Thursday, April 3, 2008
Though I had been doing work on a consultant-basis with White Whale for around two months now, this week was the first of my official full-time position. To kick it all off, my fabulous new car that I’ve been the proud owner of for about a week now decided to go into an unexplained coma (the dealership is blaming the biodiesel, but I suspect it to be a scapegoatting tactic of their jackal-faced sales force). So, whatever, I’ve been relying on public transit and my trusty aluminum steed (read “bike”) for the past two years, and one more week won’t kill me. I rolled into the studio about half an hour after I generally do, and was met by an empty office. No, not just uninhabited, literally empty: the boss’s desk was gone, my little work table and chair was mia, etc.
Apparently over the weekend, we moved into our awesome new office, so I went down and tried the door, opening it this time to the greeting of a confused but nonetheless happy Jason. The confusion ended up being attributed to his assumption that I would start my official employment cleanly on April 1st, and thus his presumed mental Monday schedule was now undergoing a slight change. We opened up the calendar to see what was on our plate for the week, only to realize in horror that we had first-round designs for our new client, Berkeley Law, due in a mere three days.
My partner and I had been vacationing in Barcelona during the initial meeting with this new client the week before, so I hadn’t yet been made privy to the design-related notes for this client. After a brief design discussion between Jason and I, we hurriedly hassled Tonya for her annotated novella of said meeting, and had Donald brief me on his notes, which spurred a series of preliminary sketches that I turned into mock-ups over the proceeding 24 hours.
Selecting my initial color palette from Berkeley Law’s view book, and banking on my Asiatic minimalist color and design tendencies, I digitized my sketches. Upon Jason’s viewing of the first few digital versions, he expressed interest in the designs and concepts, but “hated the colors” and thought that they “needed to be brighter and friendlier”; the design killing statement was, “The color selections are too J Crew”. So on into my foray with brighter, friendlier color combinations.
Forcing myself to work with color combinations that I tend to avoid like the plague (ie – red and yellow [McDonalds], red and blue [generally a color theory no no], etc), I actually managed to come up with something that we both like via subtly asserting the color combinations, and pulling some of the colors from pictures (blue skies). Its shaping up quite nicely and I’m very excited about its potential, as it is pushing my design tendencies into a realm yet to be fully explored, and thus giving Berkeley Law a very unique solution to their site redesign.
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