Feature News

For my feature news project, I decided to shoot someone close to me who has had a huge impact on my life. This is Connor Pickett, a local reserve firefighter.

A part of passing the fire academy is learning to put your turnouts on in less than 1 minute. Connor's current record is 28 seconds. The turnouts help establish social context. Connor always has a large red bad filled with his turnout and a gear everywhere he goes, and this is a norm for all firefighters.

Connor graduated and received his bag June 6, 2016. 

One struggle I had with this assignment is Connor is very tall, and I'm short. A step ladder would have came in handy. But taking a photo from this angle helps show how tall he is. 

Communication Objectives

As a group, our communication objectives were to make Cliffside Restaurant more approachable and keep our designs simple enough to where we were working with what the restaurant already had. The restaurant is very modern and simple in its own unique, beautiful way.

As I was working on the website, I wanted to make sure these objectives were shown through what I was created. That's why I wanted to take my own photos and focus more on the beauty of the food and the design of the restaurant. I think the colors of the food really brought out the beauty of the restaurant as well. My hope was to also create a user friendly and visually appealing website to make Cliffside more approachable for our audience.

My Artifact

For my artifact, I decided to recreate Cliffside's restaurant. As a group, we wanted to keep the audience that Cliffside already has, but we also wanted to attract a younger audience as well. And I think this website can do that. It's a little for visually appealing and less plan than Cliffside's original website is. As for my inspiration for the website, I mainly wanted to keep it simple like the original website but also wanted to make it pop out more with bigger photos and our new logo. I took my own photos for this website, and even though they weren't the best, I tried to focus more on close-ups of the food and the dining areas to make it more appealing. 

Cliffside Restaurant

Our group decided that we're going to re-vamp Cliffside Restaurant here in St. George.

Audience analysis:

Tom, 54, is one of the owner's of Cliffside Restaurant and enjoys the fancy side of things. He's a perfectionist and aspires to keep his restaurant classy and somewhat high-end. He wants to attract more business to his restaurant by appealing to more than just the older generation.

Sarah, 21, is a stay-at-home mom and is always looking for new, delicious restaurants to go to with her husband for date night. She has a hard time finding baby sitters, but plans ahead for when she does find one. She also likes family-friendly places where she can take her kids and enjoy a family night out.

Leslie, 33, has been traveling to all 50 states with her husband and is looking for places to visit in southern Utah. She enjoys the outdoors and will go anywhere that stands out to her.

My artifact:

I will be doing a redesign of Cliffside Restaurant's menu on their website. It doesn't look that appealing right now and doesn't feature a lot of photos of the food. I will be redesigning it with our group's style guide and adding photos of the different dishes.

Mis-en-scene

Production designer for Interstellar: Nathan Crowley

Nathan Crowley started out as an art director and worked on movies such as Braveheart, Mission Impossible 2, and The Devil's Own. As a production designer, Crowley has worked on films such as Behind Enemy Lines, Insomnia, Veronica Guerin, Batman Begins, The Lake House, The Dark Knight and Public Enemies.

According to an article from IndieWire, "designing wormholes, black-holes and other space-time-bending phenomena was a first" for Crowley in Interstellar. This scene with Matthew McConaughey falling into the tesseract was done with a physical set instead of using CGI.

Crowley faced difficulties like designing these sets that had to do with jumping through space-time and designing far away planets. This set design with the tesseract scene seems to be more simplistic but also complex when watching the sequence. When looking at these two photos, I see the law of continuity play out with all of the lines in the set, which also goes along great with the theme of space throughout the film. I also see all of the other Gestalt principles as well, especially law of closure as all of these lines or blocks are close together and make up the tesseract itself.

Even though designing this set was a first for Crowley, I'm sure he got some inspiration from past set designs he has worked on. This one just seems more innovative.

Compose your frame

I took this photo from my balcony. The rule of thirds apply here because the top of the spinning wind chime is the center of my focus. When it comes to vectors, the lines of the gate and the line of the old airport hill in the background both insert direction to the wind chime in the photo. There's also direction in the lines of the ceiling that the wind chime is attached to. If you look closely to the photo, there's a diagonal line in the road that's below the wind chime. This also adds a sense of direction and appeal to the photo.

Design Evaluation

I love seeing an impressive newspaper layout design. If I pick up a newspaper, and the layout is awful, I usually won't read the content. I chose this layout design from The Ithacan because it automatically caught my attention, and it's impactful. Not only is the story itself impacting, but the way the title works itself into the photo with "It happened" in the background, automatically drawing my eyes toward the woman. What I love the most about the title is the lower portion where it says "and it will again" is shaped and cut out from the grass, making the headline a part of the photo. With print design, it's so important to make your artwork as impactful as the story is. And that's exactly what this design does. 

With this design, a Gestalt principle that stands out to me is figure/ground relationships. The distinct figure in this design is the woman on the ground, and the background and scene of the photo makes her stand out. I also see the law of continuity. Your eyes follow the path of least resistance. If you look closely, the path is easy to follow because the words are staggering from shorter to longer, and back and forth.

Other great examples of print design: https://designschool.canva.com/blog/editorial-design/

This design gives me a headache. There's a lot of white space going on this design, and that's a big no no with print design. I get what the designer was trying to do with the graphic, but it's disproportionate to the article, and the pills are a little too big to be visually appealing. There is no law on continuity here because it takes me forever to look through this page. And many of the other Gestalt principles don't apply to this design either.

Need a good laugh?: https://www.buzzfeed.com/lukelewis/newspaper-and-magazine-layout-disasters?utm_term=.lc1WW9W51#.uagPPXPxY