Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event.  We're here every Wednesday morning live online at 10 a.m. central time though. We've been doing this show since January 2009 and there's still confusion or indecision about what to call these things. But we are here live online every Wednesday mornings. The show is free and open to watch for anyone, both the live show on Wednesdays and the recordings. So if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings that's fine. You can always go to our website and you find all the recordings going back to the beginning there in our archives. You can watch recordings on YouTube. If there are any presentations included, we include those as well and also links to any websites that may have been mentioned during a show. We do a mixture of things here. Presentations, mini training sessions, book reviews, basically demos of things, basically anything library related we are happy to have on the show and share with you. And we do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes come on the show and we also bring in guest speakers sometimes as we have this morning. On the line with us is Megan Frost. She is from Paul Smith College of State New York. Hi, Megan. Hello. We actually had a request for something about graphic design. It is something obviously is a very in need librarians. Generally I know I did not receive any training in that kind of thing when I was in studying for my degree. But we have to do it. It is something definitely in need. So I went looking and found actually Megan did this presentation in March just a couple of months ago at the Library Technology Conference, which is in Minneapolis, correct? Yes.  And I saw her, I didn't attend the conference. I wasn't able to this time, but I did see her description and I actually had a couple of colleagues, a colleague who had attended and said it was a great session. So I contacted Megan and she's going to, she just agreed to come on the show with us today, which is great. Thank you so much, Megan. Yeah, no problem. And she's going to tell us about doing good graphics design to get all of our promotions out there. So I'll just hand over to you to take it away for your presentation. Yeah, thank you. Well, good morning, everyone. As Christa said, I'm Megan Frost. I'm the public services librarian at Paul Smith College. And as you probably already guessed, the title of my talk today is graphic design for maximum engagement. So I'm going to talk for the next, you know, 40 to 50 minutes about why I think design is so important. I'm going to give you lots of tools and tips to make great designs to engage your communities. And hopefully you'll walk away feeling encouraged and inspired to use some of these tools to take your designs from good to great. So firstly, I'm just going to give you a little bit of context to who I am and the environment in which I work. So I work at Paul Smith College, which is located in very, very upstate New York, like way further north than anyone assumes there is in New York is where we is where we are. In fact, Paul Smith College is located inside the Adirondack State Park, which is six million acres of land that's a set aside for, well, it's kind of a it's kind of a grand experiment in conservation and development. To give you some context of how big six million acres is, that's a land area that's larger than the state of Vermont, which is next door to us. Yeah, and I just want to say I mentioned this to Megan, too. As you said, many people don't even know where that is. I do. I'm actually originally from Saratoga Springs, which you see on the map there south of Paul Smith. But also in upstate New York, we're on the outside edge of the park, not actually in it in Saratoga. Right. Yes. Yeah, kind of the southern southeastern part there. And so the Adirondack State Park, which is a New York State Park, not a national park is actually larger than the national parks of Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Glacier and Smoky Mountains combined. So it is very big. So Paul Smith College is located actually not that far away from from Lake Placid, New York, which many people have probably heard of. It's hosted two Olympics, 1932 and 1980. And the famous Miracle on Ice hockey game actually happened in Lake Placid, which was where the the United States beat the Soviets during the Cold War in hockey, kind of a big deal. The college itself has about 1000 students at four librarians of which I am one and two staff members. And I'm the public services component of the staff, which means I'm in charge of our instruction program and do most of that instruction, design all of it and assess it. I'm in charge of all of the reference kinds of stuff. And I also do a lot of outreach and marketing. So you can see here some really beautiful pictures of where I live and work, the top one being of a sunrise one morning as I was driving into work. And the bottom of our campus at its most beautiful during fall leaf season. You can see we're located on the shores of lower St. Regis Lake. And the second building in that photo, the one that's a little bit behind is actually our library building. So in addition to doing the public services, I'm just really passionate about good design in general. Why do I think design is so important? Well, basically, the future is a visual place. The media is dominated by image based sharing. Carefully designed ads and brands are constantly bombarding us. Everyone shares image that indicates a wealth of nuanced information without words. And if you're anything like me, you've got a cell phone in your pocket with a camera on it. And you use that cell phone to communicate all kinds of stuff visually that before you would have used words to do. You take a picture of the beautiful sunrise on your way to work and send it to people. You know, hey, honey, we're out of milk. Can you can you pick up this this exact milk? Use emojis to to show approval or laughter, other kinds of non verbal communication. Such a visually stimulated world asks really important questions about visual literacy, but it also asks personal questions about how libraries are communicating without words. What do our materials and use of images say about us? How are we engaging our communities with