Design Stories Catalogue

Here's where I'm at with my catalogue so far. I made the cover and the page for the effect pedals last night, and it's making me want to go back and change the rest of the book to be more loosely designed to match their style. The other pages feel too structured and boring in comparison.

Installing The Show

Today was the first day of setup for the design show. I did most of the work I needed to get done including mounting my prints onto presentation board & trimming them out, painting the pedestal white, hanging the prints and setting up the iMac. I still have to figure out what to do with the Wiimote charging dock, but it's a relief to have most of the work finished.

Ready to print, instructions

It's time to install the show this weekend so I'm frantically wrapping things up. I set all of the pages I want to print out onto a single document to make it easier to print using the big printer in the design lab. I also spent time finishing the instructions poster so people will know what to do with the Wiimote. The program is also ready to go (at least good enough for the show - I could probably work on it for another semester and make it do some really cool things, but it does what I need it to do for the show).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Finalized Synesthetic show card

I played around with my card design for a while and decided not to change it too much. I'm happy with the little changes made. I've been super busy lately, and should have some more time to work on the programming this weekend.

Vistaprint is teasing me with this:

Esente week 9, Weds

On Monday, we had an intern meeting basically as soon as I got in for the day. We discussed a few things about the importance of collecting leads and what our goals are for the foreseeable future. We have begun contacting venues for One Night Stand, and need to begin contacting bands from the venue areas. We were given sections to browse through of ReverbNation, and were told to listen to the bands on the list and research any of them that could be a potential fit for the show using a Google spreadsheet. I finished my first section and was given a second, though it was too far down the list & the bands no longer had contact information or music to listen to.

I was then asked to move on to my school list for Becca's school tour. I had finished my section the previous Wednesday, and was given a partially completed list from one of the interns that left. I spent the rest of my day getting as far as I could, since that's what was emphasized during the meeting.

- Ian Corrigan
Graphic Design Intern
Montserrat College of Art

Loop machine controls, show card

I did some work routing the controls of one of the Wiimotes to the first four loop control modules in my sampler in Max. It's a little confusing but coming along. I figured out how to add a master volume control that can still allow individual volumes to be manipulated using the Wiimote.

I'm experimenting with using the XYZ inputs to control things like volume and loop speed by holding a button and making a gesture. I also figured out how to encapsulate patchers (shown below) in order to avoid a huge mess of patch cords and obscure programming commands. Any box that starts with "p" is an encapsulated patcher - you have to open it to see its contents.

I worked on my card designs for a while. I think the back needs to be revisited, and have some ideas for adding a few more lines to the front.

Esente week 8, Weds.

On Monday, I spent about an hour and a half collecting leads for OnPoint Media, researching companies in Medford using Manta.com. Afterwards, I moved on to working on my school list for Becca Levy's school speaking tour. I finished up the Framingham and Groton sections, and began working on the last town I was assigned, Holliston. I spent more time than usual on the school list because it's expected to be done relatively soon.

I then moved on to working on my fan art for Jayna Lininger. I was having a tough time figuring out what to do for a while, since there's more material to riff off for Becca Levy. I looked through whatever I could find of Jayna, and watched/listened to whatever videos or audio I could find. I finally settled on a good direction and began putting a design together. I'm making an image that emphasizes her outdoorsy, country/folk style. At first I thought about using a photo of her in the image, but I'd rather try to make a design that communicates her style without actually including her picture in it. If anything, it will probably resemble the "sunflower" image I made for Becca Levy - something simple and bold that evokes the feeling you get while listening to her music without flat-out bashing you over the head with a direct statement. I should be able to show a draft version on the blog soon.

- Ian Corrigan
Graphic Design Intern
Montserrat College of Art

Esente week 8, Monday

Last week, I spent the first part of my day collecting leads for Onpoint Media's web design service, researching companies in Marblehead on Manta. I then switched over to my school list for Becca Levy's school speaking tour. I finished Everett's schools, police and fire departments, and moved on to Framingham. I spent what was left of the day finishing up my anti drunk driving posters and emailed them to Amanda. They're already posted on this blog under last week's Esente post.

I wasn't here on Wednesday - I spent the afternoon getting one of my molars pulled. It had broken a week or so ago, but couldn't be immediately removed due to an infection. The procedure went well and I didn't feel any pain, but it still sucks having a tooth pulled. I made myself feel better over the weekend by going snowboarding at Mount Sunapee. Snowboarding has been like crack for me this winter - I think it's the 8th time I've gone this season.

- Ian Corrigan
Graphic Design Intern
Montserrat College of Art

Esente week 7, Monday

On Wednesday last week, I spent the first part of my day conducting research on electrical companies in Lowell, and educational services, electrical, and e-commerce companies in Lynnfield for a lead list for OnPoint Media's web design service. Since I was finished with both of my media lists (PA and VT), I moved on to working on the school list for Becca Levy's middle and high school speaking tour. I made some good progress, but there's still a lot to be done - Everett has a lot of schools with lots of staff members.

