Advanced Typography

At this point in the semester, I definitely predicted that I’d have less hours that I currently do, so by the end of the semester I’ll probably be way over my predicted practice hours.
I don’t think that my idea of sophistication in my work has changed; it still involves a lot of clean work, with a lot of visual language and a clear idea in the presentation of what information is the most important. I think that the general movements that I had within my animation were sophisticated, although it was hard to catch all of the little mistakes that ended up happening before turning in the final report. I thought that the overall layout turned out really well, and I worked really hard to make sure that there were no extraneous movements so that I could emphasize the right information. I also really liked my color scheme and the weather icons that I created.
I already knew some of the really basic stuff within AfterEffects, but this project really helped to expand my knowledge of what different effects could be done, as well as how to work with compositions within a project, since I hadn’t done that before. I also really had to think about movement frame by frame, and try to get the timing down in a way that wasn’t rushed or too slow.
I think I would have liked to play with the ease in and ease out feature a bit more.
I’m not sure how one measures value; what unit would that be in? I think this project has a lot of creative learning value. I think that it ranks higher than the stop motion animation that I made for George’s Image Methodology class, because while that one also used AfterEffects, it didn’t really go in depth with all of the effects that the program is really useful for. I also think that this project ranks above a similar information project, my seafood flowchart, since both deal with motion within information, although through different methods. I think that the flowchart ranks higher than the stop motion animation though, because it deals with conveying a large amount of information visually, like this weather report. The biggest difference between the flowchart and the weather report is that I felt I had more control over the information in the animation, and it led to more creative challenges in movement than the flowchart.
I feel like my creative “me” is probably about 40 percent myself, but I feel like the rest of my processes are influenced half and half by the teacher and my peers. I’m just a really internal person, and I really value outside perspectives, but the majority of my processes come from me, since I hate to rely on other people’s ideas too much.
Do you have any suggestions on where to look for internships?

The idea for this project was to show a lot of data on a screen and be able to use motion in a way that emphasized certain parts of that information. Using the weather data from four different cities of our choosing, we had to make it clear whether location, weather, or time had hierarchy over all of the other data during each segment, without making any data actually disappear. I based the order of my information on the flow that I thought made the most sense in terms of transitioning from one hierarchy to the next, so I showed where all of the cities were, introduced each of them by time, and finally ordered the days by weather. My decisions were based upon how I could make the text the most legible throughout the whole animation. While there are several bugs still in the actual motion pieces, I think that my flow of information and the weather symbols that I created made it an easy-to-follow weather report.

Alex Clarke: Design student

Conference Booklet

Mid-Term Assessment

The Weather Report