intentional graphic design? What kind of nuanced information are we communicating? So let me give you a visual example of this sea change in visual communication. So here you see two photographs taken from essentially the same place and essentially the same situations, eight years apart. So this top image was taken in 2005 at the introduction of Pope Benedict XVI. And the bottom image was taken in 2013 at the introduction of Pope Francis. In the top image you notice there are a lot of people and like a couple of vague glows of a cell phone, just a few people interacting with this experience through a piece of technology. And the bottom is just an absolute sea of pieces of technology and people who are experiencing those events while recording them at the same time. In 2005, the people attending this event would have communicated with words or with text about what had happened. And in the bottom, they're communicating primarily through use of pictures and video. What we see, I believe, can profoundly affect our experience. So how things are presented can actually change what we might do in response. And let me give you a couple examples of that as well. And we're going to use wine as an example today. So I have two pictures of wine bottles here. One is the cheap wine. The bottle has a really particular shape. It happens to be a screw top bottle. And you'll notice that the label has, you know, acute illustration on it. The expensive wine has a shape that is reminiscent of a champagne bottle, something that we associate with being like a very high brow expensive item. It has a natural cork, not a screw top. And you'll notice that there's a distinct difference in the approach to the label design between the expensive wine and the cheap wine. The expensive wine uses all kinds of very fancy typography work to communicate what this wine is all about. So science has done some really interesting experiments on how things are presented, how that might affect our experience. So for example, one thing that we as humans are not very good at is telling which one of these wines is expensive. So if you gave us a blind taste test and you said one of these wines is very expensive and one of these wines is cheap, on the whole, there'd be about a 50-50 split. Like we are no better than chance at determining which one of these wines is expensive. Our taste doesn't have a valuation of a monetary valuation for wine. So that's first of all, it's pretty interesting. Secondly, if you were to put the same wine in both of these bottles, so say you put the cheap wine in the expensive looking bottle and you served it to people. People would say that the wine they saw being served from the expensive bottle was clearly an expensive wine. This wine is clearly a cut above because of how they're looking at the bottle, when in fact we know that the wine inside both of the bottles is the exact same wine.  You don't do anything to it. The second glass, if you take some odorless, tasteless red food dye and you dye that white wine red, people who drink that wine will describe that wine as being having notes of plum and raspberry and wood smoke or however it is, people describe red wine. They will essentially describe the red colored wine as being red wine. When they taste that exact same wine that it's its natural color, which is white, they will describe it as being grape fruity with notes of green grass. What they see profoundly expects how they experience something. Although the wines are exactly the same, how they interact with things on a visual level fundamentally changes their experience. As librarians, we work really hard to make our individual interactions with our community as pleasant, clear and helpful as possible. And I argue that we should aim for the same in our materials, especially when those materials have the potential to be shared widely, whether that's on your campus community, as is my case, or whether that's with your larger town community, but also online through social media. The effects of good design and good materials can have very far-reaching benefits. When something is designed well, it makes us want to get closer, take in the information and to engage with that. Design can apply to nearly everything from the layout of materials in our libraries to architecture of building, but today we're going to be talking about graphic design in libraries. Specifically, I'll be touching on some of the practicalities of the design process and highlighting lots of free or freemium resources that you can use to take your designs from good to great. So I've designed my talk in about three parts. So firstly, we're going to cover four, what I believe to be, fundamentals of graphic design, those four considerations that you can use to really up the level of your design thinking. Then I'm going to talk about three shortcuts. So having all the time in the world to make beautiful designs and play around with fonts is great, but sometimes you just really need to get something done. So I'm going to give you three shortcuts on how to get there a little faster, and then a few extras for more resources and extra learning as we get towards the end. So firstly, my first fundamental is layout. Layout is the most basic piece of any design. And this is where you ask all the really important clarifying questions of what you need your design to do and how you're going to go about doing it. This is where you make your plan. And in fact, those of you who are teachers as I am and spend a lot of time writing lesson plans, I actually, I often approach design of things, a similar way to the way I approach a lesson plan. I ask myself, what do I need? What do I want people to know or be able to do as a result of interacting with this design in a similar way that I might ask the same questions about what I want people to know or be able to do as a result of my instruction? So some questions that you might ask, what does this thing need to do? What are your constraints? Are they size constraints? Are they display constraints? Are you going to display this thing in print? Are you going to display it digitally? Is it going to be both? How am I going to organize my information and is there a hierarchy to the information? Are the pieces that are really, really important? Are the