Becca Levy was at Esente this week, so I had the pleasure of meeting her and seeing what she and Ron were working on. They were developing a few videos for her websites and social media, so we got to see the recording process and some of the editing process that goes into the making of these videos. Nobody was unfortunate enough to run into any ghosts or holes in the ground while upstairs, which is a plus.

For the rest of the afternoon, I did some work on my drunk driving posters and made some good progress. All 3 now have ideas taking shape and should be ready as drafts very soon.

- Ian Corrigan

Graphic Design Intern

Montserrat College of Art

*Edit: Here are the draft versions of the posters -

Loop Machine/Sampler

After dissecting several existing patchers and watching countless tutorial videos without coming across exactly what I need, I decided to make my own sampler from the ground up. Using the sample~ and groove~ objects, I wound up making a loop machine that works with 8 different sound files simultaneously - 4 are meant to be loops, while the other 4 are meant to be samples (single hit fills), but all 8 slots can be set to loop. Next I need to tie the Wiimote to various control functions in the patch, and then develop a video patch.

Esente week 6, Weds

On Monday, I spent the first part of my day collecting leads from Manta for healthcare companies in Lawrence and electrical companies in Lowell. I had wrapped up my media list for PA and shared it with Laura over Google Drive.

I then moved on to the schools list for Becca Levy's school talk tour. I was assigned to Middlesex county, looking for all middle and high schools in Dunstable, Framingham, Everett, Groton and Holliston, as well as all of their respective fire and police departments & unions.

After working on the school list for an hour and a half, I moved on to my drunk driving posters. I've basically finished one and am well on my way with a second. Once they're all in a more complete draft state I'll post them here, and again once any final adjustments have been made.

- Ian Corrigan
Graphic Design Intern
Montserrat College of Art

CTRL Event

I'm going to be hosting an event at my school for a project in my Design Factory class. The "design" work is the organization of the event itself, including corresponding with outside organizations and designing promotional material for the event. For a topic, I chose to make the event about media reform. It's an issue that I feel strongly about - I think the media and our addiction to it fuels many bigger problems in our society, and we continually try to address individual problems instead of getting to the heart of the matter. I've been in contact with members of freepress.net, one of the country's most prominent media reform organizations whose headquarters is in Boston. They're helping by recommending prominent figures to invite to the school, and suggested the idea of a film screening to help draw people to the event.

I'll go into more detail about the event in the near future. For now, this is the first poster design I've come up with for the event. I've chosen to name the even CTRL, to emphasize the importance of what's being portrayed in the media and by whom.

Max objects title design

I spent some time thinking about a title for my project, and came across a phenomenon called synesthesia. Synesthesia is when more than one of a person's individual senses are connected. For example, some people who suffer from synesthesia read numbers, letters and words as having specific colors - "3" always appears green, "B" looks red, etc. Others may equate numbers or letters with specific places in 3 dimensional space or time. Since my project is shaping up to be a combination of sound, visuals and physical movement, Synesthetic seems like an appropriate (working) title.

I then went into Max and started placing objects and routing patch cords in order to create a visual design rather than anything functional in the program. I ended up designing the show title typographically by creating letterforms out of the Max elements. Some of them function in some way or another, but many are standalone and solely exist for the sake of creating the overall letterform.

Esente Internship week 6, Monday

Last week (Monday), I spent the first part of the day conducting internet research developing a lead list for Onpoint media concerning healthcare companies in the Lawrence, MA area. Ron held a short meeting in which he stressed the desire to get our media lists finished up for every state.

I had already finished my first media list (VT), and was assigned a second list (PA) that someone had already been working on. I whined a little last week about how sloppy and chaotic it was (the girl who was working on it left the company). I finished sorting out all of the newspapers and filled in the ones that she missed from USNPL. I then spent some time sorting through the college radio stations & newspapers that she had found, and again filled in the blanks she had left. Finally, I spent a bit of extra time on the list adding some of the local TV news stations to the list, independent stations in particular, but also including many corporate stations.

I felt pretty good about the list being finished, and moved on to my anti drunk driving posters. I made a little bit of progress on one of them, but the day was almost over when I started. Earlier in the day, Tim and I got to show the other interns our design work for the first time. We showed our anti bullying posters and I also showed my examples of Becca Levy's fan art. The other interns didn't have much to say, sort of what I expected. Critiques are hard even for art students, so I imagined not many people would be too willing to throw in their 2 cents. Amanda made up for the silence and offered some great & productive feedback, though. I think overall the work was well received, which could also be why there were crickets chirping after Tim and I briefly spoke about the projects.

