hello
So far, I’ve spent a lot of time expanding my technical knowledge in the new year. Since I’m currently job hunting, this may be partly influenced by my need to stay competitive in the job market. That being said, I want to share a bit about a project that’s consumed much of my January.
As part of an interview process for a company that I won’t name in this blog, I’ve mocked up a landing page for a marketing campaign for Quinnipiac University. This campaign aims to collect the contact information of potential applicants by sending targeted marketing material to current high school students. The marketing material refers the recipient to the landing page that I’ve designed to be “conversion-centered”.
Conversion-centered design crafts the layout and user experience around a particular business goal or “conversion”. In the pseudo-campaign previously described the primary conversion is the collection of up-to-date contact information for potential students and the secondary goal is for the student to download free Quinnipiac University hockey tickets so they will visit the campus.
These conversions and their relative significance must be manifest in the visual hierarchy of the design of the landing page. In my project, the experience is slightly different depending on the device used to view the page, however, the significance is clear across platforms. At the very top of the page is a semi-translucent form welcoming the student and requesting up-to-date contact information followed by a bright attention-grabbing submit button.
This form is placed over on top of a hockey-themed photograph. On larger screens, the hockey player’s gaze directs the user’s eye to the form. Research on conversion-centered design supports using the gaze of a human subject as a directional aid in guiding a visitor’s navigation to important page elements. On mobile, the form takes up enough real-estate on the screen that such subtle cues are not necessary.
Moving down the page we find the second conversion quickly as represented by another bright orange button that parallels the properties of the submit button at the top of the page. Internal consistencies in buttons, typography, colors, and other properties help to make a visitor’s experience intuitive by providing clear predictability through repetition.
These design choices have a strong impact on conversion rates even if the impact on user experience takes place largely on a subliminal level. While I’m new to some of the principles I’ve learned in conversion-centered design, I’m sure similar evidence-based visual hierarchies and design principles will prove to make all my designs more effective and intuitive in the future.
After mocking up a layout for mobile and for larger screens, I got to work developing the code for my design. Per usual, I used HTML to build the structure of the webpage and CSS to beautify the page. This time, however, I used a CSS preprocessor called SASS/SCSS.
SCSS is an interesting syntax that enables the developer to write code in a way that is cleaner, more intuitive, and DRY. DRY stands for “do not repeat yourself” and hints at the simplification SASS offers as a remedy to often repetitive CSS stylesheets..
This was my first time using a CSS preprocessor so I didn’t explore all of the possible features it supports. That being said, I found the experience of CSS to be greatly enhanced by the use of variables and nesting.
Variables enable you to name property values like hex colors that you know will repeat throughout your design. This enabled me to begin my code by naming the brand colors in my color scheme for quick implementation later. For instance, upon naming hex color #272241 $brand-blue, I no longer had a need for remembering and writing the brand color in the multiple places it appears on the page.
Nesting enables you to write CSS similarly to how you’d structure HTML, by cascading elements and their properties within the scope of parent elements. This makes the code way easier to read and navigate.
SASS has way more to offer than just variables and nesting however. It supports custom functions and interesting built-in functions that support arithmetic and easy color manipulation like darkening colors, lightening, colors, and more. I look forward to exploring the affordances of this technology in future projects and excited about my limited experience with it so far.
In the end, my research on conversion-centered design and the intuitive syntax of SCSS aided me in crafting a landing page that’s clean, professional, and effective. I plan to strengthen my familiarity with SASS and utilize more of its functions in my development in addition to seeking inspiration from evidence-based design principles while crafting goal-oriented designs.
This is my twelfth blog post for linesbydevon.com, a domain I registered on a whim in December of 2017. Since the very beginning, the fact that I didn’t design the WordPress theme for my own site was a point of haunting insecurity. I knew eventually I’d have to design the site myself in order to feel confident presenting my work to people. That being said, with 2019 around the corner, I decided to get a head start on my new year’s resolution.
Two weeks ago I created a Codecademy account with this purpose in mind. Codecademy is an online resource for learning different technical languages via interactive lessons, projects, and videos. I made it through the Intro to HTML learning path with ease —I did manage the old Myspace page for my high school death metal band after all!
