CNN Digital in Atlanta, Georgia asked us to design a news app for CNN that targeted the younger millennial demographic. This was a team project where I worked with two other designers. I acted as the art director for our group, and I could not be more pleased with the outcome of this app. It's youthful, edgy, and active, but also tempered to not distract from the news.
Key points of the app are:
It only displays 10 stories in the newsfeed
It only displays trending news
It's totally customizable, from what topics you read to how you prioritize them
Ability to follow stories to receive notifications on certain topics
Ability to bookmark stories for later
Ability to share stories via email and social media
Ability to view short summaries of stories as well as detailed analysis
We received positive feedback from CNN Digital, and I look forward to seeing which direction they take with this app.
Below is a video of how the app functions, as well as a few still graphics.
Below is my 30-second Promax BDA submission for the 2015 Student Challenge. The point of the video is to tell why you design. I hand-drew the illustrations and animated them in After Effects. This is my first After Effects animation.
I had a blast art directing this music video! I chose the song "Don't Stop" by ODESZA. The video needs work so I'm going to wait to post it, but check out a still graphic from my makeup and post-production work! Huge thanks to my super awesome boyfriend who let me put spirit gum and liquid latex all over him. P.S. I designed and made the costume!
Here are some shots from the shoot before production work:
All semester long, I have been interning for Peachtree Publishers, an indie children's book publisher in Atlanta, Georgia. There's a lot of great books coming out of Peachtree Publishers, and I am excited to be a designer on their publicity team!
Below are some auxiliary press materials I worked on the past few months for their upcoming titles:
The 2015 World Summit for Nobel Peace Prize Laureates is being held in Atlanta this year, so the committee came to us to try to help them brand the summit. I worked on a fairly large team with 7 other people, and below is a small taste of some of what I worked on in my sub-team within the larger team: the summit's website and the donor sheet. We wanted the website to be friendly for users of all ages, with all types of computers, with all different education levels. One poll the committee offered us said that there are still people around the world that do not know how to use the scroll function on a website, so we wanted to make scrolling obsolete, make images large to be seen by the elderly, and we wanted to make the website as clean as possible to avoid confusion for people worldwide unfamiliar with technology.
We teamed up with the Georgia Alliance to End Homelessness, and created collateral pieces to help end homelessness! My group created a video promo for the organization, a booklet for teachers and staff at schools about homelessness and the organization, and also a small pocket-size triangle brochure that schools can give out to homeless parents and students that has references for important resources if you are homeless. My focus was on the triangle brochure.
Below are the final designs for several pieces involved in a group project for Georgia State University's Auxiliary Services department. Anyone who's ever tried to make it to class on time downtown at Georgia State knows that traffic and parking are a total nightmare. My group came up with Panther Pathway, a parking app that allows real-time info and services to student commuters. The app notifies students through Twitter updates about any road closures, open parking lots, or events downtown that could impact students. It also shows real-time GPS of the shuttles, so students know when and where buses will stop and arrive, and it also allows students to reload their Marta Breeze Cards on their mobile phones in order to avoid line times at the station while also acting a safety feature to keep crime down at Marta stations so that students do not have to take out their wallets to reload cards.
Below are boards we created that showcase the app's design, a video that would run on monitors at the university that promote the app, and poster flyers the university could put up to advertise the app.
Upon doing more research about what makes a successful awareness campaign, I've decided to trim a bunch of fat off of my script for the Break The Cycle campaign. After watching a few videos on Youtube that address similar subject matters, I've decided my commercial should run 30-seconds for maximum impact and should be a one-shot shoot to increase dramatic effect. Generally, I lost interest in videos that took too long to develop concepts and ran a minute or longer. I also concluded early on in the concept development that I did not want to show faces or have my subjects speak in the script, and I wanted the general focus of the camera to live around a medium shot of torsos or worms eye view of feet/legs.
With that said, my new script idea is:
- Camera peeks through a crack in the door, subject sitting on bathroom floor is out of focus.
- Subject's body language is overwhelmed, limp, and tired.
- Camera stays focused for awhile and continues to peek.
- Legs enter the scene from the left and slowly walk towards the cracked door.
- The door opens, revealing the bathroom and more of the figure, still out of focus.
- The legs frame the subject on bathroom floor, then legs crosses the threshold and enters bathroom.
- Door slowly begins to close on the scene, and screen goes black.
- Text overlays screen; "Schoolyard bullies are four times more likely to abuse intimate partners than those who never bullied."
- Text fades out, and the "Break The Cycle" logo and website appears; remains on screen.
The door symbolizes both the physical and metaphorical barriers dating abuse causes between intimate partners, as well as the barriers created between the victim and the victim's loved ones; frequently, the bully partner seperates the victim partner from people who care for them. The door also illustrates the concept of "the things that go on behind closed doors", which are typically not discussed in society, which perpetuates bullying and abuse by pretending it does not exist. By having the door shut at the end of the spot, it conveys to the audience that just because you cannot see the abuse, does not mean that it isn't there.
The legs are also symbolic in the script because the role of the legs is not specifically defined; the legs may be an abusive partner, or the legs may be a loved one coming to help the victim cope with the abuse. The ambiguity of the concept of "friend or foe" allows for the idea of intervention to enter the spot, so as to subtly say "you can make a difference".
Below are links to reference my statistics and the song I'm considering for the spot.
