps! Its unique flavors make it one of Bristol’s most tasty and cheap restaurants. Two amazing and incredibly cheap breakfast spots include the Sunset Café and Manny’s. Of the two though, Manny’s is the best. Anywhere that sells a chili cheeseburger for less than $5 is a favorite of mine. Manny, owner and executive chef is a cynically charming man. He has a comment for everyone and holds nothing back.
For something on the go, the delightful Beehive Café offers a relaxing setting and delectable baked goods. Its tucked away location makes it a favorite of locals.
To say Rhode Islanders love coffee would be an understatement. In order to satisfy Bristolians coffee cravings there are multiple coffee-spots. Along Hope Street is the gold-plated Dunking Donuts, a small but quaint spot. Further down Hope Street on Route 114 is Sip n’ Dip, a Rhode Island favorite. It’s appropriately placed on the edge of the water.
Downtown Bristol has a variety of stores to satisfy those who love to shop! Favorites of mine include Striper Moon and Kate and Company. For those on a budget, Roxie’s consignment fulfills any shopaholics needs.
A strange but delightful feature of Bristol is the abundance of churches and barbershops.
It seems as though along every street corner there is a place of worship or a hair salon.
About two minutes outside of downtown Bristol is Colt State Park. The beautiful park is frequented by an abundance of Roger Williams University students, myself included. Upon entering the park, a strong aroma of sea salt and freshly blossomed flowers fills the air. The long and winding roads seem endless, but in reality only last a few minutes before the water appears. Seagulls squeak above in the sky while runners run by with their dogs. Each and every inch of the park offers a variety of luxuries. On summer days people are often seen grilling hamburgers and hotdogs while enjoying their food at the green picnic tables overlooking the striking view. If you drive a few minutes past the most popular hang out area, you will find a beautifully weathered willow tree. It stands alone in a giant open field towards the back entrance of the park. The willow tree shares its location with a giant old castle, an enticingly haunting structure. The park itself serves as a personal sanctuary to all Bristol inhabitants. It untainted preservation makes it one of Bristol’s most charming landmarks.
Bristol is one of the most spectacular places to live, I feel blessed to have been able to enjoy it for the past three years and look forward to another great year hear.
Design Rationale: When this assignment was first assigned I thought, what am I passionate about? There are many things I love. I love music, food, clothes, the list is endless, but what I really love is Bristol, Rhode Island. The adorable town which is home to Roger Williams University was one of the main reasons I chose to go to school there. I had always told my mom that I needed to find my Stars Hollow, the fictional town in the show Gilmore Girls.
Since freshman year I have loved Roger Williams. I have made wonderful friends, taken classes I enjoy, and loved living in Bristol. I had always known that I wanted to live off-campus my junior and senior year, so last year me and two of my friends decided we would make it happen. I studied abroad in Italy fall semester of this year. Italy was so amazing and wonderful, but I could not hide my excitement about returning home to live in my apartment on High Street.
I began this project with my storyboard. I mapped out what I wanted to take photos of. Bristol has so many great aspects in it so it was difficult for me to narrow it down to just a few. My slide show is a bit long, but I did not feel that I could have cut it down anymore than I had. My next step was going around Bristol and taking pictures of all my favorite spots.
Once my pictures were taken I edited them in iphoto to enhance them. I put all of the photos into powerpoint to make a slide show.
After my PowerPoint was created I wrote a script. I had so much fun writing the script! I have GarageBand on my computer so I recorded my voice at home and them opened the sound file on Audacity on the school computers. Once my voice was in audacity I had to add a background noise that I felt matched the slide show. Originally I had ocean waves in the background. They were too loud and did not seem to be the right fit for the slide show. Instead, I decided to chose a smooth jazz song. I fits in nicely with the slide show. The song is not too overpowering, but sets a nice tone underneath my voice. The jazz clip was 7 minutes long, I only used 4:18 because that is how long my slide show is. I went through all of the necessary steps in converting the clips from WAV files to MP3 in audacity and iTunes.
The hard part was over. Now, I had to convert my PowerPoint presentation to a JPEG and move my MP3 version of my voice over to the desktop.
I opened up the program SoundSlides and uploaded my PowerPoint slides and sound clip. I had no trouble doing any of this. Once the SoundSlides were created I saved the project to the desktop and used the program FileZills to upload the presentation to the web. This was the first time I had used FileZilla without any problems. I went to a website which allowed me to upload my website to my blog and my project was complete.
Prior to starting this project I was really excited about it. It is always fun to work on a project about something you are passionate about. Since my last project was the BiBi Card, this was a very nice change of pace. Once the project actually started, my thoughts had changed. I had some difficulty choosing a background noise and my slide show is not timed perfectly with the voice over. If I could change anything, I would re-d0 the timing for about 5 pictures. Overall though, I am happy with how this project came out. A lot of projects are trial and error and this one was no different. Had I had more time to complete it I think it would have been perfect. With each project I have done throughout the semester there has always been something I've wanted to change and this one is no different.
