Thank God, last night was the final class of my Colour Theory course.  For my final project, I decided to do a series of four upscale bottles for a line of vitamin/mineral-enhanced water, called Elements, aimed at the yuppie market.  I did each bottle with a different colour scheme, depending on the names of the four “elements” – Fire (red), Water (turquoise), Air (blue) and Earth (green).  When I was designing the labels, I came across a really cool zodiac dingbat font that had some nice illustrations of each sign, so I chose a sign from each category (fire, air, water, earth) and used that on the front of the bottle of that element.  I bought these Fiji bottled waters at SaveOn that have more of a square shape to their bottles.  I took off their labels and covered the plastic caps in aluminum foil to show that, ideally, my “product” would have silver caps on the bottles, similar to the ones that the Absolut vodka bottles have.  My stupid printer was, yet again, giving me a hard time printing the pages without cutting part of it off, so I sent a PDF to the UPS Store in Station Square and had them print it out for me on a nice glossy cardstock. They turned out pretty nice!

I had to take the bus to Langara and, at one of the stops on the way there, Heidi (the teacher for the class) got on.  Weird that she’d get on the same exact bus I was on.  Sarah had dropped her project off on Monday, so I brought that to class with me, too.  Todd, Gerald, Darrell and me were the only ones in class – Leng and Sarah were not there, but Leng had dropped her project off.  We went through and wrote down comments about each project and then discussed them in class.  My water bottles got pretty good feedback – will be interested to see what Heidi forwards from the sheets we filled out in class.

We got all our coursework back and I was dismayed to see that I got a B on my Vancouver project.  I was sure that all my effort would have resulted in something a little higher than that, especially considering they use – and + in addition to the normal letter grades – not even a B+ for god’s sakes – WTF!  She said she thought I could have chosen a different way to present the ideas, rather than a standard book format of photos and captions. I talked with her more about that at the bus stop after class to get her to clarify more of what she meant.  She said she thinks I would benefit from taking more art-related classes, to explore different mediums and stuff like that to open up my creative thinking more. I totally agree.  I told her that I’ve worked by myself most of the time I’ve been in design and that it’s hard to think “outside the box” when you work alone and also when you work with clients who require “safe” solutions.

My colour journal, however, garnered an A+, so I was happy about that – that sucker was a lot of work!  My other coursework was graded pretty well, too so, with the final project, I’ll be interested to see what my final grade will be. 

More later…gotta get up and go for a walk.