Learning CSS, however, presented a new challenge that I greatly enjoyed undertaking. Before I knew it I was developing simple static pages all by myself. I can’t remember that last time I felt as accomplished or proud of something I made.
After I exhausted all the HTML and CSS courses on Codecademy I decided to get started designing and developing my very first WordPress theme. Developing dynamic pages proved to be a much greater challenge than the static pages I previously took great pride in completing. I soon found myself sifting through the WordPress codex and scouring PHP forums for hours on end.
With this being said, I’m proud to publicly present the product of my recent studies in web development and design so far. It is a pretty humble beginning and I still have a lot to learn. I already have a lot of ideas about elements I can improve and look forward to developing my skills with these technologies.
As a teenager I hopped around from one minimum wage retail job to the next. The part-time hours accommodated my schedule as a student while offering pocket-money for gas, punk shows, and the cheap restaurants my gang frequented. It also helped me to develop a strong work ethic and introduced me to professional bromides like “the customer is always right” and “if you’re not early then you’re late”. One job, however, introduced a customer service policy that I still consider when designing for clients.
“Four on the floor” is how my supervisor explained it during my first day on the job at a popular shoe store in the local mall. The concept is simple. After browsing the selection the customer may ask to try on a particular shoe. The employee’s job is to go into the stock room and grab that shoe in the appropriate size in addition to three other shoes.
The confused look on the customer’s face when I returned with more than he requested was often intimidating but I was surprised at the effectiveness of the sales technique. After all, its effectiveness is part of the reason why your virtual shopping cart includes suggested items based on similar transactions. As a sales associate, my job was to listen intently to the customer and build a selection based on their needs, past transactions with similar clients, store promotions, and fashion trends.
Sometimes their need may have been only one particular shoe. In this case I would’ve brought the requested shoe in addition to the style in a different color, a similar style from a competing brand, and maybe a clearance option from their preferred brand.
Fashion and design exist in both a conceptual realm and real-world execution. With matters of aesthetic, there are trends that we may enjoy but come to realize may not necessarily meet our particular goals. Comfort and fit aside, I’m sure I’m not the only one who loves the look of a display shoe until I catch glimpse of them on my feet. The amount of times I’ve tried on Converse sneakers and took in the sight of my clown feet with great disappointment continues to haunt me.
The very same principle occurs with design. A client may reach out to me to design for their website, business, or personal project with a particular theme, color palette, or font in mind. My goal is not only to listen to their aesthetic preferences but also to listen to the larger needs of the client and their business in general. This sometimes includes needs outside the awareness of the customer.
With that in mind, I aim to deliver “four on the floor”. One draft along the lines of their original vision in addition to a few draft ideas they may not have considered. This helps the client to assess different options and determine what is both visually attractive and most well-suited for the needs of their project.
I didn’t utilize this until very recently when a videographer and motion designer contacted me to design a logo for him to use in his 2019 reel. He had previously browsed some of my logo concepts and wanted something in the style of a concept I designed for an imaginary clothing brand called OAKAO. This design suggests geometric letterforms by subtracting the forms from horizontal lines. I’ve attached it below.
Stephen suggested he’d prefer something like this logo. He stated that he likes logos that are not necessarily readily legible. They make your brain “work for it”. He also wanted the design to be comprised of many different pieces that could be animated and used for a bumper in his reel.
So I got to work designing and did what I was asked to do—or atleast, what I thought I was asked to do. I converted his name into geometric forms and basically reconstructed the OAKAO logo to be shoehorned into Stephen’s professional project. I did not feel confident about the effectiveness of the design but I zipped up the draft and sent it over to Stephen. It seemed like that was the product he wanted and “the customer is always right”.
It soon became clear that Stephen was not impressed by how the design “fit” his purposes. I called him up and we discussed different aspects of the design, its potential use, and revisited his tastes and mission. Suddenly, my awareness that Stephen was shopping for a design rather than contracting the construction of an already existing concept crystallized. I immediately thought about “four on the floor”.
I returned to the drawing board and created four very different designs. Some were close to what Stephen and I discussed, some more experimental, another more minimal, etc. The goal was to try on different shoes until we found something that fit.
