Author: Ryan Tvenge

Our client project for the semester was working with Jamie Harvie, who was with The Institute for Sustainable Future. His goal was to educate more people in how to use products that were friendlier to the environment and to make sure that there was no misuse of antibiotics on farm animals. The way that he got this message out was to use these characters that he had made up over the years.
Our job was to use these characters and create a campaign called The Anti-Biotics Revolution Revolution, or ABXRR. So we started brainstorming with Jamie as to how we were going to accomplish this. He had a great amount of ideas for us and we started to sketch and get these ideas to paper. We had Erik and Trevor do the preliminary illustrations and the rest of us worked on color schemes and layouts of different ideas.
We had a problem with communication with our client at times. Near the end of the project, we had a whole set of cards, post cards, berets, pledge sheets and a logo set out, but it turned out to not be what Jamie was envisioning. So we did not get a final product to our client that he had liked in the end.
I had learned a few things when working in this group. First, if there is no leader, one should be appointed, because it wasn’t clear who was to make decisions. Also, I learned that you have to be a little more forceful with your client if they can’t make up their mind, or it is unclear what they want. There were many things that my group and I could have done different to make this a smoother process. Even though we didn’t come out with a final product, I still came away with some useful lessons throughout the whole experience.

For the weekend, a group of us from the SDO went down to Mankato for ByDesign on the MSU campus. When we got there, we heard a lecture from Paul Wharton from Larsen Design. He had told us about some scenarios where things had gone wrong. Overall, it was good lecture.
The next day, we started off with our first workshop, which was Final Cut Pro Tutorial. Through this, a guy from Apple showed us the basics about Final Cut Pro. Although I had already knew about these things in FCP, it still got me fired up for some editing that I could do for my cousins wedding.
The next speech was Kate Pabst and Emily Eaton. They were partners in their own firm and had shared with us their success and falls while being in the industry. They talked about the evolution of the web and how they were the ones to help NWA get their site up. I thought it was exciting to hear that they were part of some of the first web sites ever made.
One of the other workshops was Macromedia Flash. It seemed that this gentleman, who had a background in graphic design as well as computer science, was talking a bit over all of our heads. But it was still very interesting to see the possibilities of flash.
One of the best parts of the weekend was going out with all of UMD and MSU students to BW3’s and other such establishments. Much fun was had. There was talk later of having UMD’s SDO doing something like this next year. Only time will tell.
Overall, it was a VERY fun weekend, and I learned a lot about other school’s GD departments.

The Challenge was to make some sort of product or kit to put into the given box. The other half of the challenge was to have the idea be something green or eco-friendly. The suppplies were also supposed to be friendly to the environment.
I started with making a list of 100 ideas that would fit into this 3.5″ x 15″ x 1.75″ box. The problem was that most of them were not eco-friendly. Then I narrowed it down to fourr ideas and expanded on each one of those. After looking at these for a while, I decided on the recipes.
My solution was to make a box that holds recipes, an assortment of herbs and spices, measuring spoons and a stand to hold your recipes.
It hold a mini rack for the spices, measuring spoons, a place for the recipes, and the fold up stand to hold the recipes on. I used design on some of the elements. I used a layout on the back side of the cover to show people what was in the box and it’s purpose. I also used typographic design in the recipe cards. And lastly, I used it on the spice rack to label the spices.
The reason why this constitutes being green design is because the recipes are healthy and all the herbs and spices are organic. I found it important to give a healthy lifestyle feel to this while using 30% post consumer waist paper throughout the box.
The list of materials is as follows:
Old measuring spoons thhat I found in a Friends house that were going to be thrown away. Cost – $0.00
Cardstock found at paperhog which is 30% post-consumer waist. Cost $0.15/sheet
Containers for spices found at my father’s office, being thrown away. Cost – $0.00

I was just introduced to this concept of “Green Design.” What is green design? No, it’s not green marijuana leaves with hemp tied around it. It’s eco-friendly materials, with ideas that support this idea of a clean organic world.
What do I have to say about this? Well, it’s definitely not from my neck of the woods. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in keeping our environment clean, but there are extremes to everything. So, in this project, I want to make it Green, but do this without being overboard.
So I guess my first step is to do research on these “eco-friendly

I read the Design manifesto before designing this poster. I can’t say that I have the appreciation for this idea because I haven’t been designing in the real world, doing ads for butt-toners like all these designers have. It is our job to market these products though. Honestly, if you want to design for worthy causes, you can do this, but it’s a tradeoff. You aren’t going to make a living off this. You’re going to have to do these types of things on the side. Talk to me in 10 years when I’ve been in the field for a number of years, and then I’ll tell you if I’m sick of designing for commercial items.