pieces that are not so important? Which piece is the most important? And how are you going to show that importance? Are you going to use color, texture, placement, size? Does the flow of information make sense and is it clear? Is there an easy way for people to kind of make their way through the design? Can they get from beginning to end easily? And is there anything here that isn't needed? So I have here my one and only example today of what I consider to be a really bad design and I'm showing it to you because I think that while the intentions of this design were good, this is a classic example of someone not asking the important clarifying and layout questions before sending something out into the world. So on the screen you see an image of a bookmark that was distributed at my college by the athletics department. And what I believe this bookmark was meant to do was to communicate the hours of the fitness center, swimming pool, rock climbing wall, etc. to people.  I would argue that this is asking a lot but it's also a good example of not asking good questions before making a design. Not only is it not aesthetically pleasing but it also doesn't do what it's set out to do. It doesn't communicate those venue hours. So here is an example of two of the same information presented two different ways. So Paul Smith College Library puts out a newsletter on a monthly basis called The Thinker. Excuse me. And it's distributed mostly in our restrooms across campus which is why you see the little thinker statue that's contemplating a roll of toilet paper there. And this is something that is something that I do on a monthly basis and on the left hand side of your screen you can see my first attempt. I have some templates that I've developed over the years that I like to use. You know I'm in a rush. I slapped my information into the template that I've already got going. It was just about to hit print when I stepped back for a second and I took a look at it and I asked myself why would anyone read this? Is there anything here that I feel like would cause someone to want to read it? Is it easy? You know I'm sort of retroactively asking myself a lot of these layout questions. And I said to myself I can't see me reading this in the bathroom and that's a real clue right? If I don't see myself reading it how can I expect anyone else to do it? So I went home and I came back the next day and I rearranged things into what you see on the right hand side of the screen. I was always calling it three quick things. Why was I not choosing to display this in a list? You know lists have a lot of advantages to them. One of which is that it offers people a really easy way to make their way through information. To start somewhere and know where they're beginning and know where they're ending. In addition it allowed me to put in a little tiny bit of extra information that could be helpful to students and community members wanting to know about the hours for the spring. And I want to point out that actually the text in this did not change. So all of the little articles are exactly the same. The only thing that changed is the way the layout of that information how that information is presented. And I would argue that the design on the right hand side is just a much better, clearer, more engaging kind of design than the one on the right. And that's all as a result of layout. So we talked about some questions that you can ask yourself about about the thing that you're trying to make before you do it. And so then that raises questions about like how do you even get started. I find staring at a computer screen when I'm trying to design something to be really incredibly paralyzing. I just can't do it with a blank computer screen. And so what I like to do is I just get an eight and a half by 11 size sheet of paper and I start sketching out really rough blocks. You know, I want the image to go here, title is going to go here, there's going to be some text here. I want to make sure I include sponsorship information and that's going to kind of go in this area. And then once I have that really super rough sketch then I go to my computer screen and start translating that into actual imagery. I make my plan before I start essentially. And then you may think this is the end of end of paper in the design process and it certainly is not for me. I constantly check the layout on the screen and also in print. So I'm constantly printing out pieces of paper, taking that you know step back and I'm looking at them, making some tweaks and doing it again. I find I have a hard time with that on a computer screen so I need to use paper. And you can see here an example of my personal design process at work. So this is a really simple poster in the end that was meant to is a request for for proposals for the library sponsored student speaker series. And so there were a couple of basic pieces of information that needed to be communicated and it took quite a bit of paper to get there. So I started with the central graphic. You know, everything looked good on the computer screen. Transparency of those speech bubbles was seemed right on. And then when I printed it out it just didn't translate well. I had to adjust them. So I got that where I wanted. I added, I blocked in where I thought pieces of text were going to go. I tried that and it didn't didn't work. I didn't like the way it looked. So I tweaked a couple of things. For a little while I thought I was going to put white text over the central image. I didn't think that was readable enough. So I tried black text. I thought that was a little harsh. And just to kind of give you an example of how tweaky I can be on the final text is actually very dark gray. But basically this is meant to show the power of looking at something in print. You can print anything on a standard size sheet of paper just by choosing fit size to fit or whatever in your print options. And the little tweaks that you can make about color, about spacing, about I want this piece to be a little bit more visual. I think I need to make this part bold. Can really make the difference between something that contains all the information but is a little bit difficult to muddle your way through to something that is not only visually interesting but also much more communicative. So