In the end, Stephen picked a design that was very different from what he originally thought he wanted because I was willing and able to provide many different drafts for him to try on. After he confirmed his favorite draft, I made some final touches and sent him two versions of the design to optimize his interaction with it as an animator. I sent him one version of the logo built from triangles and one version of the logo built from parallelograms so that he would have more options in how he manipulates the mark in his reel.
So while I often rolled my eyes at our “four to the floor” policy as a teen, I’ve come to appreciate its value in helping clients to join me on the adventure of developing their brand identity by exploring their initial preferences and introducing options they may not have considered. Now I’m wondering if I can discover value in my other teenage banes.
Thomas Kerr, an independent director from the Outer Banks, reached out and requested I help him to design some promotional material for his upcoming horror series Grace and the Lighthouse Keeper. The series, he assured me, would celebrate the people, places, and culture of his community by putting the Outer Banks at the center of a horror story.
The idea sounded intriguing but he hadn’t yet started filming, didn’t have a completed script for ten episodes, and delivered to me nothing more than an elevator pitch. Furthermore, his computer literacy skills were self-admittedly poor but he desired to generate buzz on Facebook and crowdfund on Indiegogo.
It seemed that I had my work cut out for me. I had to take an elevator pitch from a blank canvas to a cohesive informative campaign with little to no creative direction from the director. I had a hard time knowing where to begin as I reviewed the rambling notes I jotted into my sketchbook during the long conversations he and I exchanged over the phone.
Thomas spoke at great lengths of his plan to start filming from January through March in the Outer Banks’ off-season. It would be grey and dreary, he mentioned, which is perfect for his macabre sensibilities. The plot would also focus heavily on the Outer Banks’ history and he wanted nautical themes present in the development of graphic content.
That being said, I gravitated toward photography. I searched for simple oceanic images including underwater shots. I also found expressive photos of dancers. Humans are intrigued by other humans but I didn’t want identifiable faces in the photography as Thomas hasn’t started casting and it may be confusing to have random faces associating with the series. Lastly I pulled screen grabs from Thomas’ previous short film Who’s the Stiff?
I layered the content in Adobe Photoshop and tinkered with the transparency so as to suggest an eerie double exposure effect. Dancers became underwater phantoms, for example, as the subjects of the photographs formed unexpected relationships. Lastly, I adjusted the levels to achieve assets that are dark and blue-green tinted despite being dramatically desaturated.
I created a duel typographic system for his campaign. For the title image and bolder displays I enlisted the help of Trajan Pro 3. If you’re especially familiar with cinematic typography or marketing then you may be rolling your eyes at my choice. Trajan is the workhorse of Hollywood, adorning title sequences and posters for countless blockbusting epics and thrillers including Lord of the Rings and Titanic.
Its actually this industrial omnipresence that drew me to Trajan. I wanted Grace and the Lighthouse Keeper to fit in among the blockbusters but stand out among the sea of crowdfunded independent B-movie horror flicks. I wanted a display type that was old, elegant, and created an aesthetic as ambitious as the director’s funding goal of $150,000.
I chose Acumin Extracondensed as the secondary type due to its simplicity and stark contrast with Trajan. In an email to Tom, I provided the design rationale that the type is “light and airy . . . its presence is only faintly noticeable . . . like a phantom”. Horror buffs, of course, love this kind of language.
Overall, the photo-typographic coupling produces a strong design that piques interest through its mysterious simplicity, inspires chilling unease, and reinforces the themes of Grace and the Lighthouse Keeper. Most importantly, Thomas is excited about the graphics and feels comfortable moving forward with his project since I’ve provided him with a solid foundation on which he can generate buzz for casting, funding, and viewership.
View the final product on Behance!
Almost thirty years ago, Red Bull reached out to Kastner & Partners to build their unknown brand of lightly carbonated energy drinks. The resulting campaign, “Red Bull gives you wings”, quickly earned the beverage worldwide attention. Integral to this campaign were brief hand drawn animations that engaged the audience in short stories of unassuming protagonists clumsily overcoming obstacles with the aid of the angelic wings gifted to them by the beverage. I always enjoyed this campaign and decided to explore its aesthetic and attempt to recreate its feel with Adobe Illustrator.
