Design Methodology Weekly Blog
Weeks 11–13 (July 19-August 1)
Not a ton to update on these last couple weeks of the semester, I have spent the majority of the time writing interview questions, planning research to execute during the design phases, and writing out the history on the topic.
I did find out that the history that I was aware of for the team was actually not as deep back as it goes. Indianapolis’ hockey history goes way back to 1939 when the Indianapolis Capitals played in the AHL. Ironically, the AHL is the highest level of hockey that an Indianapolis team has played in since they were created. The Capitals logo was… lackluster to say the least though. Here’s a little walk through Indy hockey history.
Lots of content to work with here. There is a mini-market formed around the Indianapolis Racers gear even today, which makes an interesting opportunity for revitalization. Could run into some recognition issues with the Indiana Pacers. Something worth testing, as this is a relatively unknown era of history.
Week 10 (July 12–18)
This week was spent primarily on benchmarking and finding visual inspiration for what deliverables are necessary to paint a complete picture of the brand I am trying to create. Benchmarking started with previous DAAP Capstones (I’ve mentioned previously) the Portland Pioneers, and Queen City FC and then expanded into not only official rebrands, but also fan projects for how teams can differ their look.
I started by building a collection on Behance for visual inspiration and information on deliverables. This also gave me a good starting point on what brands I needed to take a look at for competition. Specifically benchmarking other Minor League hockey teams like the Fort Wayne Komets, Henderson Silver Knights and Rockford IceHogs. Then taking a look at other Indianapolis teams like the Colts, Pacers and Indians and seeing how they utilize their branding. I think that my next step is formally putting together a table or something of what each of these teams or brands is doing successfully and where the weaknesses lie, then I can identify where I can capitalize for my rebrand.
Week 9 (July 5–11)
Back in business. As stated before, there is some benchmarking that needs to happen but I focused this week on writing out some of the previous steps for my project brief including the constraints and outcomes of the idea, as well as gathered options for interviews. Hoping to make more progress starting with benchmarking, then moving to surveys and interviews to probe what names and ideas would be interesting to test.
Below is the new idea pitch I created for this hockey rebrand, including moodboards of the city, the sport and then the history of Indiana hockey.
Week 8 (June 28–July 4)
Alright, dropping the film festival. New plan is creating or re-creating a hockey team for Indianapolis. This is based on an extensive return to my idea list as well as a look into previous DAAP capstone projects like the Portland Pioneers or Queen City FC as branding exercises. I chose this city and sport from the understanding that there is a hockey fandom in Indiana that the current minor league team is not maximizing, as well as the fact that the NHL is expanding with a new team this year, the Seattle Kraken, that hypothetically could be replaced by Indianapolis.
The Fort Wayne Komets (Northern Indiana) are a long-standing independent minor-league hockey franchise that has long topped the charts for attendance in the lower leagues. The Indy Fuel, on the other hand, are a rejuvenated franchise based on the former Indianapolis hockey teams (the Indianapolis Ice & Indiana Ice) that folded in 2004 and 2014 respectively. The Fuel and the Komets participate in the same league, however the Komets outdraw the Fuel by nearly 3:1 in average attendance despite being in a much smaller sports market within the same state.
Having lived in both cities, the Komets are much more integrated into the community than the Fuel. Their social media presence is not only better designed, but gets better engagement than Indy despite having fewer followers. Part of the issue is how the Fuel present themselves as a brand. While the Fuel name isn’t bad, paying homage to the Indy 500, I feel the brand could be elevated with a greater design presence and refresh.
The design deliverables would include a look at the current name, logo, social media presence, jerseys and other merchandise.
So yeah, third time’s the charm.
Week 7 (June 21–27)
This week was spent working on a revised research report. I admittedly was not able to fill out as much of it as I would’ve liked. There were a lot of questions that I didn’t have the answer to, and a lot of questions I don’t really know how to even find the answer to. I am not certain what this project is supposed to look like, where I am supposed to be, or even if my idea is something that I’ll really want to end up doing. I have been trying to cram it into a “design problem” box but I feel it’s just changing the entire concept of what I thought would be interesting to work on.
I feel that the research and knowledge necessary to become enough of an expert in my topic area to completely recreate how film festivals run is actually dragging me farther and farther away from a “design problem” that I, as a graphic designer, am qualified to fix. I’m struggling to understand why this isn’t just an in-depth and elaborate branding exercise. An exercise with research about what exists in the market and how to stand out. Research about what deliverables film festivals have to create, and what draws people to attend them that you can improve upon. Benchmarking is really the best place I can think to start.
Below is a little preliminary visual benchmarking of both environmental film festivals as well as standard festivals that my partner and I categorized by design quality:
I know this probably isn’t what the blog is supposed to be. I am using it more as a brain dump than a process area, but I haven’t really been making any progress to share. Just a lot of pivoting and re-writing and re-wording to make something that I can even progress on.
Week 6 (June 14–20)
This week I was really trying to get my idea ironed out more to really be in a position to get good feedback on this project. This included answering some of the questions about who the audience is, where the content comes from, who it’s benefitting, and also how the constraints are specifically effecting the design rather than the film festival as a whole.
The idea of the programming of the festival being the differentiator hasn’t seemed to go over well. Thinking about how I could reposition and work with this idea has been challenging. The number one thing I have come back to several times is using the festival to push sustainability for both the viewer (through the content they watch and the discussions they hear) and the industry (by changing how festivals can be operated).
