Class Meetup and Final Review

This week had us attending class for a quick meeting with Nancy. We exchanged our experiences from our meeting with the Chamber of Commerce and took a moment in class to play around with our next step of our project.

The next component of our project is to focus on developing 2 10 inch by 10 inch panels to showcase our assignments. These will be printed off and displayed for other students in the halls at the school.

We exchanged some quick concepts with Nancy in regards to the directions we would be taking with our panels and were then cut loose to work on photographing our printed components.

Attached you will find the latest iterations of my creative brief and rationale. There have been minimal changes to what I had written previously due to little feedback from the Chamber.

Stay tuned later this week for a peek at where I am going with my panels.

Tweak, Polish and Refine.

This week has been relatively quiet.

I have taken the feedback to my project gained from the meeting with the Chamber of Commerce last week. I put myself to task making the last few refinements before this project comes to an end.

Color schemes were tweaked, wording changed and issues were addressed.

I updated my tagline to "School Got You Stressed Out?" to avoid a bad mixed message I had unintentionally introduced in my previous tagline due to a poorly placed line break.

I unified my wording across my coasters and settled on the same message to be presented on each one. The message now reads "Get Help From Other Students" across the top, and "We're Here To Listen" across the bottom on the back of all three designs.

Next I found that in working on the iPhone mockups the high resolution screen led me to producing near illegible type when it was printed out. I made slight changes to the size of my typefaces to make the app more legible.

For this mondays presentation, I have produced my 2 10 x 10 panels for submission and have my other deliverables printed, mounted and ready to go.

However, I have been plagued by some output problems on my stickers and posters that have to be addressed by my instructors. I will have to revisit my final panels after I get my output issue fixed.

I can't believe we are so close to being done… it has been so much work and I still feel like I have so much to do in so little time.

Feed Me To The Dragons.

So today I put my concept up for review with 3 members of Nanaimo's Chamber of Commerce.

All things considered the presentation went very smoothly. I tripped on just a couple of lines and wound up coming in at just over 20 minutes for my talk.

My concept was well received by the Judges and they though that overall my concept was very sound.

It was pointed out that I had a couple of discrepancies in the information presented on the poster and the coaster concept. I told them that this project is still a living breathing entity that has had and will have revisions going on until the very last day. I informed them that my research can make changes to the numbers and information I am using as work continues.

One of the other chamber members pointed out a bit of wording in my tag line of

"DON'T DEAL WITH SCHOOL
STRESS BY YOURSELF"

she read it as "don't deal with school, stress by yourself." This was something I had seen but didn't change as I thought it might have been me reading it wrong after looking at it for six weeks.

I guess my hunch was right. Than will be switched up immediately.

Lastly one of my "Dragons" told me that he though my overall concept was solid and well researched, but he was really concerned with the concept of having peers counselling strangers in crisis. He suggested volunteers undergo a small online training course in sensitivity that might at least teach strangers how to help people in need.

This was a great idea, but I'm unsure if it would actually flu under the reach of my project. It is food for thought.

Lastly I wound up being grilled for about 10 minutes as to what my plans were for launching this project, with associated costs, where volunteers would come from, launch window and how advertising or funding would be coming from.

Needless to say I was broadsided by this, but was fortunate enough to be able to drum up what I considered reasonable responses on the spot. That was a little more than I had expected.

Overall the meeting was a success, and I came away with some more input to continue honing this thing to the razor edge it has to be by end of term.

Last Minute Polish and Chasing Loose Ends

This weeks activities included two photo shoots. One at the library showcasing a student lost in the aisles of academia, and another shoot showing how tight finances can be for some of us.

Aside from these major events I spent the majority of this week trying to get all of my visuals laid out for presentation in some sort of cohesive fashion. I settled on 11 x 17 pages that will be printed and mounted for presentation alongside physical mockups of my drink coasters and cellphone apps.

I also spent some time taking conceptual shots of where my posters can/will be placed along with mockups of the intended uses.

I am also beginning to outline my pitch for tuesday afternoon so I can have my thoughts in order.

Busy times indeed. Stay tuned to see how my pitch goes with the chamber of commerce on tuesday!