View the final product on Behance!
Like spinach to Popeye, Red Bull saves the day for students, athletes, creative professionals, and any discerning individuals who needs a quick canned pick-me-up. It gives you wings, after all. This message was clear but noninvasive due to the animations’ priority to entertain rather than hype a product or push a lifestyle.
By humoring audiences internationally with these advertisements, Kastner & Partners solidified a unique brand illustration system. In an article on Medium.com, Micah Bowers clarifies that a brand illustration system is “a collection of images with a cohesive mood and style that clarifies a brand’s promise, often with a nod to human experience”. Illustrated systems are quite common these days. If you refer to my last blog post then you’ll find my exploration of Duolingo’s illustration system for instance.
Red Bull’s brand illustration system features simple undetailed characters and scenes in an understated wash of light colors swallowed by the white background on which the illustrations reside. The shaky black strokes that comprise the characters reinforce a hand drawn aesthetic while adding energy and movement. Who knows, maybe the illustrator’s hand was shaking from drinking too much Red Bull.
With this in mind, I began by working up hand drawn guides drawn with ink on paper. After importing my rough drafts into Adobe Illustrator I used the pen tool to carefully trace the image with a comparable stroke weight. After I finished tracing the image I selected my paths and applied a tepid but noticeable roughen effect to emulate the lively shakiness of the original advertisements.
In order to colorize the characters and scenes, I used the pen tool again to trace out fill areas and masked thick water-color inspired vector brush textures within them. In this brand illustration system, human characters tend to lack color in their flesh apart from their rosy cheeks. Colored areas in general also tend to be inconsistent, light, and butting up against bold negative white space. This gives the work a minimal, weightless, recognizable characteristic that works well cross-culturally.
In the end I’m pretty satisfied with my attempt to capture the characteristics of this campaign in my short strip “Build Great Things”. I like the way the characters came out and it works well as a storyboard if someone asked me to pitch them a Red Bull commercial. I don’t anticipate this happening but it’s good to be prepared. Maybe in some time I’ll develop an interest in animation and breathe some life into this concept.
In lieu of a full blog post this month I wanted to share what I’ve been working on recently and my plans for the immediate future. My last day of work with the Department of Social Services is this Friday and I’m starting to take my independent studies in design a little bit more seriously. I’m interested in discovering engaging designs “in the wild”—phone applications, websites, billboards, etc.—and performing case studies to identify and replicate the aspects of the design that help to reinforce its message, propagate the identity of its brand, or simply inspire my imagination.
Most recently I’ve focused on Duolingo, the popular language learning application and website. Their design team combined flat-design illustrations with a minimalist interface reminiscent of Google’s material design to develop an application that is as fun as it is educational. My brief case study explores the very basics of Duolingo’s presentation and showcases some of my own illustrations inspired by the application.
Behance.net is a site owned by Adobe for the purpose of the self-promotion of creative professionals. I intend to upload some of my more “professional” work to behance but will be updating my INSTAGRAM with works-in-progress, fun personal projects, and more.
I’m a big fan of recycling. Not only in regards to my material waste but also in regards to creative reproduction. I’ll often reuse my graphic assets from abandoned projects, lyrics from partially developed poems, and riffs from previous music projects that didn’t satisfy my vision. I’m always looking for opportunities to dig through my creative library and find dead content to revive.
That being said, you could understand my excitement when I found an old—and I mean very old—external harddrive in a shoebox hidden away in my closet. I explored the contents and found illustrations, photos, and music that I had assumed was gone forever. Some of the contents I had forgotten about completely. I’d estimate the harddrive is from when I was in high school.
Of immediate interest to me was a folder labeled Powertab Files. The lost treasure. Not that you should know, but Powertab is an out-of-date music notation software aimed primarily at guitarists and bassists. It was my primary tool for composing throughout high school for various music projects and I still use it every so often due to its simplicity.
While riding a high of nostalgia, I browsed the Powertab files and started to think about how I could re-purpose some of these ideas. I cannot impress on you how much work I put into these compositions as a teenager. I couldn’t just let them go to waste. Besides, some of them are pretty good if you can see past the lo-fi MIDI playback quality.
