Red Dog’s Live

The Red Dog Productions site is live!

Still needs some work, but I’m excited the project from last fall’s interactive design class meets the organization’s needs!

 

Red Dog Productions Website – A Work In Progress

To combine the work I’ve been doing with RED Dog Productions (The New School’s in house production company) and my coursework for Media Practices: Interactive, my final project will be RED Dog’s website.

I’ve met with RED Dog’s administrators to identify their goals for the project and what they’re hoping to accomplish, identify key elements the site should feature.

Goals:

• Showcase our work
• Advertise our capabilities/services and appeal to clients outside of The New School
• Demonstrate the professional training and real world opportunities student workers receive, which reinforces or compliments their classroom lessons
• Portfolio for students who have gone through Red Dog’s training program

Important Site Features

• Scrollable text (that doesn’t overlap menu or other text)
• Embedded videos play easily
• Student tags to allow for searchability

Inspiration:
(Sites that have similar purposes and design aspects and functionality we want to emulate.)

• Blonde and Co – Sizzle reel upon opening, simple clean scroll through layout appealing. However text is messy and overlapping in some places. Clean up with div boxes.
• Transient Pictures – Interactive collage for featured work

Navigation Elements and Site Map

Based on the preliminary discussions I have with the team, we identified the functional areas of the site: Projects, Services, Who We Are, and Professional Development. Projects will be a curated selection of our best videos, photos, and event documentation demonstrating to clients what RDP is capable of. Services will communicate to our clients what we’re capable of, how the company works, and will include contact information. Who We Are will be a breakdown of RDP’s faculty advisors from The New School’s media studies department, RDP’s professional staff (who I’ve been meeting with), and the student workers. Professional Development will describe a significant way RED Dog is unique, and that’s in the training program for future media professionals. There’ll be some background pictures of the students in action that can be used on the site. Furthermore, the assets in the Projects section of the site will be tagged with student identifiers, so that anyone visiting the site who wants to see the examples of what a specific student has worked on will be able to do so by clicking on the student’s name. The sitemap is as follows:

Proposed Sitemap for RED Dog Productions website. October 2014

Design

I’ll receive feedback on my project proposal through my Interactive Design class. I had to submit the homepage for viewing, which doesn’t look as impressive as the sizzle reel video is the main component. But below I’ve include a sample of what the Faculty Expert page will look like. The faculty members names will be on a secondary navigation to the left. Selected one of the names will make the page jump directly to that professor’s bio. It’s all Ipsum Lorem text for now.

Notice how I’ve separated the text to make it easier to read. Unlike the Blonde and Co page. This is a work in progress created with Photoshop. I’m sure there will be other iterations before the final product.

Feel free to share any thoughts in the comments. Thanks for reading!

Future Applicability

Here I am, a little more than half-way through a media studies graduate program I entered for many reasons. You can review most of them in earlier posts, but one significant reason was (and is) starting the next phase in my career. I chose a subject about which I’ve always been passionate, a program that provided flexibility, and a curriculum that would offer some tangible skills in the short and long terms. As I type, I’m excited about completing my first website for my interactive design class and discussing the most recent readings and articles in Managing Creativity in the Media Arts.

I’ve embraced the fact that what I’ll be doing in 10, 20, or 40 years, may not necessarily exist yet. And I’m coming to terms with the fact that my career path is more likely to resemble an unmarked woodland trail than a straight shot on any highway. Indeed it certainly does already. But I’m taking steps now to buttress my future. I’ve started volunteering at the Media Center, and am taking advantage of networking and industry insider events through school. Because I’m human, I stress about my unknown future at times, but I’m doing the work, and I tend to believe that things are going to work out in the end.*

It is with this mindset, that I came across and offer up the video Humans Need Not Apply by CGP Grey. In 15 minutes, it describes how robots will eliminate the need for humans in most segments of the work force. It touches upon labor of course, but then goes on to describe how white collar, professional, and even super special snowflake creative career paths will also be replaced. The question is not “if,” but “when,” followed by “how.”

The video concludes:

“Horses aren’t unemployed now because they got lazy as a species, they’re unemployable… We need to start thinking about what to do now when large sections of the population are unemployable through no fault of their own. What to do in a future where for most jobs, humans need not apply.”

My proclivity for the sentimental wants to argue that robots cannot offer human connection; the bonds we form with others, the joys and sorrows we share, etc.. etc.. But then I imagine a robot can easily send a charge to our neurons, and fire synapses which replicate the stimulation caused by human contact.

When automation takes over the jobs that currently run our economy, what will society look like? What task can we assign value that can’t be replicated or simplified by bots? What aspects of our humanity will we prize? And most importantly, how can we start building and preparing for that today? It’s certainly something to think about.

---

*I recognize this outlook is based on my past life experiences, and that it is a privilege to hold such a belief system.

Work/School Collision

At my current job, we hire student leaders for the upcoming school year through a uniform application process. This year’s application theme is #leadership, as a play on the social media convention of “hashtagging.” Check out the logo I created for the application!  I don’t have access to fancy software at my job.  So this was created with good old fashioned publisher.  I’m pleased with how it turned out.