Rocket Fizz Candy Box on display in the RMU 2017 Gold Show.
Assignment: Design a candy box for the Rocket Fizz franchise location in Robinson Twp. Shopping Center. Showcase the mood of the candy store and determine what form of box would be the best fit for a candy box. Go to the store and collect research on common candy and soda sold, the target audience and the intended purpose of the candy box.
Description: Rocket Fizz has a bright and playful logo. By using a lid and base, the box can have multiple sides that capture the mood of the Rocket Fizz brand. Pop art is a common theme that the Packaging Design class stated when doing research on the store and its products. The lid has a simple yellow background with magenta dots repeated around the edges of the lid and three locations for the Rocket Fizz logo to be showcased. The base is double sided and features a magenta and yellow outer space pattern with planets and a rocket ship.
I decided to keep the design simplified to yellow and magenta color plates in order to keep production costs of the box low. The logo inspired me to take an outer space approach and really create a captivating base that would have customers looking on every side to see the whole design. As for the lid being so simple compared to the base, it allows for the branding to be showcased and seen at every angle.
This project was featured in the juried Robert Morris University 2017 Gold Show.
Assignment: Design ceremonial signage and building signage that adhere to building codes and regulations. Represent a Twitter Headquarters that would be located on University Boulevard in Moon Township, Pennsylvania. Extend the signage into an invitation and promotional item for the grand opening of the headquarters.
Description: The ceremonial signage was inspired by the ability of Twitter users to connect quickly and constantly. The materials used are tinted see-through fiber glass that can withstand the elements and provide a safe view to turn onto University Blvd. from the headquarters parking lot. At night, the panels would glow their respective color from the base of the sign in order to keep the sign and address visible. The eye within the bird glows to match and tie in with the building signage.
The building signage represents the intensely connected network of Twitter. Each orb glows when a tweet is sent anywhere around the world. At night, the sign would appear as a connected network of stars, which can be expanded how the whole world is constantly connected. The whole structure is three dimensional and powered by solar energy.
Twitter’s East Coast Headquarters Grand Opening invitation gives a preview of the building signage. The band on the promotional giveaway also shows the signage from the building.
Product Photography Credit goes to Ms. Kelley Bittner of Kelley Bittner Photography. Her strong and powerful photography can be viewed on her website at kbittnerphotography.com.
This is my senior portfolio book that features projects I have completed within the 4 year Bachelor of Fine Arts track in Graphic Design at Robert Morris University. It was featured in the 2017 Senior Portfolio Show in April 2017. My book was a printed piece on hand picked linen paper and bound within a ghosted plexiglass book that adhered to my corporate branding. I also have included links to my corporate identity branding as an example of how to take a design and expand it into various formats. There is also a link to a process book I did for a vector graphics assignment where each student had to design an original coffee shop from scratch.
I am very proud of my achievements and success within the past four years at Robert Morris University as a three time Dean’s Scholar, listed 8 times on the School of Communication and Information Systems Dean’s List, and a recipient of the Media Arts Leadership Award chosen by the faculty and staff within the Media Arts department. I have had four internships within 2-3 years of school.
This project was in collaboration with Sarah Mild of Mild Designs for our Senior Studio thesis project. Senior Studio is a capstone course where senior Media Arts majors choose to pursue a topic or skill and build a thesis around it in order to learn new skills or bring more awareness to a situation.
We decided to keep the overall design clean and simple. Our inspiration came from amusement park maps such as Kennywood or Hershey Park because their maps are abstract, but each illustration identifies the characteristic of each location, building or ride without going into too much detail. By doing this, we were able to show each building based upon the most commonly viewed angle it is seen by students, faculty and staff without worrying about building orientation regarding North, South, East or West. The map even includes the newly planned UPMC Event Center that will be replacing the Sewall Center and the new Student Recreation Center that will be replacing the North Athletic Complex building.
