Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Esente week 13, Weds.


On Monday at Esente, I had a particularly short day. After class at Montserrat, I had my internship seminar meeting with a small group of students and our internship advisor. We passed in reflection papers, activity journals and other paperwork, as well as talking briefly about our experiences. The talk went from 11:30-12:30, so I arrived at Esente about an hour later than usual.

When I arrived, I had more bad news to deliver to Laura. I would have to leave early, around 3:00, so I could attend my friend's wake. Sean Collier was the MIT officer who was murdered Friday night by the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. He was shot multiple times while he sat in his cruiser, and the reasoning behind the shooting is still unknown. Sean was an old friend of mine, though I hadn't seen him in a couple of years. He went to school with me in Wilmington and was a year behind me. I had a few friends in that graduating class and Sean was one of them. We had many great times together and I'll always remember him fondly.




Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Esente week 12, Weds.


On Monday, I spent the first hour and a half of the day collecting leads for OnPoint Media, researching companies in Peabody on Manta. After working on leads, I went back to touching up all of the artwork I've made so far. On Wednesday of last week, we had a group critique where we showed everything that we've completed so far. I've been working on adjusting the pieces I already have according to feedback from the crit, and have also started working on a few more blog ad designs.

While we were working (at around 2:45-3:00), we realized that there had been a terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon. I watched a live stream of the news for a while, completely distracted by the chaos that was unfolding at the finish line in Copley Square. Two pressure cooker bombs filled with ball bearings and nails were detonated in quick succession alongside the finish line of the race. Three people were confirmed dead with over 170 reported injured. Many of the injured suffered from shrapnel damage and hearing loss, and some even lost extremities or had to have amputations done at the ER. It was a truly tragic day for Boston and the United States as a whole.

We walked over to Ron's apartment as a group and watched the news on TV for a few minutes. When we came back, it was nearly impossible to get any work done. When something that intense and horrific happens, how can anyone focus on anything else? Ron decided to close the office early and invited us to dinner at a local Italian restaurant. I declined the invitation because I'm swamped with schoolwork and wanted to take the opportunity to go home and get a head start on it.

Ian Corrigan
Graphic Design Intern
Montserrat College of Art

Catalogue beginnings


Here's a few pictures of my catalogue design, showing the instruments and musical equipment I have with brief descriptions/back stories. I'm not happy with the layout so far, so you can expect it to change in the near future.




Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Routing the second Wiimote

I spent some time working on the Max patcher for the loop machine. I got the Wiimote to select the machines using the D-pad like I wanted to, but when I started using the volume and speed features, multiple machines were being affected. After looking around at the schematic, I realized that I had messed up a bit of the wiring. Once I sorted it out it worked perfectly. I made a second control set for the second Wiimote and began to map it to machines 5-8. It will consist of different controls since 5-8 are going to be samples instead of loops. I also spent some time organizing little parts of the patch, moving a few things and deleting unnecessary objects. I also made it so the master volume will automatically set itself as soon as the patch is opened.


Monday, April 15, 2013

Esente week 12, Monday


On Wednesday of last week, I spent the first hour and a half of the day conducting internet research for OnPoint Media, collecting leads for businesses in Groveland, MA on Manta. During the afternoon, the graphic design interns were asked to pull up all of their finished work on screen for a group critique with Ron. I had a lot of things to show and was first in line. Ron wasn't shy about giving realistic constructive criticism which led to more of the interns putting in their two cents, which was good to see. I think my work was well received by pretty much everybody with only minor details needing adjustment. Seeing everyone else's work was also a great experience. People had a lot of great work, but a recurring theme with a few people was poor typography. I think schools tend not to focus too much on type, which is a shame because it really has the power to make or break a piece.

After the critique, I spent some time promoting Becca Levy's "Fix You" video on Facebook groups and anti-bullying blogs. When I looked at the video on YouTube that morning, the views had jumped from ~3,000 to about 20,000 since last time I looked, so all this promoting must be doing the trick. After the promoting, I spent the rest of the day making adjustments to my graphics based on the critiques I received earlier in the day.

- Ian Corrigan
Graphic Design Intern
Montserrat College of Art

Thursday, April 11, 2013

CTRL event flyer update

The CTRL media reform event has been officially scheduled for Thursday, 4/25 in the student lounge from 7-11pm. I updated the flyer to include the details and have begun getting in touch with people who could potentially speak at the event.


Routing Wiimote data, analyzing audio signal


I spent some more time working on the program over the past week. I set up all of the Wiimote buttons that I'm using so far to be routed through a switch system that only sends the incoming signals to specific loop machines. This way, one Wiimote can control 4 different loop machines. The user will be able to switch between the 4 machines by using the D-pad on the Wiimote - up is assigned to one, down to another, etc.

