Zoo Atlanta Website Redesign

Zoo Atlanta is a very strong physical presence in Georgia. It is a big part of family time during weekends and holidays. Their research program is very strong. The facility is beautifully maintained and provides an educational environment for families of Georgia. However the same was not true of their website. It did not convey all that the Zoo stood for. And that was the challenge for my students.
Objective: Convey everything that the Zoo has to offer to the community in an interface that communicated trust and assured them that the Zoo is one of the better choices amongst other attractions in the city of Atlanta. Based on research, propose a redesign for the Zoo Atlanta website and create a working prototype to convey design decisions.

Class: The class was Digital Studio I (graduate web design class focused on information architecture, usability and accessibility principles).

The Website: The class worked as a team of three designers that worked individually upto a certain point and then came together to fuse the more successful concepts to create the single working prototype. The client was extremely overjoyed with the results and the students gained excellent experience as a result of the project and the class.

"Aah Haan" Moments of learning

• Visit to the Zoo.
• Sitemaps, wireframes, sequence charts...
• Panda cam = revenue generation?
• Cascading Style Sheets—slow miracles.

Wine Label Design–French wine–Japanese consumer

The setting was picturesque. I was in Lacoste, France. SCAD LAcoste is located in a 200 person village. Ideal for painters and photographers. Not so perfect for control freaks that like to control every em and pixel with their Mac book Pros (graphic designers). But the learning was also of a different kind given the environment. Traveling and making do with the resources to produce the best work. With one Mac lab to be shared with all classes and no art store with easy access.

Objective: The class was to use their skills of thinking outside the box and design a wine label for "Muscat Rose" wine that was to be marketed to the Japanese market . This was to be done for a local winery Chateaux Pesquei in Moirmoron, France. The wine was made with Muscat grapes

Class: The class was Graphic Design for Alternative Media. The challenge was for the students to understand the process of wine-making. Understand the minor details of information that is required on a wine label. Get a sense of the Japanese market and create a label that met all these needs.

The Winning Label: The client was beyond impressed considering that the class was conducted in the Lacoste campus of the school. The campus is located in the beautiful Provence with limited resources. The results included everything from a Barbecue event, high-school competition, youTube channel and guerrilla marketing

"Aah Haan" Moments of learning

• Tour of the authentic French winery.
• Research = tasting different kinds of wines.
• "So legs of a wine define how sweet it really is??"
• Japanese market research.
• Working with limited technology/ material.

Welcome

It has been 8 years now since I entered my first class that Winter day in a classroom in pretty Savannah, GA. I had 20 students watching my every move. I was all prepared with the syllabus to share, the information about the class, introduction phrases, a couple emergency ice-breakers and my lecture and assignments for the day. I began the lecture with fair ease. And then I was done. And it had only been 30 minutes. What do I do with the next 120 minutes?

It has been a long journey since. Mostly of my own education. I learn everyday from my students. As I teach in a culture I did not grow up in but adapted to instead, I get to know so many new things every day. Right from, the favorite cartoons, to life in high school, what certain slang means, how it is to grow up in the suburbs, how certain phrases may mean different things just with a change in tone. How much could I stretch my authority, how differently it is viewed by different students. And to make life more interesting, how I become the referee when diverse groups interact. These could be differences in gender, nationality, culture, regions of the same country, different social backgrounds and ethnicity to name a few.

And within all this where does learning design or communication or technology fit it?

When I signed up for the job, I thought I was going to talk about the principles of design, typography, hierarchy. I was going to teach how a software works and how you use it to convey your ideas in a refined fashion. I was going to help them develop strategies and apply them towards conveying ideas.

There has been all that but there has been so much more. And that's what this blog is about.