Powertab’s audio playback is especially bad. The MIDI voicings rarely liken the instrument they’re supposedly synthesizing. The unpalatability of the it gave me an idea to re-purpose the compositions in a way that’s easy, fun, and trendy. Chiptune, or chip music, is a genre of music inspired by vintage 8-bit arcade music. I decided to turn my Powertab compositions into Nintendo inspired chiptune bangers.
I started by exporting the MIDI files for lead guitars and second guitars separately so I could import them into separate tracks in FL studio, pan them opposite each other, and assign each a distinct voice. This also afforded me more ease in automating level controls and volume swells for each voice independently.
Next I mapped percussion. Chiptunes are pretty straight forward so I didn’t want the percussion to be too involved. I did, however, want the kick drum to syncopate with some of synths’ rhythmic phrases. This took the most time but I’m glad I followed through on it.
I listened to the final product for a while at home and in my office at work. I imagined an arcade game set in outerspace. The song’s complexity conjured a story of extraterrestrials beaming lengthy and sophisticated communications to earth. Communications that envelope all of their lived experiences, desires, curiosities, and more. Communications that showcase both the darkest and most beautiful moments in their shared history.
After all, if they’re anything like humans then they couldn’t be all bad or all good.
I began to construct the vintage video game in my head. KONTAKT, an action packed hit for your vintage home video gaming console!
And with that I started drafting a mock title screen for the game. I found an image of a beautiful woman holding a gun and imported it into photoshop, converted it to black and white, boosted the contrast, and slightly over-exposed it. I decreased its opacity and colorized it by painting on the layer beneath it with my Tascam pen and tablet.
I repeated the process with her surrounding scenery: the rocks, the deserted landscape behind her, and the Earth-rise just beyond the horizon. It’s like a digital painting meeting a digital collage. When I finished this process I simply blurred the result slightly in order to limit detail in unimportant spaces and then pixelated the image before adding pixelated text.
The final result, I think, is fun and nostalgic. I hope to make more in the future.
I started to wonder if there was something seriously wrong with Derek when the content of the video played through my iPhone speakers. He was trying to introduce me to a strange EDM subculture that’s made itself at home on Youtube and Soundcloud. It’s called Nightcore. These remixes of billboard charting pop songs are crude in production. At times they’re nothing more than the sped up audio of the studio version of the song they’re supposedly remixing. Paired with the chipmunk-esque rendition of Katy Perry’s Firework was a Youtube thumbnail; a still image of a young cartooned woman I assumed to be an anime character judging by her stylized wide eyes, angular bone structure, and impossible hair color.
“I do not like this at all,” I concluded. And the thought of Nightcore never crossed my mind until a few months later when I’d start making it myself.
I bought my new laptop in June of 2017 and was excited to start a new project. I had recently finished recording all the tracks for Level’s Mini Storage Demo and sent them to Derek for mixing and mastering. I also didn’t want to write any more material for Level until I could find band members to join. I figured there was no point in amassing too much material if I’d never be able to perform it with a band. Basically, there was a creative void that I decided to fill with one of my more bizarre creative projects—XCHADXHEAVEN.
Despite my initial resistance, I became attracted to how different Nightcore was from other types of music I had written and produced in the past. I was especially attracted to the fact that it was something I could produce alone without starting a band, organizing rehearsals, and negotiating creative visions. This afforded me the ability to hit the ground running toward an unexplored territory of posi-nightcore; pop remixes with comically aggressive but lyrically affirmative rap breaks.
My first remix was uploaded to the XCHADXHEAVEN youtube channel on June 9th, 2017. I began with a Sia remix. I’ve always loved her voice and have personally been inspired by her as a song writer and as an individual. I was able to download the isolated vocal tracks for her song Greatest, import the tracks in Audacity, set it to a click track, and start composing.
I composed the MIDI sounds in Powertab, an outdated guitar tablature composition software that I became very familiar using during my teenage years playing with my death metal band. I exported the MIDI files from Powertab, converted them to MP3 files, and imported them into my Audacity project. It was low-fi and tedious but slowly starting to come together.