How do you teach people about the environmental impacts of their choices without being hypocritical? Is there a way to make different aspects of a
film festival more environmentally conscious? Could you possibly run a
“zero-carbon footprint” festival? What would you need to change about existing set-ups? How could it be made more efficient?
There is a lot of secondary research I need to start out with to establish what I’m thinking and where I am going. Who knows where it will end up, or if I will be pivoting all over again.
Week 4 (May 31-June 6) + Week 5 (June 7–13)
I’m writing this entry about a week and a half late. Lots of work on the deliverables for all my classes combined with waiting on faculty feedback to give me something to write about pushed everything off a little bit so I feel like it’s best summarized in one entry.
The idea that I did eventually push through for faculty feedback was the New Film Festival Creation. I feel like this has been a difficult process because as I’ve noted before in these blogs, I’ve presented this idea multiple times with little to no feedback that anyone really supported it. I just feel like from the position of setting myself up for success over the next year, this was the right balance of fun, a wide-array of deliverables to showcase my skill development, and ability to address larger world issues. These are all areas that I think are important to keeping the project engaging and meaningful.
My faculty feedback (below) was, again, mostly mixed on the idea.
Perhaps it is something about how I am presenting the idea, but often the feedback I get is directly contradicting things that I have heard from other sources of feedback. I’m not certain what to follow or what to change. I think there are a lot of good concerns, but as my professor pointed out, a lot of the creation and understanding of this content is on my shoulders. This means I could either alleviate all of these concerns, or confirm them. I guess we will see where some of the research conversations take me.
Potential Interview Subjects:
• Programmer Heartland Film Festival (Expert)
• Frequent Festival Attendees (Users)
• Design, Marketing Person at Heartland Film Festival (Expert)
• Other connections from Surveys or Interviews (Users/Experts)
Week 3 (May 24–30)
Narrowing down subjects this week has been very difficult. I presented 3 ideas to my group of peers and didn’t get overwhelmingly positive responses. The ideas I shared first were:
1. New Team Creation (any sport)
2. New Film Festival Creation
3. True American Board / Card Game
Upon realizing that nothing was really sticking with anyone, I presented a fourth idea, one that I was more concerned about, for the National Park critterpedia based on Animal Crossing. My peers seemed very excited about this idea, and started building upon the different uses and strategies for how to present things in the different parks.
I gave it some thought and I think the feedback was all good but I think it spoke to a vision that was vastly different from what I was envisioning for the project. We are creating our presentations for later faculty reviews next week and I still don’t feel like I have landed anywhere close to a single refined topic. I feel like my primary struggles are balancing something that I have learned is interesting from the feedback, with something that will keep me interested for such an extended period of time.
Below is the feedback I have been working with at each step:
Week 2 (May 17–23)
I spent a lot of time this week trying to think of the different topics that could be interesting to me for my capstone. I know the goal has been to think of things that are problems that can be solved or issues in the world but that all seems really big and heavy. Obviously we would all love to change the world with design but I feel like we are often forced down those kinds of routes for our DAAP projects and I view the capstone as something that should be a little more fun / lighthearted for us to work on.
Obviously, while brainstorming some of the bigger and deeper topics surfaced. Maybe means that there is an intersection between my “fun / lighthearted” ideas and those bigger issues, but I’m still not convinced I wouldn’t burn out quickly on those kinds of projects.
Here is a list of what I had brainstormed this week to share on the 24th:
- True American board / card game (based on “New Girl” game)
- Creating a new professional sports team in an underserved market (Indiana baseball, Cincinnati hockey, etc)
- Concussion-friendly kit for entertainment without overstimulating the brain
- Ultimate team (FIFA, Madden, NHL video game mode) puzzle generator
- Film festival database for discovery and tracking
- Indy 500 book, app, ???
- Expanding a professional team into a different space (women’s adjacent team, minor league team, etc) with challenge of continuing consistent brand elements
- Preparing the 99% of student athletes for life after sports
- Graphic novel or animation or something for emotional health
- Creating, branding and site creation for a new film festival
- Kaiju Pokédex (Monster-verse based on Godzilla movies)
- Collectable flip books, perhaps with facts or something in addition to imagery
- Coffee table meme history book
- National Park Critterpedias for child engagement in parks (based on Critterpedia in Animal Crossing games)
- Creation, branding and EGD of a new brewery
- Sports memoribilia trading site, ebay adjacent
- The Roundabout Trail guide (book? map? history? unknown)
- Looking into binge watch culture and it’s effect on movies and content
- The Hangover Cookbook for college kids the morning after a rough one
- Daily schedule randomizer to help prioritize and sequence tasks in a day
None are particularly standing out to me as “I must do this one” so I will be interested to see what the class and everyone thinks of this kind of brain dump of ideas for the week.
Week 1 (May 10-16)
This was the first week of classes and it took some adjusting to get used to the new schedule. Throughout the week I was typically pretty physically and emotionally drained by the time I got through all the classes and responsibilities in the day. I had a pretty eventful weekend to keep me distracted. I was in a friend’s wedding on Saturday and then attended a funeral on Sunday so plenty of things for me to think about both good and bad.
Some things I did:
- Applied to jobs
- Started therapy
- Got vaccinated (woohoo!)
- Started a new show
- Rehearsal dinner
- Full day of wedding activities
- Funeral and family dinner
I wasn’t in a fantastic headspace to observe what was going on around me. Mostly spent the week on auto-pilot but hopefully can be more in-depth and thoughtful in coming weeks.