my second fundamental is color. What colors are you going to use and how are you going to choose them? Obviously you can choose any colors that you like and the colors that you choose will have some effect on that piece, on that fundamental communication that we were talking about. I have two color palettes here. One based on chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream which results in a very natural refined calming kind of color palette. And another based on Superman ice cream which is a very different palette, a very vivid, vibrant and energizing palette. As a kind of best practice, I like to recommend that people choose no more than three colors as a good place to start especially as you're getting started and graphic design. I think choosing a limited color palette is going to help you keep things feeling really cohesive while still providing the interest and contrast that you're looking for. And three colors seems to be a really manageable number or no more than three colors. I don't count black and white to be among that three so if you were to count those then maybe you could sort of have up to five colors. And like I said this will help things feeling feel as though they belong all together. One example of a three color color palette is actually this presentation. I have a navy blue background. I have a medium blue as my sort of imagery accent. And then the text is actually not white but a cream color. Another example of a limited color palette is this poster which is a poster that I designed to communicate to our campus community the results of the LibQual survey that they took a couple of years ago. And I had a really difficult time designing this poster for a number of reasons but one of them had to do with color. And I found that things really opened up to me once I found that LibQual icon in the top left hand of the screen. And you'll notice that there's actually three colors at play there. There's yellow, purple, and kind of teal color. And I only used two in my design. I used teal and I used purple. And what I think this does is really help things feel like the whole poster is working together towards the same end. It's all of a piece. When you have lots of big blocks of color or you have words bolded in a whole rainbow of things it can feel really, really disjointed. And so, of course, rules are meant to be broken but as a best practice and a suggestion for starting out I recommend no more than three colors. Let me give you some suggestions of places you can go to help you out with color. My first suggestion is a website called or it's not a website, it's a browser add-on called Colorzilla. So you can install this in Chrome and Firefox and what this allows you to do is pick up colors on the web. So this is really great if you, for instance, find a color or some color combinations that you really like already being used on a particular web page or for me or maybe for your communities picking up the colors that are being used on the college web pages to make things feel as though they are all working together as though they all belong together. And it's just as easy as clicking on the add-on using that little color dropper and then it allows you to copy to your computer's clipboard and RGB or hex code or whatever it is that you prefer which you can then paste into whatever piece of software you happen to be using. It's really easy to use. D Grave is a color palette generation service. So this is how I made the ice cream color palettes a couple of slides ago. And what this does is you enter the URL of an image into the box there. You hit Color Paletteify and it will give you a color palette of both a dull color palette and a vibrant color palette based on the colors at play in that image. You know, if you love an image part of probably part of the way the reason that you love it is the interplay of colors available in the image. And particularly if you're trying to evoke a certain feeling like a beachy kind of feeling as in this example using a color palette generator can be really helpful.  Now, if you're not quite sure where to start you're having a hard time you just, you know, decisions are not your strong point you don't have an inspiration image. Design seeds might be a place to help you out. So this website gives you both an image and the color palette generated on that image in the same place. So you don't have to have an inspiration image you don't have to have a particular color in mind. You can simply scroll through and pick something that sort of strikes your fancy. My third fundamental is images. Where do you go to find images that you can legally reuse and remix? So this is a book talk poster that I designed for an author who came to speak on campus. And obviously since the book talk poster the book cover was prominently featured but Philip Ackerman Leist is also a homesteader and a huge proponent of working working land with draft animals and specifically teams of oxen. So I wanted to make sure that I included I included a little sort of nod to that in the form of a cow which you can see in the bottom of the screen on the bottom of the poster and so where might you go to find something like that? Well a couple of suggestions for you that you probably already heard of but bear repeating one would be Flickr Creative Commons where you can go to search for Creative Commons licensed images. A lot of non-professional photography a lot of vintage images. Google now in its image search also has a search tool that will allow you to filter those results based on licensing and reuse which has made that a lot more attractive for my use personally. But let me give you some suggestions of places you probably haven't heard of. One would be Morgfile. Morgfile is an aggregator of stock images so it searches a bunch of different websites and returns all of their available stock images. You can see I searched Moose here got tons of results and these are all available free for your use. You don't have to pay for them at all. Pixabay is a similar service to Moorgfile in that it aggregates stock images but it also includes illustrations and vector images as well as just straight up photography. So vector images if you aren't aware are images that can be enlarged or shrunk to any size without