Next I needed a drum beat. I didn’t have a drum machine on my computer at the time so I lazily sequenced a reggaeton inspired beat in a web-based drum sequencer, downloaded the file, and looped it throughout the duration of the project. This robs the song of any percussive variation but it didn’t bother me too much. At this point I was just experimenting and wasn’t necessarily trying to make something anyone but me might find entertaining.
Composition was just about complete but I wanted to add some live instrumentation. I mixed the instrumental track down and loaded it onto my four-track digital recorder in order to add some competing guitar voicings on the song. This was particularly inspired by certain J-Pop artists I was listening to at the time who would include high-gain guitars with fast leads behind their synth-laden pop tunes.
Lastly, I needed to lay down my first rap track. XCHADXHEAVEN is as much a character as it is a music project. From the beginning I knew that xCHADx was a punk outcast with sharp edges, a good heart, and common sensibilities. xCHADx yells because he’s passionate and confident. He believes in himself and he believes in his audience.
At last, all pieces of the composition were in place. The only thing left to do was to make it “Nightcore”, of course, by digitally accelerating the playback speed. The consequence of this follows in the video below.
Upon completion of my first remix, Derek installed FL Studio 12 on my laptop. FL Studio is a MIDI composition tool and drum sequencer that Derek insisted would make my life a lot easier. Despite this, I wasn’t fully comfortable with the program and used it only to program my drums. This afforded me greater percussive variation than was present in my first remix. I exported this drum track to Audacity along with the vocal stems for Taylor Swift’s Shake it Off. I again used Powertab to compose the MIDI instrumentals for my second remix.
While composing live guitar tracks I was excited to discover that I could repurpose an old arpeggio sequence I wrote years ago and wash it over the chorus. These arpeggiated guitar tracks were panned in opposition to each other while simultaneously descending and ascending in opposition to each other. This created a natural phasing effect that I find greatly satisfying.
I uploaded this remix on July 7th, 2017. The thumbnail includes a promotional Polaroid photograph for Taylor’s album 1989. A banner runs the length of the photograph behind the subject that reads XCHADXHEAVEN in Impact font. I selected this bold sans serif type due to its wide accessibility and its ties to hardcore and punk typography. Its not uncommon to see Impact fonts or similar type utilized in logotypes, show fliers, and merchandise. This is the closest thing to an aesthetic XCHADXHEAVEN developed in the short time I uploaded remixes.
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I decided to get familiar with FL Studio 12 instead of relying on my history with Audacity and Powertab. I made it my goal to do the entire composition for my third remix in FL studio alone. This proved to be a fun challenge and I learned some of the basics very quickly. I downloaded the isolated vocal tracks for Miley Cyrus’ newly released Malibu from a forum on Reddit and got right to work.
After selecting programmable “in-house” synthesizers, I composed a bass line and a few counter melodies. In order to create interesting dynamics I programmed automated controls to effect instrumental panning, filtering, and levels throughout the song. Instead of adding live guitar tracks as a contrasting auditory element to the MIDI instruments, I chose to use Miley’s voice as an instrument. I sliced syllables from her verses and turned them into bizarre and lively melodies.
I published this remix to Youtube on August 4, 2017. The thumbnail included a screenshot from the official Malibu music video with the XCHADXHEAVEN banner once again creeping across the length of the photograph and disappearing behind the subject. On the top and bottom of the photograph is negative space that squares off the image and provides social network information and the hashtag #firstfridays. My intention was to release a remix every first Friday of the summer. I printed the thumbnail art on to stickers that I posted around local bars, venues, and cafes.
Now I wanted a new challenge. I decided that for my fourth remix I would chose a song that I had never heard before. I thought that it would be interesting to compose the music based solely on the vocal track alone and then maybe listen to the original after finishing my own version. I browsed a Reddit forum for sharing isolated vocal tracks and stumbled upon a the stems for a song called IDGAF by Dua Lipa.
I had never heard of Dua Lipa and to this day still don’t know any of her other songs. When I first listened to the isolated vocal track I knew that I had to remix it. Her voice is rich and deep which means it’ll hold character well after being sped up. The lyrical content was also sassy and confident in a fun way that compliments xChadx’s shtick.