I was out on Wednesday due to a dental emergency. I had broken a part of one of my upper molars a while back & have been avoiding taking care of it for the time being, hoping that I could handle it after I graduate since I don't have dental insurance. Unfortunately, another piece broke on Tuesday night while I was eating some cereal before bed. Teeth breaking are like a nightmare come true for me, so I freaked out and had to deal with it the next day, missing both school and work. I'm fine now, but have to go back next week to get the rest of the tooth pulled - not looking forward to that.

- Ian Corrigan
Graphic Design Intern
Montserrat College of Art

Synth manipulating video

I'm starting to understand Max a bit better, having spent a few hours looking at how the Wiimote patch and this synthesizer patch are constructed. I spent a while trying to get the output values from the synthesizer to control certain inputs in a video patch, and I'm getting the results I want. The most difficult thing moving forward is going to be figuring out how to map individual keys to specific video clips. I took some time to understand how the Wiimote patch works and should be able to connect it to video in the same way as I did with the keyboard. I was having second thoughts about using the Wiimote last week, but the more I look into it the more I want to have it be a part of my project. I almost feel the opposite now - I may not bother with the keyboard and just stick to the Wiimote, adding the third dimension of movement/gesture to the connection I'm trying to make.

Esente week 5, Monday

On Wednesday, I spent the first part of the day working on the Cambridge lead list, conducting internet research on financial companies in the area. After an hour and a half, I resumed work on the Pennsylvania media list I was given. The list was partially completed by another intern who wound up leaving Esente, and was a total disaster - it was completely disorganized, seemingly random, and potentially incomplete. On Monday, I had begun the work of sorting out what was what, as well as what was from USNPL and what wasn't. Wednesday, I was able to complete comparing the now-organized list to the list on USNPL. Many of her contacts had missing information like email addresses and phone numbers, so I went back through the entire list and filled in all of the missing information (which is odd - how she didn't find the info that I found rather effortlessly is a mystery). After that, I noticed that she had skipped many of the papers that were on USNPL's list, so I finished up with any extra papers that I could find.

After another hour and a half, I was able to move on to graphic design work. I finally finished working on the Becca Levy fan art. I sent both files I had been working on to my supervisor Amanda. She and the other girls who were still around by that time (around 5-6pm) seemed to enjoy both of them despite my discontent for the first one I had created and abandoned. For the remainder of what little time I had left, I revisited my anti drunk driving posters. Next, I will be making fan art for Jayna Lininger as well as wrapping up my drunk driving posters.

Curating Cramsie, David Gatten

For Design Stories, we were given the task of choosing 4-8 poster designs from our book to present in curated form so the reader comes away from the experience with a new understanding of the topic. This was inspired by visiting artist David Gatten's films. We were lucky enough to have David spend the afternoon with us during Thursday's class before he went downstairs to give a talk and have a legitimate screening. We chatted about his process, research methods, and production methods, and then he was kind enough to show us two of his films.

I chose to make my curating project about the evolution of Art Nouveau, highlighting how artists broke from traditional painting and, through experimentation & embracing external (outside Europe) influences, developed a commercial art style the public could connect with and respect.

Esente week 4, Wednesday

On Monday, my day was relatively routine. I spent the first hour and a half conducting internet research, developing a lead list based on financial companies in Cambridge, MA using Manta.com. After that, I spent about an hour and a half on a new media list for the state of Pennsylvania. One of the other interns had already worked on the list, but had left the company without finishing it. It was in complete and total disarray, with no organization evident whatsoever. Whoever worked on it before must have either had 0 organizational skills, or went into her list and deliberately turned it into chaos before leaving. Whatever the case may be, it took me that hour and a half just to sort through what she had, comparing it to what was on USNPL and reorganizing it in another Google doc. After I got them separated into categories, I edited some of them that were sloppy or confusing. Many seem to be missing pretty key information, like emails, contact names, etc., so I assume I'll be spending more time figuring it out before I consider it to be finished.

For the rest of the day, I worked some more on my Becca Levy fanart example. I decided that the piece I had been working on was one of the worst things I've ever made, so I decided to cut my losses and scrap it entirely. I feel like I spent too much time trying to make an idea work that I was never happy with in the first place, so it was like trying to make a fundamentally broken thing function properly. Instead of continuing to bang my head against a wall, I started making a new piece that instantly looked and felt much better than the previous piece. It's coming along much better now and should be finished a lot quicker than the other piece was taking. I keep promising to add a draft version of it to the blog, and still intend to, but considering the circumstances it probably won't be until next week.

- Ian Corrigan
Graphic Design Intern
Montserrat College of Art

Edit: Here are the two images. The speech bubble one is the one I decided to scrap.