losing the image quality. So if you've ever had the experience of wanting to use a particular image and then needing to blow it up a little bit to fit your poster or whatever it is and then printing it out and finding that image has gone very grainy and the quality is really bad now vector images won't do that. They will both expand and contract without losing the structural integrity of the image. And also just as a side note I recommend that people pay attention to the size of the image that they're trying to use because graininess can be an issue. Whenever possible choose something that's larger than the space that you have so you can shrink it down and avoid grainy images. But also vector images come often with transparent backgrounds which you can see here behind this Moose silhouette in the gray and white check. That is an indicator of a transparent background and what that means is when I put if I was to pull this Moose onto the navy blue background of my slide all you would see would be the Moose silhouette and not kind of the larger rectangle of the image around it. So this is great for colored backgrounds that's great for photoshopping things into images. Let me give you another suggestion particularly if you're looking for icons. The Noun Project is a great website that will give you an icon to represent just about any concept or idea you can think of. Really truly if you have a concept that you're trying to communicate and you're looking for a very sort of pared down way to do it the Noun Project probably has an icon for that. You can see here all kinds of different ways of representing the idea of a Moose. The Mountain Dweller in me would like to point out that some of these are not actually Moose but caribou but beside the point large horned mammal there is an icon for that. So this is an example of a design done by Elena Vermincki of St. Mary's College of Maryland who used iconography to communicate a piece of information that was really important for faculty to know but the kind of thing that they would sort of probably ignore. So this was meant to communicate the journal selection process to faculty members and this is the kind of thing that could easily be communicated with an email, a bulleted list, PowerPoint slide, just chalk a block full of text and understanding that that is a communication that's really easy to ignore, really easy to not pay attention to. Elena created this design to counteract that and I would argue that the use of this just not looking like the standard that this design would cause people to stop for a second and actually look at it rather than just saying, oh blah, another list and move on. And when you cause someone to stop and take a look, they have taken in some of that information and in fact they've probably read bits of it because as literate adults we don't really think about reading, it just happens when we look at words and so if they've read a little bit, chances are that they're much more inclined to read all of it than they were than they were in a list format and I argue that this is just a much more effective way of communicating some of that important but not as sexy information to people and not only is this a better way of communicating it but it's probably a lot more effective as well. So my last fundamental is fonts. Fonts are great, they're really easy to install on your computer and you can get loads of great ones for free. The right combination of fonts can almost even stand in for an image. For example, this art show poster here that I designed for a student art show that we hosted in the library doesn't use any images at all. At all, it just uses fonts. One of my favorite resources for free fonts is a thousand and one font. This is a website and one of the reasons I love it is because you can preview your word or phrase in the font. An alphabetical list of characters is certainly shows you what you can expect a font to look like in theory but in practice, things can look a lot different. So being able to preview a font in those crucial words or phrases can really help cut down on your decision-making process. DAFONT is another website that does similar things to a thousand and one font. I like DAFONT if I'm trying to match a particular feel of a font, I find their filtering and browsing options to be really useful. You can search for Western fonts or retro fonts or Mexican fonts or handwritten fonts, all kinds of stuff. This also has a preview feature which I find really helpful. In addition, DAFONT also has lots of dingbats. Now, you probably discovered dingbats on your first computer and said to yourself, wow, that's super cool and never actually used them. Well, here is your opportunity. Dingbats are so useful in designs, particularly, and I'm not sure that a real paid graphic designer wouldn't necessarily choose to use dingbats, but for a self-educated off-the-cuff kind of graphic design, dingbats can really help bridge the gap. You don't need to know how to make perfect little curly cues or nice curly arrows or how do you represent music or different shapes or whatever. There's a dingbat for that and it'll save you a ton of time. And DAFONT has lots of different dingbats.  So this is a website called TypeWolf and if you've ever had that experience of seeing a design and saying to yourself, oh my gosh, I love that font. I want it for my very own. Unless you're a typography professional, chances are good that you are never going to be able to find out exactly what that font is. Now, you might get close, but your powers of being able to exactly match that font are limited and TypeWolf is a website that helps bridge that gap. It gives examples of sort of design in the wild, if you will, and it tells you exactly what fonts are being used. So not only will this help you say, I love that font, what is it, but it will also help you get an understanding of how different fonts might work together when you're trying to make decisions about which fonts you might use. So this is an example from Solvig Lund of Concordia College of another one of those pieces of information that is really important for people to know, but they're very susceptible to just kind of ignore or not pay attention to. This is a problem that we all face is getting people to return their materials, and particularly for us in academic libraries, getting people to return their materials at the end of a semester. And so the way that she communicated this rather than just, you know, throwing a sign up on the front door or sending out an email to people to remind them that they needed to return their books for a certain time is through this really gorgeous design.  