I imported the vocal track into FL Studio 12 and started composing the instrumental behind it. I really wanted to give her voice space so I tried not to crowd the mix too much. I composed sparse harmonic movements that I assigned to a piano SFZ and a violin SFZ instrument. From my limited knowledge, SFZs provide more authentic replications of instruments as they are sampled from the desired sound rather than synthesized from digitally manipulated wave-forms. The utilization of sampled instrumentation gives the remix a bit more of an organic feel than the previous remixes that rely heavily on digital synthesis.
This remix was supposed to be uploaded September 1st, 2017 but—although it was complete—I had technical issues uploading it to Youtube. This left me a bit heartbroken as I had failed to meet my goal of uploading a new release each First Friday of the month. In disappointment, I shelved the video for some time and uploaded it this summer on 06/01/2018—the first friday of June and the one year anniversary of XCHADXHEAVEN.
The character I created became a part of me to some extent. I’ve learned that living positively and thinking positively can affect your life positively—even if the only change is within your own mind. Creative people in general are often afflicted with self-doubt, self-hatred, and habits that are mentally, physically, and socially self-destructive. Writing cheesy but honest music reminded me that artists don’t have to be pathological people.
I’ve also learned to set deadlines for myself. Deadlines kept me organized and engaged with the project when I could’ve easily put it off to do other summer things hitting the river or the skatepark. The truth is that I ultimately have two jobs. One fulfills me financially and the other fulfills me spiritually. Its a shame that its too easy to neglect my passion when I come home exhausted from the office but I’ve learned how rewarding it is to make time to be creative. Even if that means making silly nightcore remixes.
Thirdly I learned that setting restrictions on yourself helps you to develop technically and creatively. When you decide you won’t exceed more than x amount of tracks in a musical composition or x amount of colors in a design then your approach aims to maximize your desired effect within parameters that will prevent the product from getting too muddy. I’ve found that this also protects me from the paralyzing effect of choice. Setting my parameters early alleviates the stress of decision making in this way.
So, while it’s a pretty silly project, I’ve learned a lot from XCHADXHEAVEN that has influenced the way I approach art and life as a whole. That being said, I feel satisfied calling an end to composing Nightcore remixes while I pursue other creative avenues. Who knows, maybe XCHADXHEAVEN will make a reappearance on a First Friday sometime in the future.
In 2013, shortly after graduating from Virginia Commonwealth University, I started my first office job with Fairfax County Department of Family Services. I served the community in varying capacities for two years, proving from the beginning to be a competent employee who was eager to develop professionally.
It was no secret around the office that the young new-hire was damn good at what he did. I was organized and efficient, easily dwarfing my peers’ daily output by lunch. I won’t even mention my advanced comprehension of federal policy and confidence applying it. Whoops, I guess I just did.
There was one problem, however—I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t sure why. I had done what seemed nearly impossible; I secured full-time employment that allowed me to support myself with excess income for a social life. I was actually fairing well in a job market that initially seemed especially hostile to millennials—and I was doing it with a sociology degree of all things.
In search of insight I observed my coworkers. Many were old and burnt out with empty cow-eyed gazes. Even senior staff and management personnel seemed dull and barely present, often only partially absorbing the content of any professional interaction. I grew depressed and hopeless.
“This isn’t how I want to spend MY TWENTIES”, I thought to myself as I drafted my letter of resignation. I subsequently packed my Nissan Versa and moved back to Richmond in hopes that the young urban culture would curb the existential concerns my career inspired.
Soon after my relocation I accepted employment with Henrico County Department of Social Services. Yes, you’re absolutely right—it’s the same job. And yes, as I’m sure you can tell, I’m still unhappy. It didn’t take long for me to realize that maybe I was wrong in assuming my environment would do the heavy lifting in my journey for . . . I don’t know, actualization or something? I peered around my new office and encountered the same dreadful expressions I thought I left in a different area code.
The existential concerns followed me down the interstate to Richmond; my college town; my neverland. The realization sunk in slowly. “Fuck my precious TWENTIES, this isn’t how I want to spend my LIFE.” It occurred to me I had no desire to advance professionally with Henrico. I didn’t covet my supervisor’s position, the director’s, or even the county manager’s job. I was going the wrong way and needed to get my bearings.
