I looked at quite a few storyboards in search of an artist that could really catch my attention, and whose style I could possibly emulate, as I have not done much storyboarding. I knew my search was over when I came across this story about a drink called Pia, created by artist Vinicius Menezes. I've found that he often zooms in on important aspects of that point in the story. There are plenty of interesting vantage points, and I love his use of color. The facial expressions are great, especially in the second one. His other art is worth a look as well. You can find him on deviantART here:

Vinicius Menezes

I've started to make a storyboard for the HP project. Here's what I've got so far. It will be changing considerably as my design develops and my story changes. I would appreciate any comments.

Process Book

I've put together a process book for the USB project. If you want to take a look, you can find it here:

http://www.daapspace.daap.uc.edu/files/download/deininan/QRlMjLeNAUt0UUg-JSWoNzA1QgmUdy3YAImPl9F9ki0

I also improved my original two Illustrator renderings...

Here's the final render, using a little more Alias and less Photoshop, along with the final Illustrator rendering...

More USBs

USBs for you and me

Here are some renderings of USBs I did branded to the Adidas brand. They range from a little bit of Alias and a lot of Photoshop to a little more Alias and a little less Photoshop. I think I will split these into categories.

These are half of the ones I did with mostly Photoshop.

Teknowledgies

Regrettably, I am not extremely tech-savvy, so when I find something new and am excited about it, there is a good chance that it has been around for ages and I am just now catching on. On that note, here are some technologies I've found that I think will be very useful in my HP design.

Flash-based solid-state hard drives, originally utilized in low-cost computers for developing nations, then also for netbooks, may find a good application because of their reliability, low power consumption, size, and cost efficiency. This combined with extended capacity SD drives such as this one, which holds 2 TB of files, along with some kind of developed Live USB technology that would allow for the kind of easy upgradability I am looking for, may result in an interesting product.

USBs

Here are some Adidas USBs I made for Des Comm.





















































It was nice seeing all of the things you can do with Illustrator to make a nice rendering. I learned pretty quick that you really get out of it what you put in. If you take the time and effort to put as much detail as possible, you can really come out with something presentable in the end, and the inverse of that as well. Depending on how finalized the visualization needs to be, you can create an appropriate level of detail for what you are trying to portray. Some specific things I learned about Illustrator were the Expand Appearance function, and the difference between effects and filters. I had already known about the Appearance palette and changing effects, but I really put that to use for this project. I'm hoping to do some more work in illustrator to improve these to a quality I can be happy with.

Not Completely Irrelevant

Okay, this was originally going to be a useless post about something fun I found on the internet. But I think I could make a pretty believable argument that this is good design.


So why is this good design? Many reasons.

1. It fits the target market to a T. Football fans can completely relate to this product.
2. It fills a need. You gotta eat, right? And if you're going to be eating all these completely unhealthy snacks, anyway, why not add in some fun interaction? I can totally see a couple of my friends acting out some play with their vienna sausage teams- which brings me to #3
3. Emotional draw. Why eat from a bag when you can eat from a miniature football field?

If you want to see their process book, here's the link:

http://www.holytaco.com/ultimate-super-bowl-snack-stadium