So the little banner, the curly arrow, all of those little swirls, those are actually dingbats that she has used just to kind of show you what can be done with font and typography. And once again, I would argue that choosing to communicate this very basic information in this way would cause people to actually stop and take a look. And when they stop and take a look, you force them to kind of engage with the information. And not only is it a better communication tool, but I think that it also, you know, makes people remember. They remember not only the design, but the information within it. So those are my four fundamentals of graphic design that was layout, color, images, and fonts. So now let's talk about some shortcuts that you can take when you don't have a lot of time to mess around with, you know, trying out a lot of different things. You just really need to get from point A to point B. You're on a time deadline. You know, the bathroom is all backed up and your work studies are MIA. My first suggestion for you is a website called PicMonkey. It's a very robust photo editor. So it'll do all kinds of stuff that, you know, your average lay person doesn't necessarily need Photoshop to do because they have PicMonkey. It'll do collages. It'll do all kinds of image adjusting. But they also have some really cool themes for adjustment. So their themes are things like Winterland and Comic Heroes and Zombies that will allow you to take an image and transform it into those themes. So to give you an example, this is a picture of me just kind of messing, you know, I was cheesing for the camera with a cherry pie. And I took that into PicMonkey and chose their vampire editing theme. And I made myself into a cherry pie vampire. So I really lightened my skin. I darkened my eyes and made them red. I gave myself fangs with dripping with, you know, cherry juice blood. I put all kinds of interesting creepy overlays in the background. And frankly, this was a really fun way to spend an hour. So even if it's not something that you necessarily use for your library, although maybe that comic book heroes theme might be useful, maybe, maybe not. It's definitely something to know about. And you can have lots of fun with your friends or nieces and nephews or whatever. So speaking of comic book heroes, this is Morty the Tiny Paper Skeleton.  So he comes out of his graveyard, he makes all kinds of trouble around the library and then goes back into his graveyard after Halloween is over. So this past summer, we had gotten a grant to do some digitizing of photos and I wanted to make sure to use, to highlight those collections and I used Morty to do it. So on the left-hand side of the screen, you can see I photoshopped Morty into an old-timey image of, on the right-hand side, you see Phelps Smith, who was the founder of Paul Smith College. And then on the left-hand side, that's actually President Calvin Coolidge who spent a summer running the White House out of White Pine Camp, which at the time was owned by Paul Smith's College. Plus, I always like to give Morty a Halloween costume and this year he went as a superhero, courtesy of Pick Monkey. Another suggestion for you is Canva, which is a design templating website. So Canva has all kinds of templates from posters, presentations, business cards, social media headers and icons for things like Facebook and Pinterest. It's a freemium service, so most of their stuff, or about 50% of their stuff is available for free and then other pieces, if you want a specific element would cost 99 cents. I have never had to pay for anything. I've always been very satisfied with what's available for free. So one example of a Canva design is actually this presentation. So I designed the presentation template for this presentation in Canva. Really easy to do, very editable. You can choose all kinds of different elements and colors and all sorts of stuff. I want to give you two suggestions of infographic generators to use because I know that they're something that not only are we using to communicate with our communities, but actually that are in the example of myself in higher education are being used in the classroom actually. I think easily is a great of the multitude of infographic generators out there. Easily offers a lot of different templates, a lot of different kinds of templates, while still retaining all of the highly editable, uploadable, customizable elements that you might need. PictoChart is another infographic generator that is similar to easily. Lots of different designs of templates, but they also allow you to choose the format that you might like. So you can choose an infographic format, a report, banner, or presentation format, which I think extends the utility of this tool. So here's a design by Courtney Seymour of Union College who once again is communicating some pretty basic you should know this kind of information to her community and she used PictoChart to create this really great infographic that just is a lot more engaging for people who are interacting with it than your typical list. So we've talked a lot today, or I have talked in a very one-sided way, a lot today about basic principles of design, tools that you might use, but I haven't addressed that one crucial question that people ask, which is where does your inspiration come from? Where do you get the ideas to do these things? So I work in a very rural area at a very rural school and needless to say, we do not have an on-campus graphic designer, much less a person with a graphic design training that works for our library. So if a design is going to get done, it needs to be me that does it. And so I spend some time like intentionally saving things that I find to be, that I think are good design. I'll even go out onto Google and start googling poster designs. And then when I find stuff that I like, I put it on my Pinterest board. Now, I'm a female, I'm on Pinterest