I have never worked in Dreamweaver before so I was very nervous about this project. I took a communications class in high school and made a website but that was 4 years ago and if these programs are constantly updated.
To begin this project I opened up 5 blank Dreamweaver documents. I saved each of the documents under different names; index, contact, about, location, and frequent designers. I began working on the index document, also called the homepage. I put a horizontal list of the index, contact, about, and location at the top of each of the 5 documents. Since I could not remember how to link each page the easy way for each of the 5 titles in the 5 documents I had hand type in where I wanted each title to link to. At the bottom of Dreamweaver there is a Link box that appears once the title is selected. For each index I linked it back to the homepage. For each of the contact I linked it back to the contact page. I continued to do this for all of the titles. It seems like it would take a long time, but it went fairly quickly.
Once I completed the navigation portion of the website I typed in the proper information into each document. The homepage does not have any information. I attempted to put pictures on my website but had difficulty getting uploading them onto FileZilla. The information for each link or document, came directly from my brochure.
My final link on my website is a direct link to Anthropologie's official store website. I simply did the same thing I did for the other links to work. At the bottom of Dreamweaver I pasted the link to the store's website into the link box.
After completing the website in Dreamweaver, I had to upload my website onto the internet. I used the program FileZilla to do this step. I have used FileZilla before, but I had so much trouble getting my website to work properly. At first I was typing something wrong, then when I was sure everything was correct, FileZilla would not connet. I was very frustrated, but evertually I got it to work. It's always a relief when something you have worked hard to do finally works properly.
If I had more time to complete this project I would have definitely figured out the how to properly post pictures. Although the only requirements for the project were to make sure the links worked correctly, I do not like the bareness of my website. I would have loved to use the pictures I thought I uploaded correctly.
I am very happy to have learned how to make a successful website. It's incredibly cool that I know how to post things on the internet that are active for users.
I had heard that this project was the most difficult one to comlplete, knowing this, I decided to start work on the BiBi Card well before the due date.
We were to complete the assignment in both QuarkXpress and InDesign. I am very familiar with Quark because that is the program I have been using for the past few assignments, but I hadn't used InDesign in over a year. I begain working in Quark since I knew how to use most of the tools anyways. My first task was trying to figure out what font Esquire used to make their famous title. I found online that the font is unique to Esquire and I would not be able to reproduce it. Instead, I took a screen shot of it from online and edited the photo on Photoshop. This was surprisingly more difficult that I thought it was going to be. Eventually I got an image I was happy with. The next step was finding the picture of Daniel Craig that appears on the left side of the BiBi Card. I found the image fairly quickly on google images but could not access the image without a photobucket account. I then made a photobucket account searched for the picture on their website. I was lucky enough to have found any form of the picture but, it was not exactly like the one on the card. It was slightly narrower, a problem I would later encounter.
Once I found the most difficult pictures I set out to find the right font. There are three different fonts that appear on the card. I began looking for the font that appeared the most. The closest font I could find to the one on the card was Arial Bold. It is almost a perfect match, the only time that a difference is evident is when I typed out numbers. The second font I found was Prestige Elite Std. This font was used for the numbers and letter that appear at the bottom right hand corner of the front. The third font was cracked, used for the words Best Deal, underneath the subscription prices.
Once the fonts were found I measured each piece of the BiBi Card. When I was actually reproducing the card I tried my best to get the exact spacing. I went through the BiBi Card and wrote down next to each word what size font I thought was used. I didn't always turn out to be right. After printing my first draft I made adjustments to make sure the fonts on mine and the original matched nearly perfectly. I began by placing the Esquire title into Quark and choosing the proper size for the title. I slowly worked my way down the card to complete each line. For the most part this was not too difficult, the spacing and sizing was tedious though. A small red arrow appears on above the words Best Deal, I made the arrow in Illustrator. There was another symbol at the bottom of the card that I could not re-create. It was a small red mouse. Once the right side of the card was complete I moved onto the left.
There is a dotted line, a perforation line dividing the left and right side. I made the line with the line tool and simply changed it from a sold line to a dotted line. Since the picture of Daniel Craig was not big enough to fit the space without distorting him I decided to place two black boxes next him and center his photo in the middle. This was a good alternative because my look is still very believable.
Now that the front was complete I attempted to work on the back. My first step was to turn the Esquire title from black to white. I did this in Photoshop by inverting the colors. I made a black box for the smaller right hand side of the card and filled in the few words that there were in a white fill.
The left side of the card was a bit more difficult. I had to re-work many components of this side before it looked right. I began by making the postage stamp that appears in the upper right corner. This was not too difficult, but I did have to change the width of the lines a few time before they were correct. The next thing I did was to make the text boxes that appeared on the card. Again, this was not hard, but getting the perfect spacing took a bit of time. The last part I did was make the bold lines that appear near the perforation line and the ones below the postage.
After completing the Quark BiBi Card I began work on the InDesign one. I did not know how to do everything in InDesign but I found that this program was actually easier to use than Quark. The InDesign card went much faster than Quark because I had already done the hard parts in Quark.
