New Portfolio Site

CORRECTION on Oct 23:

Sorry my site is currently down for maintenance it should be back up soon!


My new portfolio site is up and live! Check it out here.

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D&AD Work in Progress

D&AD New BloodD&AD is something I’m really excited about. I haven’t been doing much for myself recently when it comes to art direction so I’m excited to be working on this.
But when I started I was overwhelmed to say the least… I mean look at how many briefs there are and they are all great choices. I spent so much time thinking about what I wanted to do. I mean currently I’ve been focusing on design so I didn’t want a purely design brief. I found myself narrowing the briefs down to 3 that I liked the best.

 

WORK IN PROGRESS NOTES… EXCUSE THE TINY IMAGES AND SKETCHES, I’M STILL WORKING AND DON’T WANT TO REVEAL TOO MUCH. (shhhhh……)

Ford, DesignBridge and John Lewis were the ones I focused on, but as you can see from my notes those three turned to the one very quickly. I decided the DesignBridge brief was the one for me. I’ve been working on it for a while and I think I may have the concept narrowed down. And although the brief is a product design brief I’m going to include some print ads that present the concept further. I can’t wait to present my idea for how to make a beauty brand that breaks the cliche and stereotyped gender branding types.

 

 

Brand Redesign Concept: German School Association

When I lived in St. Louis I worked for the German School Association of Greater St. Louis. It was an organisation that I was really proud to be a part of. We taught German culture and the language to students every Saturday morning. My classes were children’s classes, but we also had adult classes. But this post isn’t about how great my experience was or how great the organisation is. It’s about something that really bothered me about the company. The Brand Design! From the logo to the Website, I was never really happy with it. I just thought it could be better. I mean take a look…

Website

Their Current Website

FIRST OFF THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS PROJECT, BUT I WANT TO SHOW THE PROGRESS I’VE MADE. 😀

Logo sketchesI decided that I should do something about it even if it was just for me to see what redesign I could accomplish. So I began to sketch.

I tried to think  about the various sides of the German school and it’s mission. I thought about how they are trying to show the traditional while enticing students to be curious and explore the modern side of German culture. This lead me to the two design channels.

 

 

I then decided to bring the designs into Adobe Illustrator and bring them to life a little more.

logos

German has a great deal of “traditional” and “modern” typefaces that are really  attributed to movements and the culture. I started with blackletter fonts and thought that might be too traditional for a school in 2015. So I looked to Bauhaus and tried to draw inspiration from there. Looked at classic Bauhaus posters. I ended up really liking the layered G & S look, but still not sure if that is right for the school.

I started to delve into their website and critiquing what worked and what didn’t. My comments are on the website below. I’m going to need to spend more time working on this, but I think I’ve made great progress so far.

Website with my comments

 

Motion Graphics inspiration

For some reason I have decided that I should create a new motion graphics piece. My motion graphics course was one of the hardest things I have ever done, but hey why not do one more for fun…?! What is wrong with me. Anyway before I do so I thought I would get some inspiration and with the amazing Helen Sell I found this: http://www.fromupnorth.com/best-motion-graphics-of-2014/. 25 of the Best Motion Graphics of 2014 was exactly what I needed. I picked out two of my favorites:

The illusion of life

The Things I Love

Semi-Permanent Tattoo: Brandink

For our second project my group of three had to create a brand and a campaign for a new line of tattoo ink that fades with time. This one was a lot of fun. As one can tell we used ourselves as models and drew on our own temporary tattoos. We took on a fashion perspective and I feel like I could really see it in a fashion magazine featuring all sorts of models (including male models of course).

KNowotny_Brandink_Helen

KNowotny_Brandink_Kat

KNowotny_Brandink_Charlotte

Roses Brief: Time Travel Agency

We hit the ground running this trimester and all the work that the class is producing is at such a higher caliber than last trimester.

We started right a way with a brief that we would enter into a competition, Roses Student Awards. My creative partner and I decided to go with the brief in which we had to brand and create a campaign for a Time Travel Agency. We decided to create a set of invitations to various events in history. We came up with the name Echo and even created a website. Unfortunately we won’t know how we did in the competition for quite a while. Below is what we submitted.

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