anyway, which is why I choose to use Pinterest. You can certainly use whatever it is that you prefer for saving stuff that you find on the web. It doesn't have to be Pinterest. But the point is when it comes time for me to do a design, I have this inspiration board where I've kept things that I think are great ideas, interesting ways of representing information, and then I can pull from there. So you may notice in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, the EuroPython 2014 icon with overlapping speech bubbles. Now that may look familiar because earlier in this presentation, I showed you a poster for the Student Speaker Series, which also included a graphic of overlapping speech bubbles. That was the direct inspiration for my generation of the Student Speaker Series icon. Pinterest is also, whether you have an account or not, a good place to look for color palettes, a good place to look for font combinations, software tips and tricks and that kind of stuff. It's a pretty good pointer out to other kinds of design-y information. I would also be hiding something from you if I didn't tell you about Librarian Design Share, which is a blog and a website run by two fantastic librarians, Veronica Ariano Douglas and April Altman Becker, who started this blog for libraries and librarians to share the designs that they make. So the idea is that you or librarians submit designs and they are featured on the website with the understanding that those designs are available as a template for under Creative Commons licensing for other libraries to reuse, remix and adopt for their own uses. Not only is this just a really great community with lots of inspiration and templates that you can use, but it's also great to kind of get an idea of how other people are communicating, the kinds of stuff they're communicating, the kinds of events and services that they provide. And it's a wonderful website. I highly recommend that you add this to your blog role and check in regularly. So also today, I didn't really talk about software. I talked about tools, I talked about design principles, and I didn't tell you that you have to use a particular kind of software or that you need to go out and purchase the kind of software in order to make good design. And that is because I believe that people make design, software doesn't. I think that you can create great design with whatever piece of software it is that you feel comfortable in, whether that's a PowerPoint or a publisher or that's, you know, a Photoshop and Adobe InDesign. Really, it's all about the ideas and enacting a vision and more than it's about a particular kind of software. Having said that, let me give you some suggestions of places that you can go to learn more about software or more about design in general. I have greatly benefited from a consortium subscription to lynda.com, which is how I learned to get beyond the very most basics in Adobe InDesign which is where I do most of my design work. This is available free to me through a consortium and if you are interested in learning about design software, I suggest that you take a look and see where you might also have access to lynda.com. Canva, the Design Templating Service, also has a design school blog and short tutorials. They cover a lot of different design principles, some of which I have talked about today but a lot of which I haven't and all of that is freely available on their design school website. Creative Live and Skillshare are two online class platforms that are based toward creatives. They aren't free classes, you have to pay for them but if you get on their mailing list, they're often running promotions or they'll be giving away free classes every now and then and if you're interested in learning more, it's worth signing up for those kind of notifications. I know a lot of people, actually professional designers who use Creative Live and Skillshare not only to brush up on things that they may already know but also to just learn from people who are real masters of a particular kind of design or creative pursuit. So they're both really great websites. So today I have shared a lot of my best tips and resources for designing materials that cause our communities to step closer and engage. Design can cause both positive and negative experiences and we really want to make sure that we're doing our best that our communities have more positive than negative interactions with us. I hope you have lots of great new ideas and resources for how to take your library's graphic designs from good to great and I would be more than happy to answer your questions at this time. Okay, thank you very much Megan. That was really cool, yes. I don't hear the commission a lot of flyers and things, just a few different things. I do a lot of PowerPoints though, so I may be borrowing, stealing some of the ideas for how I do my presentations now. Yeah, for sure. Getting more creative and not just taking what are the standard templates that are offered out there and saying, ah, it's the best I can do. Well, and you know, to design a template for this website really didn't, or this presentation really didn't take very long and it just makes things feel so much more personal, you know? It does, yeah. It doesn't look like anybody else's. Like I said, you remember it, yeah. Which is your attention, being unique. Let's see, we didn't have any questions throughout the show. We do have some coming in. If anyone does have questions, go ahead and type them into the questions section of your GoToWebinar interface and I will grab them from there. Let's see, we do have, ah, any suggestions on fonts to avoid or use or considerations with this part of design. So, you know, what would you like, maybe, yeah.  