The user interface is simple. If a user wishes to learn more about a specific building, they may click on the building and a side bar will toggle and share information about offices and functions of the building. A user can then click another building to find more information or click the white space to remove the side bar from view.
Problem
Robert Morris University’s current campus map is a PDF document that focuses primarily on the parking lots and roads across campus. For new students or campus visitors, the map tends to be overwhelming and confusing, especially when tours have visitors walking around not driving around campus.
Purpose
The purpose of developing a walking friendly interactive map is to provide students and visitors with a map they can access on their digital devices in order to determine the most opportune paths of getting from point A to point B. The map also delivers the user information about the purpose of each building and what can be found there.
Objectives
Create a user-friendly interface.
Provide an easy to use digital map.
Increase knowledge of jQuery and JavaScript.
Create illustration work usable for web and/or mobile application.
Target Audience
Incoming students/visitors.
New students, new faculty and staff, new transfer students.
It has been a recent topic of discussion for the city of Pittsburgh regarding the replacement of the Sprint banner sign on Mt. Washington overlooking the city. The media refers to the possible signage concepts as the Pittsburgh-Hollywood sign. However, this reference stirs up many mixed emotions for the citizens of Pittsburgh. How will the new sign be original? What benefits are there in replacing the Sprint banner sign? Does the new sign need to look like the iconic Hollywood landmark? Is it affordable? What materials will the new sign be made of? Is the new sign going to be energy efficient? It is important to note how the scenic view of Mt. Washington is a popular transitioning shot for local stations to show during broadcasts for local professional sporting events, concerts and news. Mt. Washington is home of the Pittsburgh Incline, which holds significant historical values for the city of Pittsburgh. The Bayer sign used to be in place of the current Sprint banner sign that is on top of Mt. Washington, but many citizens of Pittsburgh have expressed the new Sprint banner as an eyesore.
Benefits
The proposed design of what the new sign should look like shows the culture and historical values of the city of Pittsburgh. Some historians question if Pittsburgh is still a Steel City. Steel is and always will be a key component of Pittsburgh’s culture and history. The gold backdrop of the sign embraces the three major sports teams: the Steelers, the Pirates and the Penguins. In order to keep up with the modern improvements of the city, the backdrop also functions as an eco-efficient digital screen. It can show graphics behind the brushed steel letters for the weather, fireworks and national holidays like Memorial Day, Veteran’s Day, Fourth of July and other events to be remembered. The new sign’s design would require minimal excavation of the landscape of Mt. Washington and would provide minimal opportunity for trespassers to vandalize the signage.
Materials
Each letter of the new sign would be made from sheets of brushed stainless steel. It would have to be brushed in order to dull down the extreme reflection from the natural daylight in order to prevent it from being overly blinding. The back of each letter would have flood lighting shining against it in order to produce an “outer glow” effect. The backdrop display would be made of high resolution LED technology similar to digital billboards commonly seen along major highways.
Energy
The new sign would be powered by solar panels placed above or below the signage platform built within the hillside. It would require energy from the solar panels only when the sign would be turned on. However, if the interactive is not programmed to be turned on, spot lights can be turned on instead to provide back lighting for the lettering as an appearance of an “outer glow.” All lighting and display components would be ensured to comply to energy standards and be held to energy efficient regulations.
This was a final project in Corporate Identity Design, where we were instructed to create a complete branding guide book for an actuary firm.
After doing thorough research on what an actuary is and what their professional duties are, I related their practice to Euclid, who is one of the original mathematicians, and a caliper, which is a tool used for making mathematical measurements and solving formulas. The corporate branding is clean and classy in order to make their brand reflect a high end firm. The brand includes an alternate set of logos and typefaces to use within the assets for the firm.
This project was an assignment in Advertising Design, where we were instructed to research two comparable brands for a product or service. The assignment required each designer to identifying the market, identifying the product or service benefits and make sure the new advertisements pieces serve the product better than the original advertisements have before. I compared Sharpie and Prismacolor based upon their product benefits, artistic preference and printed marketing.
