logo & postcards

I've been trying to focus on the logo by working with other type options and will continue to down playing with the symmetry and asymmetry as well as varying the colors. I also worked on postcard and uniform designs. 9 hours







This weekend I will be making more versions of a postcard, poster and the intro page of the website.

I also made more decisions and planning of the organization such as answering these questions.

How do the children learn about each other?
The children will learn about each other similarities and difference through practicing baseball/softball each day and spending time together, before and after practices. There will also be traveling to games since our team will be competing against other baseball/softball teams in the entire state of Wisconsin. Each coach with Rising Star are truly stellar role models leading these children in self awareness and learning to focus on positive qualities of others. The key component while at Rising Stars is to treat everyone with respect. There will also be social outings, such as movie night, bowling, miniature golf outings, allowing the children to continue to interact outside of the baseball field. Friendships and trusts will be developing as they work and play together, side by side.

What are the children doing together?
There will be practices for all the baseball/softball players on Monday through Thursday, after school. The group will also meet after school on Fridays, but this day is devoting to promote community building. With their coaches continuing to lead the way, one agency will be their focus for a designated time period. We will be working closely with many different non-profits such as United Way, Salvation Army, Goodwill, Homeless Shelter, Food Pantries, and other deserving groups. As we rotate through these organizations, one representative from that group will be visiting Rising Star during the time we are volunteering for this group. This person will educate us on what they do for the community and how our children can make a difference.

The teams will be grouped by age groups, a team for 9-10, 11-12, 13-14 and there will be separate groups for girls and boys--softball for girls, baseball for boys. The organization will always try to group similar skill players together so each person is able to feel comfortable and motivated to get better throughout the year. Changes can be made throughout the season, so each team will be as strong as possible. Many of the conditioning drills, fielding, battling, throwing and conditioning will be done in a large group setting so there will be plenty of interaction within your group and amongst all the players at Rising Star. All of our Friday activities, social events and community outreach projects are done as a complete Rising Stars Unit. We are always promoting community; working together provides a stronger presence.


If you have any suggestions of things that are not clear before my presentation, please let me know! below is my abstract as well.

I am looking to create design material for a fictional non-profit company titled Rising Stars, a baseball and softball organization for boys & girls ages 9-14. Rising Stars will bring together kids from diverse areas to learn new perspectives and focus on the life-building skills that are also associated with all sports: teamwork, goal setting, improvement, hard work, and dedication.

Rising Stars will be located in my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin. Madison will benefit by this organization as there are many diverse areas, but they tend to be naturally separated. Bringing groups together as they play and work, side by side, will promote self-awareness, leading to personal growth and as a result, build a stronger community. This youth sports organization is the first of its kind in this area. Rising Stars will be able to bring groups together as they form a common goal: making the entire city more cohesive and teaching our youth to be excellent citizens.

The vision is to bring together kids who would not otherwise meet each other and create an interaction through baseball and softball. Rising Stars provides a healthy social setting where boys and girls can play sports together, be enthusiastic and learn new skills and cooperatively achieve many life long goals. The foundation for my organization includes: play, inclusive, collaboration, open-minded and empathy. The objectives of Rising Stars would be for children to work with peers coming from differing backgrounds and perspectives.

This branding project will feature logo, signage, and uniform design, along with other promotional materials. The goal for this project is to establish a cohesive marketing
system. These designs will show the public that Rising Stars' is a vibrant and active athletic alternative for boys and girls to participate as an after school activity.

editing cont'd

Over the weekend, I have been working with the star image and possible variations of the logo as well as working on different materials such as the design on the uniform and recruitment postcards.



