School project S6 – The graduates website

In this project, each student created a portfolio website that featured all graduating graphic design student for 2012. While a lot of students build their website around the same theme as the graduates exhibition, I decided to go in a completely different direction… a periodic table of graduating students. I must admit that my idea would have been more fitting for chemistry graduates, but since each student has its strenghts and weaknesses, certain elements mixed together could create a reactive design. This is the basic chemistry of teamwork. My website wasn’t chosen as the official website, but was a finalist. The official 2012 Graphic Design graduates website will be accessible here at the end of the semester.

The live version of my website can be accessed here. The animated introduction was made in Adobe After Effects. Note that only my student page is available on this website.

 copyright Dany Pepin 2012

School project S6 – The 2012 Student Exhibition

Each year for this project, graduating students need to create a poster, a directional sign and an invitation for the graphic design student exhibition. This year the tag line of the expo was “Warning: Creative Zone“, so we had to design our applications around this idea and include the 2012 color: Tangerine Tango. Lots of cool designs were created and three finalists were chosen. My design, which finished 3rd, represent a vibrating mass of creativity hovering inside a closed perimeter. I made the orange mass as alienish as possible. You can almost see it moving and transforming itself. The student exhibition will take place April 17th from 5PM to 8PM at La Nouvelle Scène in Ottawa (333 King-Edward ave.).

 copyright Dany Pepin 2012

I know what you did last summer (part 2)

One of the things I designed while working for the IT department, was their website portal. It was just awful (white page with blue hyperlinks) and needed a revamp. I created over a dozen maquettes and one of them was chosen by the employees after two rounds of votes. I was surprised to see that the IT employees had chosen a really dark background since the college identity is dominated by a light color palette, but hey… that’s democracy for ya! I have no clue as to when the page will be implemented within the college website. NOTE: All these designs were created with Adobe Illustrator.

 

Discarded (some of my designs left out of the vote)

 

First round (my designs included in the vote)

 

Variations of the chosen design

 

Final choice

 copyright 2011

I know what you did last summer (part 1)

Oh man, what a busy summer! The word “vacations” wasn’t part of my vocabulary during the last months. I worked full time as a support designer for the IT department La Cité collégiale revamping the website, doing updates and some designing. But in addition, I was designing the new album of French-Canadian singer/songwriter Paul Demers during evenings and weekends. I also designed my brother’s bachelor party invitation as you can see in a previous blog entry.

As my 5th semester quickly approaches, here are some of the things I designed during the summer. NOTE : I will be adding a blog entry for the new Paul Demers album when it comes out.

Graphics (organisational chart)

I redesigned an ugly organisational chart created in MS Word into something more visually attractive. It may or may not be use.

Back to school banners

One of those banners may or may not be chosen for the school homepage, but I had a lot of fun experimenting with photoshop.

HDR photography

I did some photography of the campus to refill the college’s image databank and experimented with High Dynamic Range (HDR) toning with some of them. I kept the effect subduded to enhance the image and not make it surreal.

 copyright 2011

School project S4: Student web portal

This project was an actual contract for our school student web portal. We (the 2nd year students) had to design something that wasn’t corporative and felt younger. We each created several maquettes in photoshop and chose the one we wanted as our official prototype (Html/CSS). The latter would be judged for this competition and graded by our teacher. Here are my four maquettes and my official submission (see below).

This is my first concept (called “concrete”), and now that I think about it, the one I should have chosen as my prototype. I think my chances to win would have been greater. This concept was one of the few that was made an example of by the teacher after the disappointing first round of submissions.

I don’t quite like this concept (called “Graphic Pizza”) because it is too busy. But from what the teacher told me, the clients found it interesting because of the icons which would be good for an iPhone version of the student web portal they were thinking about creating. The teacher did not like that one at all. 🙂

This is my favorite concept (called “Black board”),… and the teacher’s favorite also. I like this one because it reminds me of my old days in school (late 80’s). Unfortunately, the client though it was too dark/black for the color palette of the school identity. Good point.

So I changed the “Black board” concept to the “White board” which is closer to what we see nowadays in classrooms. The light color palette works better with the identity of the school and so I decided that this would be my official prototype for the competition. A big surprise would be next. The client announced that the design students (our class) would be choosing three finalists and those three student designs would be then submitted for the school vote (all students). It was an extremely tight finish for the 3 finalists in which I was a part of. Unfortunately I didn’t win this competition, but one of my closest friends did.

 copyright 2011