I also started trying to analyze the resulting audio right before it gets sent to the speakers, but I'm not sure that I'll be able to read what the notes are - I'll probably have to work with the overall signal's amplitude/frequency.


I did a little work making the instruction manual as well - so far I've just started to turn the Wiimotes into vector art.


Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Esente week 11, Weds.

On Monday, I spent the first two hours of the day conducting internet research, collecting leads for OnPoint Media for businesses in North Billerica, MA. I had a pretty good list for a change and managed to get about 50 all together. I then moved on to my blog advertisement designs. I made some minor adjustments to the 3 I had already completed and then finished 3 more. I basically made a set of 4 that were more on the safe side, and started making another set with a little more creative freedom. I spent the entire rest of the day working on these. I'll post some images showing 5 of them - the 4 "safe" ones, and the first of the more edgy ones.






Monday, April 8, 2013

Esente week 11, Monday


On Wednesday of last week, I spent the my first few hours collecting leads for OnPoint Media, researching companies in Everett, MA on Manta. After that, I moved on to working on my blog advertisements. I got a lot of work done on them - 3 of them are finished, and the fourth is well on its way.

While working on them, Amanda asked me if I could send her all of the design work I've completed so far because she was going to be collecting everybody's work to go over it some time this week. I made a few quick edits to my posters and saved everything out as JPGs to keep the file sizes down so I could send them via email. I zipped all the files I had and the file was too big to send (Hotmail/Outlook sucks), so I split them into 2 zip files and sent them in separate emails.

Altogether, I have the 3 drunk driving posters, the 3 anti-bullying posters, 2 pieces of Becca Levy fan art, a Jayna Lininger fan art piece, and 3 of the 4 blog advertisements. Seeing it all together made me feel pretty good, it's a nice reminder of my accomplishments here so far.

- Ian Corrigan
Graphic Design Intern
Montserrat College of Art

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Routing the Wiimote data, streamlining

I mostly worked on programming since tuesday. I cleaned up my schematics by encapsulating large sections of it using "p" objects, and by sending/receiving data without patch cords using the "s" and "r" objects. What you see above the blue segment are the volume and speed controls being split into 4 different outputs that are selected by pressing either up, down, left or right on the D-pad of the Wiimote. The fifth button (attached to the grey switch) tells it not to send any information unless a button is being held - A for the speed control, B for the volume. The "send" objects send the output values to "receive" objects in the 4 different loop machines. This will let the user play with any of the four different loops, picking which one via whatever direction it's assigned to on the D-pad.


Esente week 10, Weds.


On Monday, I spent an hour and a half collecting leads for OnPoint Media, researching restaurants and bars in Wakefield, MA. I was given a new graphics project to work on designing 4x4" blog ads for the four main blogs we use - BizBuzz, Rock Report, Right Now, and The Buzz on Bullying. I spent most of the rest of the day working on those designs. I basically finished the ads for Buzz on Bullying and Rock Report, and got some work done on the Right Now and BizBuzz ones.

Ron took a few minutes to look over the posters Tim and I had designed (since we were the only interns left that late in the day). He was pleased to see our work and offered some insight into how they're reading, as well as making a few suggestions on how to improve them. I felt it was a pretty constructive little critique, and it's nice to get some feedback directly from Ron. Next week we'll be focusing on the artwork everyone's completed so far, so I think I'll make a few changes to the posters that Ron pointed out in order to have them polished for the larger crit next week.

- Ian Corrigan
Graphic Design Intern
Montserrat College of Art

Monday, April 1, 2013

Esente week 10, Monday


On Wednesday of last week, I spent the first part of the day conducting internet research compiling a lead list for OnPoint Media's web design service. I researched companies in Tewksbury, including advertising and marketing companies, agricultural and apparel companies. After about 2 hours of leads, I moved on to working on my band list. I had finished a few band lists last week and was assigned a new list, covering the area of Cleveland, OH. I was towards the end of the Cleveland list, so after a certain point there was either no music to listen to or no contact information available (since the bands were so far down on the page list.) I then moved on to Charlestown, WV, looking for bands within 90 miles of the city.

After spending a good amount of time on leads and our band list, I spent a little more time working on my Jayna Lininger fan art. I'll attach a copy to this post, but I don't feel like it's finished yet. Hopefully I'll have some time to really work on it soon, since all of this list making has been eating up all my time.

- Ian Corrigan
Graphic Design Intern
Montserrat College of Art