DONE!

I’m not sure words can really explain how I felt today as I drove away from campus after presenting my work for the last time. Amazing and happy and excited… and a little sad all at the same time. Mostly just amazing and happy and excited though.

These two posters each explain one project that I worked on all year. The one on the right is my Senior Project and the one on the left is a research project that I worked on with one of our professors.

This one explains my Senior Project. My proposed project was simply to get a basic understanding of web design- enough to make a website from scratch. It was fun to present to my professors because I now officially know more about the subject than they do (since they are Industrial Designers not Web Designers).

Of course to make a website, you need to have something to put on it. I decided it would be fun to try to sell custom Wedding Invitations so I set the site up to help me with that. The invitations on there right now are not actually part of my project- I just needed to design some really fast so they could show how the site worked. So if you look at my website(jessicageorgedesign.com), focus more on the fact that it's a working website rather than at what the pictures are of! I'm excited to have time now to design some really cool invitations to put up there.


The other was a research project that I worked on with a professor all year. Research projects for designers make me smile because... I mean... we studied blocks of color.

Right now when a designer picks colors for his project, it is a pretty subjective process. There are of course rules to follow and studies to show which colors are 'hot' at any given time but it can still be hard to know exactly what shades of different colors to put together and how much of each accent color it is appropriate to use.

Our project is based on the fact that God is the ultimate and perfect designer. Everything created by Him is an example of perfect proportion and color balance. Many designers use the 'Golden Ratio' to help guide them in size and proportions. (If you don’t know what the Golden Ratio is just take out a credit card and study the proportion of the long side to the short side. That ratio, or about 1.618, has been studied throughout time because it is repeated in nature so often. It is considered the ‘most beautiful proportion’ and as such has guided many famous artists and architects in their designs) However, there has not yet been an official way to capture the color schemes used in Nature for the use of a designer.

We (Doug helped a lot in this part- we actually hired him part time... and I got to be his boss. It was cool.) created a simple computer program that allowed us to basically put in a photograph and get a list of all the colors in the photo. Included with each color is a percentage telling us how much of the color was present in the photo.

With that information, the picture of my project can make more sense.



Square #1 is the chosen photograph.

Square #2 contains exactly the same percentage of each color as the photograph did. Basically, if the photo contained 100 pixels that were dark blue, the middle chart also contained 100 dark blue pixels. They are just all grouped together.

Square #3 takes the colors and percentages used in Square #2 and creates perfect, proportional color schemes.

It’s been a lot of fun to see how perfectly nature really is designed! No matter what colors I picked out of a chart they created an amazing color scheme. Just another way to appreciate this amazing world we get to live in.