Product Redesign Find & Share

Mrs. Renfro's Habanero Salsa:

This is my choice of redesign for the category of ethos. As the reader turns the bottle they find a paragraph that explains that Mrs. Renfro's name is synonymous with quality and has earned respect for long years making her salsas. 

General Electric Energy Smart bulb:

This product design uses logos as its way of enticing possible consumers. Numerous amounts of numbers appear on this box including ones to show the savings when using this product.

Best Choice Cat Food Turkey & Giblets:
The cute, hungry-looking cat on the front of this can's label is meant to invoke an emotional response from the viewer This makes the can an example of pathos.

Final Vanguard Jazz Orchestra Poster

The initial concept for the poster came from a quote from the band. When asked who fronted the band, the members responded the music. Knowing this I decided to emphasis the music over any particular member or members. My process was to create a collage that was playful, experimental, dynamic, and still be structured like a jazz arrangement. I wanted the music to explode off of the sheet music paper background. The colors then introduced are visual representations of repetition, phrasing, tone, and their history dating back to 1966. Lines that were kept black reference classical music notation such as the staff and other various musical notation.

The type was handled to reference the band's members. I used different typefaces to represent the fact that this is a big band of sixteen musicians with different personalities that act together in unison. Forcing the name off of the poster was done to reference the normal venue of the band, The Village Vanguard. The club is very small for a band, big in number of musicians and sound, to squeeze into every monday night.

[michael] Language

 My anthology for Tender Buttons, A Sensational Read, is a richly tactile experience to reinforce the sensory sensations of reading a book. The slip jacket starts the empirical journey for the reader with the luscious leather slip jacket. Under this silky smoothness is the contrast of the cover, which has the rough friction of heavy artist paper.  The spine is lined with a strip of leather to tantalize the fingertips after a journey across the paper desert. In contrast to the paper of the cover the interior pages are of a thin smooth paper that glide under the fingers. Flashes of yellow alert the reader to diagrams of the central nervous system. 

The size changes that break words into their phonetic hierarchy create undulations for the reader’s eyes to follow and to create a visual and auditory rhythm. The line spacing between lines reinforces the rhythm. Words flow across page cracks and around page edges to make a flow of text. After finishing the poems the reader finds the DVD which has on it two kinetic type videos of poems from the book. The DVD’s top is also lined with a layer of smooth leather.

Vanguard Jazz Orchestra: Iterations

Second Round Iterations:

Near Final Iterations:

A Sensational Read of excerpts from Tender Buttons

Methodology: 

After reading through the poems and researching Gertrude Stein and her methodology I decided to emphasize the sound because she wrote these poems with the sound having more importance than the meaning. This book breaks down the words into their phonetic syllable hierarchy with the phonetic stress changes becoming visual. The lines of the poems were arranged to create a dynamically visual rhythm. This allows to reader to recognize the sound and rhythm quickly. These poems were chosen for the narrative that their titles create. The narrative is about the process and sensations of reading a book which leads to a disturbance and realization. 

The materials used were to further the concept of the empirical experience of reading a book. The leather has its smell and tactile qualities, while the pages also have a tactile quality. Their smoothness contrasts with the feel of the leather.

Tender Buttons.

A Sound.


Eyeglasses.

Vanguard Jazz Orchestra First Round of Digital Iterations

Starting with this set of iterations I focused on these two concepts:


1. Musical Experimentation/ Improvisation

After last critique I began creating compositions that were less caught up in showing the concept in an obvious and expected way. I started to design so that the concepts were innate in the means in which they were produced.

Experimental type

Chemical equation juxtaposition to
show the number of band members

Collage to show the phrasing, rhythm, and
experimentation through highly graphic means.

2. An Orchestra as a Family

In this concept I switched from creating scenes that showed the orchestra doing daily and holiday family activities to showing the idea of family closeness through the elements in the poster.

Tight letters pacing to visually
show the closeness of the band

Pangea of 16 instruments 

Exaggerating packing all sixteen instruments in a single

box to show that the band is traveling to Kansas City

Rhetorical ideas for Vanguard Jazz Orchestra Poster

After creating varied rhetorical ideas for ten different subjects relating to the orchestra and with input from a group critique the final three rhetorical ideas of mine are: 

1. Exaggerating the family-like bond in a big band environment (Hyperbole)

2. Juxtaposing chemical experiment qualities with musical experiment visual cues. (Pun)

3. Mixing food visuals with musical and orchestra subjects. (Metaphor)