I'm still exploring this shape, and possibly working with other shapes while still conveying a theme of collaboration. I feel I am making progress on this, but right now I am not seeing one design that screams rising stars. I also might try working with the star that has multiple overlapping circles and see how I can possibly tweak that into a logo.

editing

Over the past two weeks, I am now starting to finalize my key concepts for my organization, which is exciting because I am realizing that these concepts are clearer to the audience and now I can get the chance to work on my designs. 4 hours

I also continued to research existing non-profits that I could create a re-design of the organization, something that Hannah Smotrich suggested from the guest critique. One organization called United through Sport. This organization gives youth in South Africa to play sports where there isn't opportunity as well as raising awareness of poverty. I was thinking about creating design work for an existing organization or create my own organization and I decided to stick with the second option. 2 hours

As I was editing my mission and vision of the organization, I was hesitating on a location that the organization would be based upon. I have made the choice to have located in Madison, WI, my hometown and attract the kids from the various and diverse areas of Madison. Last week I was thinking about having Rising Stars located in LA, because I was thinking of the diversity and the kids from different backgrounds, but then I realized I had no personal interest with LA compared to Madison.

My revised objective and vision is to bring together kids who would probably not meet each other because they are not of neighboring areas and create a fun interaction through baseball and softball while providing a healthy social setting where boys and girls can play sports together, be enthusiastic and together achieve new skills and reach new goals. Keywords for my organization would include: play, inclusive, collaboration, open-minded, empathy

The results of Rising stars would be for kids to meet other kids their age that have different perspectives that they would not be aware of each other and continue to develop life long skills such as learning to work with all different types of people.

Here are my favorite logo options for rising stars. Now I am looking at the star as a symbol to show that kids are coming together from different areas of Madison to play baseball. I also wanted to see if my shape exercises could work on a uniform design. I'm not so sure if it works yet but I will continue to make more designs. 4 hours




I also worked on putting my presentation together. I'm glad my presentation was clear, because I was nervous that people would be confused if someone has not heard about my process. 4 hours

Next week, I am looking to create more designs for all materials such as logos, uniforms, posters and brochures. I will be meeting with Janie and Seth this Tuesday so I'm excited to get feedback.

shapes & words

Over the week I continued to working on playing with shapes and working in a possible design for rising stars. 7 hours







I really enjoyed Hannah's feedback from yesterday, it was great to get an outsider's opinion. She thought my overall project was too vague and dig deeper for a more concrete meaning for the overall organization. A suggestion that I liked was to look at organizations that use sports as a means for raising awareness to other topics. Continuing on, I am going to research other organizations and using the past research
further analyze other organizations.

grants, colors & shapes

Most of this week was spent working on my grant application. 3 hours

I also continued working on shape exercises and working more with layering transparent shapes and trying to capture the ideas of movement. Amanda recommended I look at the work of installation artist Cornelia Parker to understand the feeling of explosion especially in the photos below. 3 hours




From the additional shapes exercises I created the feedback I got was that the color palate was a bit muted and not great for the target age group of 9-14.





Next week I am going to continue making more shape exercises with a variety of bright colors as well playing with the spaces between the shapes similar to this example I created.


I like Erica's comment from the last post saying it would be good to experiment with more abstract shapes so I'm excited to see how that will turn out since the shapes I have been working with are geometric. I will also work with loren ipsum text as well with the text of rising stars for a logo that can convey the qualities of the organization.

sketches

Since I have decided on the title of Rising Stars, I started sketching possible ideas of what the logo could look like. 3 hours






After talking to Seth and Amanda, they suggested that I create shape exercises so I could visualize these adjectives that will describe Rising Stars:
-explosive
-play
-social
-laugh
-happiness
-quirky
-energetic
-spirit
-vibrant
-active
-boisterous
-exuberant
-improving
-friendly
-growing
-teamwork
3 hours






I also tried working with type with a made up words and trying to see if the words could resemble the adjectives above.



From the feedback I have received, next week I am going to continue making more refined shape exercises trying to convey more of the words and figuring out what shapes would sell the idea. I am also going to create a time line of events that would occur throughout the year, similar to the tournaments, leagues that I discussed with the director of Common Bond Basketball. This is something that I didn't think of originally, and important to consider the marketing side as well as the design and visual aspect of Rising Stars.

week 8: logos

I primarily focused on sketching logo designs for my fictional sports organization focusing on baseball and softball this week. With what I came up with was pretty literal with the titles relating to baseball terms. Now I have decided to focus on the name rising stars and continue creating logos for the organization. Elly suggested some links for me to look at relating to logos. I enjoyed these logos and seeing some unconventional ways logos are designed. 5 hours