I stopped drinking. Maintaining my edge is a necessary defense against complacency. I am not “working for the weekend” to party with my friends. No happy hours with co-workers. No coming home to a six-pack and Netflix. My only motivation is to correct my course even if I don’t entirely know what that means yet. My vision is blurry but gains resolution each day.
In the meantime I spend my free time making art and music while generally learning to be honest to myself about my fears and desires. I compiled a new zine this month call Unsupervised: Sticky Sketches from Work. It features eighty doodles I sketched on post-it notes with highlighters and pens throughout the career I previously detailed. The fact that I saved them for five years speaks to the desires I’ve ignored. I don’t want to be old and burnt out with an empty cow-eyed gaze.
I spent my free time after work this week attempting to design my first logo. I haven’t yet committed a lot of attention to the study of logo design so this project was mostly influenced by my own aesthetic preferences. In a lot of ways it was a complete shot in the dark. That being said I’m pretty satisfied with the final product—at least for the time being—and want to document the development process and post-implementation reflections.
The brainstorming session started last Sunday on the ninth of April. My various projects had distracted me from my website and it occurred to me that I should return to my baby and attempt to strengthen the site identity and the Lines by Devon brand by extension.
I began by toying around with type. I arranged characters vertically, horizontally, diagonally, and basically every which way they could be set on a page. I also explored the negative space of the letters in hopes of finding creative design solutions in the counter-forms of the site initials—LBD.
After a long period of desperate type-tinkering it occurred to me that a hand drawn logo would probably better represent my artistic identity at this stage in my development. After all, most of the visual content I’m currently creating are hand drawn illustrations. With this in mind I decided to move forward with the initial concept but with custom lettering instead of type manipulation.
While brainstorming I sketched these block letters sloppily. I thought they were fun, nostalgic, and had a cool urban graffiti vibe. I also liked that they were all variations of the same form as you can see below. I didn’t pursue these shapes much further into development however because I was concerned about how well they’d scale to small thumbnail sizes for social media profiles like Instagram. I decided to err on the side of clean instead of fun in order to optimize recognition at various sizes.
The next night I returned to the project with the goal of replicating the repetition I cultivated in the previous day’s session but with a cleaner execution. I also decided that I wanted to move away from heavy weights and block lettering; it’s Lines by Devon, not Blocks by Devon. As such, I started freehand drawing simple linear lowercase “B”s until I drew a form that satisfied my vision. I reflected a copy of this form to make a lowercase “D”. I took another copy of the “b” and deleted some anchor points in its bowl to make a lowercase “L”. I had the feeling I was on to something and decided to sleep on it.
On Tuesday night I reviewed my progress with fresh eyes. I decided to keep the custom letterforms I designed on Monday but I made a few amendments. First, I raised the x-height of the letters. I found that this made the forms less proportionally awkward as the original draft’s cavernous counterforms seemed to distract from the weight of the stroke.
Next I added a flat bar across the cap line of the forms for a similar reason. It creates a bit of a dam against the negative space that was washing through and drowning out the logo. It also reduces immediate legibility. This suspended legibility enables the audience to first take in the form as a unified object—a symbol—before taking in the individual letters.
The fact that the letters all share the same geometric anatomy creates a strong since of unity through repetition. I’m also satisfied with rhythmic quality of the repeated forms. The whole form itself even suggests musical notation to my eye; it appears almost as a triplet grouping of eighth notes. This is an apt visual element for a website that also hosts my music.
Of course, a simple symbol can have a lot of interpretations depending on the audience. One of my friends suggested that he saw a pair of glasses in the form while another claimed she saw the beginnings of a dog. The ambiguity of the form does not dishearten me but instead excites me as an illustrator. I like that the logo inspires different reactions in different people.
In the end, I feel comfortable using this logo to represent my lines, my illustrations, my writing, my music, and whatever else.
maybe poetry—
who knows what the future holds
for my young website.
In general it will represent my personal, academic, and professional exploration of the creative fields and aesthetics that interest me. This being said, I’m curious to see how my relationship with the symbol develops as my knowledge of design grows. Maybe a year from now I’ll be writing another blog about how this design is garbage and will introduce something completely new.