This was a very time consuming project, and one that I am very happy I started well in advance. Not only did I have the opportunity to work on the project in pieces, time away from it let me get a new perspective. If I've been looking at the same thing for too long I can't see my mistakes. I am very happy with how the card turned out, but there are things I would change. I would have liked to add the mouse to the front of the card and would have liked if the picture was perfect, but there is never enough time to make something completely perfect.
This is the front of the BiBi Card from InDesign:
This is the front of the BiBi Card from InDesign:
This is the front of the BiBi Card from Quark XPress:
This is the back of the BiBi Card from Quark XPress:
Since I loved using Quark to make my poster, I was very excited about this project. I was able to choose any corporation, so I decided to choose my favorite store, Anthropologie. I have been an avid customer at the store since the opening of one near my house a few years ago.
Anthropologie has a very unique style and I wanted to translate that into a brochure. I began by choosing a color scheme. Typically, the store uses more subtle colors that are not too overpowering. Since it is Spring, I decided to use 4 main colors throughout my project. The outside of the brochure is a light yellow color that I thought Anthropologie would use for one of their actual designs. The inside of the brochure is a celery green color that compliments the yellow nicely. For the font color I chose to use a brown color, it is softer than black, but still dark and easy to read. The final color I chose to incorporate was a redish, yellow color. I thought that it tied the font together nicely with some of the colors in the pictures on the inside.
I began by doing the cover of the brochure. I found the image in google images. I edited the image in Photoshop to make it smaller. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to use quotes from the website in the brochure underneath the title of each panel. To tie the outside with the inside I put a quote underneath the cover image.
The second panel I worked on was the back panel where I chose to list store locations and the history of the store.
The final panel on the outside was the last panel I worked on. Originally the panel was white, but because of printing purposes I chose to make it yellow and match the outside panels. I put the return address that is listed on the Anthropologie website. I wanted to incorporate the official label of the store so I placed it in the return address. I used the image of the stamp from google images.
The first panel I did on the inside was clothing. I decided to highlight dresses and blouses. All of the images I used on the inside panels were taken directly from the website. I placed the pictures in the panels and put the price and a small description underneath each picture. Next to each headline I put some playful words I thought matched the category.
The next panel I did was the accessories. I highlighted necklaces, earrings, and scarves. I love their jewelry and really wanted to show off their versatility.
The last panel on the inside was at home. I chose to use bedding, kitchen, and bath. Anthropologie has wonderful house-ware items. It was incredibly fun to explore the website with no limitations. Usually I go directly to the sale section of the website, but during this project I used only full-priced items.
I put a lot of effort into this project and I think it shows in my final product. I loved this project, but it was much more work than I imagined. It was entirely worth my efforts because I am very proud.
There were some things I would have changed. I might have used a few less items on the inside panels. I wanted to show-off as many items I could, but I could not tell if the panels looked too cluttered. After removing some pictures, I decided that I could not part with any of the pictures which appear in the final brochure. I wish there was more space in the brochure. I had a lot of text and it was difficult to fit all of it while keeping it large enough to read. After my rough-draft was reviewed it was clear that I had to adjust my spacing. If I didn't, a lot of the text and images would be cut-off. I made the necessary adjustments and it turned out to be better than it was originally.
I think the brochure turned out very well and there are not many things I would change if I could re-do it.
I was apprehensive at first when we were told we had to use Soundslides to publish our powerpoint with music attached(the legal amount of music). I had never used Soundslides before this project, and anything new is scary. This was the final component of the band project and I am very proud of how all my components turned out.
To begin this portion of the project I used the program Audacity to edit the music track I chose. I used roughly 20 seconds of the song, Impossible Germany by Wilco. I looped the track 3 times so it would complete the required minute for the project. Once I edited the sound clip in Audacity I brought the clip into iTunes and converted the WAV file into an MP3. Once the file was converted to an MP3 I uploaded the sound clip onto Soundslides. I had a lot of difficulty cutting my audacity clip down to a minute because I had accidentally made a clip that was 1:40 seconds, exceeding the minute by 40 seconds. I had to re-do the above process several times before I got it right. I got very frustrated because the computer was not doing what I thought I was telling it to do. Eventually though, I got it right.
Once the sound clip was edited in Audacity I moved onto the Soudslides portion of the project. I began by opening up a new project and uploading my slide show presentation which I had converted to a jpeg. Once the slides were uploaded, I uploaded the sound clip. Soundslides was very easy to use. Once every component was uploaded I had to add titles and credits.
This portion of the project was the final component. I had a lot of trouble with audacity. My sound clip is not perfect, even though I worked a lot on it. If I could change a part of my project it would have been aligning the sound clips together better in audacity, but I felt lucky enough to have gotten the sound clip to a minute. I wish that I had spent more time in the editing process of the sound clip.
I would not change anything else about the project. I am very proud of this entire project! Since the beginning of this project I have been enthusiastic about it.
I am a junior at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island. I am studying media communications with a focus in journalism, with a minor in international relations.
These are some samples of my work. Please contact me at: sbourbeau882 AT hawks DOT rwu DOT edu.
Thank you!