Also I met with a producer at WOLV tv, the television channel that runs throughout the dorms, on Wednesday. At first I didn't know what I want to focus on so I contacted a variety of organizations and now some of them are getting back to me at different rates. After the meeting I wasn't so sure if I wanted to go this route I wanted to focus on creating graphics for the variety tv programs that are shown on WOLV in the dorms. After talking to Erica and Amanda they suggested to focus on one project, since if I wanted to work on both, i probably would not focus on the larger issue. I decided not to focus on wolv tv as I am more interested in creating a fictional sports organization. 1 hour

As I move forward, I plan to look at different sports organizations as inspiration for names. From all the names I thought of the best one to continue on would be rising stars. I'm going to continue creating logos for that organization and straying away from the literalness of a star as the logo.

week 7: organizing

This past week, I gathered all my materials, conducted more research and created a guide that I emailed to Tyrone at Common Bond. In this guide, I included the mission statement, keywords, shape analysis, color swatches and a modification of the logo and some alternative fonts. 7 hours








Tyrone was fine with everything except the logo. He doesn't wanted that tweaked at all. I was disappointed because even with a few corrections the logo could look better. Then, I decided to continue with editing the logo, for my own purposes and started sketching some ideas.



Now I'm starting to think that I don't want to continue with Common Bond Basketball. The client does not care what designs I submit and doesn't want any adjustments to the logo, and I feel that needs to be changed. So I decided to tweak my direction.

I'm looking to create my own professional sports team for sports that are not extremely high-profiled: field hockey, rugby, lacrosse to name a few. I've been drawn to the NBA Carolina bobcats identity process and coming up with the name, logo down to designing other mediums such as the equipment, and the uniforms-- it seems as their are plenty of opportunities for me in areas of design. With these designs, similar to Common Bond Basketball would be to promote attendance at the games and awareness to this new team. The audience would be a wide range, from people of all ages who play
lacrosse to the spectators who attend the games.

I did a little bit of research and there are 6 teams in the Major League Lacrosse and now I'm thinking of creating a "fantasy" and a new addition to the league.

I know I have been trying to figure out whether I would like to design for a client or design for myself. I also am waiting to hear back from someone at WOLV-tv, the television channel that can be viewed in the dorms and possibly producing graphics for them. This will give me a chance to work with a client.

Next week, I plan to continue researching and making sketches for a different sports teams by brainstorming possible locations and names of a team. I also plan to sketch the logos and create color studies.

week 6

This week I spent a majority of my time tweaking my proposal, and journaling my thoughts relating to sports. 4 hours

I also spent my time sketching ideas that I sent to Tyrone Hicks the Director of Common Bond Basketball as well as reading about the psychology in team sports. 2 hours. Below are some initial drafts. 2 hours




Next week I plan to make connect with Tyrone and here feedback from the sketches. I also plan to attend some of the practices and get a feel of the company from the kids perspective as well as making shape and color studies as well as exploring different kinds of folding techniques.

week 5: follow up

I started out this week by continuing my research: looking for any opportunities that I could find with student organizations for possible design work. I emailed different people such as a film and engineering professor, the alumni association and LSA student government and am still waiting back to hear from them. I also followed up with the Pilates Studio from last week and have had no success so far. 3 hours

I also did some online research of design companies that have sports teams as clients such as GamePlan Creative. This studio created the design of the NBA team Charlotte Bobcats. I found a brand identity and reviewed the brainstorm list of possible team names to initial sketches of the logo to uniform designs to the creation of a mascot. This continued my interest with brand identity and I sketched what inspired me. 2 hours






On Thursday I met with the president of Common Bond Basketball, Tyrone Hicks. This non-profit company has 6 events throughout the year and I plan to market and create the distinct designs for all of the events. Hicks is most concerned about the brochures since that is his most effective marketing piece compared to flyers or email blasts. I’m excited about this avenue and it seems I have a lot of freedom with this project. Here are my initial sketches 1.5 hours



For next week I plan to research more designers, continue sketching my ideas for the first event for Common Bond, a 10-week league and tournament called Power League, and finish my proposal!