Some of Sharpie’s benefits were:
Bright colors.
Commonly used to make art on shoes, snowboards and skateboards.
Childish persona.
Comfortable grip.
Lesser value/quality.
Sharpie’s advertisements expressed the product’s capabilities in action like use of bright colors and varying line widths. The ads were usually comical and were consistent with their printed branding.
Some of Prismacolor’s benefits were:
Their archival properties.
Wide range of colors across their colored pencils and artist quality markers.
Their colored pencils correlated to their other products by color code.
Higher value/quality.
Considered a professional product, especially for illustration purposes.
Prismacolor’s printed marketing presence is nearly non-existent. What very few pieces I could find online might not have been actually printed, but they deliver a comparable campaign that shows their product in action and demonstrates their capabilities. However, brand consistency was not practiced.
This research encouraged me to take on the more difficult challenge of finding an engaging way of making a printed magazine advertisement for Prismacolor. It needed to be bold and show the product’s strengths while being a competitor against Sharpie. Since Sharpie is known for their bright colors, I decided to demonstrate how bright and bold Prismacolor colored pencils could be while being shown in a handmade drawing. Some 80’s rock album artwork seemed to be bold and daring with colors. This seemed like an opportunity to take with the Prismacolor colored pencils and really capitalize on their bright pigments. By recreating a version of a Boston album cover, I used it as the background of a printed ad with decorative vector text stating “Color from out of this world.” The bright colors are unexpected in colored pencils, but the text and the artwork express how you can get the bold color satisfaction commonly found with Sharpie in Prismacolor’s colored pencils and other products.
The second half of the assignment was to create a landing webpage for the same brand the magazine ad was to be designed for. I found in researching each brand that their landing pages were not consistent with their current marketing techniques, but instead were simply attempts to direct customers to specific parts of their websites or appeal to their senses. I was inspired by the Prismacolor code to Hex code feature on their website and decided to take a hex code color selection palette and recreate it entirely out of Prismacolor colored pencils. Once that was illustrated, I decided to animate it as if it is a loading screen in order to get viewers to take a second look at the page.
This project was an animation project for 3D Modeling Workshop.
I was inspired by legos and how they simplify human movements into the basic X, Y and Z axis. The animation requirements were specific down to how many frames per second and lighting and motion effects were in the final video.
Small details like the astronaut’s facial expression, the flag, and the environment significantly improved the animation from the original preceding design assignments.
This project was an assignment in Intro to Illustration. We were instructed to illustrate and tell a series of steps or a story.
I decided to take a pickle and give them humanistic qualities in order for them to visually show how a young cucumber goes through the pickling process and turns into an adult pickle. The steps are as follows:
Collect a cucumber.
Boil the jars.
Trim of the flower and stalk.
Fill the sterilized jar with water.
Add the desired amount of seasonings like Dill Seed, Red Pepper Flakes and Onion.
Rinse the cucumber and place it in the jar.
Agitate the jar.
Set a timer for the desired time.
The cucumber is now a pickle!
*The process is simplified for the purpose of the illustration. For an accurate pickling process, please find a recipe from online or in your favorite cook book.
The media I used were Prismacolor colored pencils, Prismacolor Illustration markers, and Pigma Micron Archival Black pens. This piece was selected to be in the juried Gold Show of 2015.
This project was an assignment in Advertising Design, where we were instructed to research Campbell’s Real Real Life campaign and design an advertisement for print that would represent the campaign for the target audience of college students.
I experimented with the concept of college students being homesick and using Campbell’s soup to make themselves feel at home like their care taker would do when they were sick as a child. The Campbell’s Goldfish brand is commonly paired with Campbell’s Condensed Tomato soup, which gave me the idea to bring the Goldfish to life as if they are real fish in a fish bowl in front of a solid red backdrop symbolizing the tomato soup.
KCarlton Designs 