d-WHOAH.com newsletter February 17, 2009

February 17, 2009
Hello Everyone! Welcome to the new newsletter format! If you're having trouble viewing this email, you can open up the newsletter in your browser here. Since this is the first newsletter in this format, please let me know if anything isn't working for you or any other feedback you may have so I can try to make this as user-friendly as possible. Thanks! Now back to our regular scheduled programming:
The Electric Company Printed Materials (found in the "work" section under "electric co."): The Electric Company (TEC) is a children's television program that promotes increased literacy in male urban youth. Plus et Plus asked me to come on board to help them design a lot of TEC's printed materials in line with the brand that they had developed for TEC. While I'm not able to show everything I worked on yet, I was able to get my hands on a few of the things that I contributed to, including part of TEC's style guide that breaks down their logo into groups of components and their usage, the accompanying cheatsheet poster to their style guide on cabling elements, the teacher's guide to activities and lessons, and a children's master vocabulary sheet that goes along with their activity sheets.
	With the style guide and cheatsheet poster the challenge was to edit and organize the TEC's flexible logo components into clear and logical groupings so that the company's in-house designers could understand their function and rules for future use. This exercise in information design also involved refining the current grid structure for the style guide, clarifying the guidelines, and creating examples of those parameters. In the examples, I had opted to set everything to grayscale except for the elements being discussed to make it visually understandable at first glance.

The teacher's guide proved to be an interesting design problem in that each activity already had an allotted amount of space it could occupy and yet the original copy given to us was much larger than could be fit in that space and remain legible. Therefore, we had to go back and forth with the editors and educators to come up with solutions in which the activity would still be well-communicated but fit within the budget constraints of the project. Additionally, this guide was targeted to adults instead of the children struggling to read, so the design had to stay true to TEC's brand while appealing to a more mature audience. Above is a spread of one of the longer activities with multiple charts and side bars. On the website you can find another example of the guide where two activities with their charts and side bars were designed to fit across a single spread.		Keeping in mind the tight budget their target audience may have, TEC asked us to design the student's activity sheets in grayscale so that reproduction would be easy and cheap. However, the energetic and vibrant brand of TEC must still come through the designs and appeal to the urban youth. In following with the activity sheets already laid out by Plus et Plus, I used similar cabling devices and typographic hierarchy to organize and design the master vocabulary list so that each group of words would be clearly separated from the others and there would be no guesswork involved with the children already struggling to read.
The great news is that since it's launch in January, TEC has been getting a lot of hype and the teaching materials are in high demand. So much so in fact, that another round of printing has been ordered for many of the materials Plus et Plus and I have developed! Needless to say, TEC loves the work we've done for them, and all this consumer demand and client approval boils down to design success!
Another small design success story that I didn't mention in the newsletters until now is that the James Jean postcard book I helped design while at Chronicle Books has gotten a lot of publicity even prior to its release last August. James Jean's work is amazing and my role with this project was to merely art direct in a way that the illustrations would best sell themselves. I helped edit and encourage the art and design of the book so that it was the most marketable, it would fall in line with the rest of Chronicle Books' postcard books, and it would give the buyer something to see and appreciate at every turn of the page.
Finally, as you can tell, the newsletters have gotten a serious facelift, and the broken sign-up (which doesn't really affect you guys since you have already clearly succeeded in signing up at some point) has been fixed, with a HUGE thank you for all the help going out to Josh. I've also created an index for the newsletters past and present here in case you missed some or are curious about some older pieces that are no longer posted on the site. As always, I'm eager to hear your feedback as to how it works for you and any other problems or suggestions you may have. I hope you enjoy the new work and there's more coming up soon so hang tight! xoxo, -d*ro http://d-whoah.com