Which is true. I think it has its place. Depends on what you're thinking. Yeah, another font that real typography nerds will look down upon would be Impact, which is what's often used in memes. I, frankly, I like Impact because it has a lot of impact. Right, it's a nice strong font, but once again used in the right places at the right time. Exactly. There are a couple of fonts I've found to translate really well to poster design that I use a lot. One is Nevis, which is free. And all the fonts I use are free or either come, you know, with my Microsoft software. Nevis and Junction, Oswald, are all really interesting fonts that are just a little bit different from Times New Roman or Cambria or Calibri, but function in similar ways and are very, very readable, either small or large. I think readability is a big concern something to be aware of as well. I've seen some people use some fonts and things and I've just had to stare at it and say, like some of the more scrolly and complex, kind of, I don't know how you want to describe it. I kind of have to look at the word and say, I'm not sure what word that's supposed to be. It's like that font is so, you know, complex and, yeah, can be a little much, yeah. Okay, next, if someone says, you mentioned limiting colors. What about fonts? And I think that a lot of those suggestions kind of apply, although with fonts, I think a standard practice is two, maximum three different fonts and similar to color, sort of only if they're demonstrably different from each other. You have a header font, you have a body font. You may have a main color and a contrasting color. You don't want to use two serif fonts that look similar to each other together because it's going to kind of look like you copied and pasted and forgot to change your fonts to be all the same thing. So when you're picking fonts, make sure that you have, you're understanding what function they're going to play and that you understand that they, you need them to do different things. True, okay. Next, I have a question about alignment. Decades ago, I was told to pay attention to this with text and avoid center alignment as it's hard to follow, but you used it all the time and many of your examples, could you explain that choice? Yeah, so I think a center alignment is hard to follow when you're looking at large blocks of text. I definitely, if I'm, for instance, if we go back to the, gosh, back for this poster here. This is a good example of both centered and specifically aligned text. So all of this information about what the book is about, I wouldn't recommend center alignment on that because it is going to be really hard to find the end of your line. Now, if you're trying to communicate titles or taglines or something that's just really short and is meant to be sort of a punch, that kind of thing, I think, is easier to read when it's centered on a poster. It's easier to grab onto and to follow. And so it kind of comes back to that. Is it easy to follow? Do you allow people to find their way through things in a way that is both logical and also readable? Well, it's like many of these things it's going to be, depend on the situation, it's going to vary case by case, depending on what you're doing, what the project is for. Yeah, let's see. Okay, here's another question. How do you decide whether or not to include a border for a poster? It may appear to be straightforward, but sometimes I struggle with whether or not to include one. Any suggestions? Yeah, I tend to not usually. And that's a personal choice.  I tend to not because I worry about alignment in printers, especially if I'm printing something really big on a large format printer. Like this book talk poster was actually like a conference size, so it was really big. And I wanted to make sure that if the alignment of the printer wasn't exactly right, that everything was still going to look okay. So I often choose to not include a border. And once again, that's a personal choice. I think you can certainly do it, although I might choose instead to use a frame around a particular image or around some particular text to highlight something rather than highlighting the whole poster, if that makes sense. Yeah, I said thank you very much, yeah. Okay, that's the last question that came in. Anybody have any other questions you want to type? Oops, something just popped up here, okay. Is it important to have house fonts or colors for brand identity and consistency? Or is it okay to have signage and flyers posted nearby with the design elements that vary a lot? Yeah, I think that that has, as a question I'm wrestling with from my own library. I have been moving us towards some brand identity, not necessarily to separate us hugely from the college, but something that feels like not only the library, but the library at Paul Smith's College. And which is where I've kind of landed on these fonts that I really like, Nevis and Junction and Oswald, that feel unique, but are still very functional kinds of fonts. I try to use the college colors a lot in my communications. We're out in the woods, so there's a lot of greens and browns and yellows and that kind of stuff. And trusting that as the central person who's doing design for the library, things are going to kind of feel like they came from one place. I understand that's a more difficult question to do when you are either designing by committee, or there's a lot of different people in your organization who are responsible for design. And if that is the case, if there are a bunch of people who are trying to create a design voice for an institution, you may choose to have some best practices or things that you know have worked really well in the past available in terms of fonts and colors. I think also in some cases, well, depending on what you're doing, it may not be under your control at all. There may be some sort of dictated as anything you're going to do for the college, for the university, is going to have this header on it. You must have this kind of footer on something, and you must use these colors for your main, so you may have some things that are dictated to you that you've got to then work within. Yes, and that's certainly a good tip. I'm lucky enough that there's a limited amount of red tape in general. I'm not sure what you're talking about. I've read tape in general in my institution, so I'm able to cast on that freedom, but you are totally 100% correct that a lot of places already have their own sort of style guide, if you will. So you might have to do that, and so is this also still okay to have different things that may vary depending on the thing that you're trying to promote? Yeah, absolutely. And so I did say, would you mind repeating your favorite fonts again? Yeah, so actually in this poster that I still have up, I believe that it's Nevis injunction that I used here, so Nevis is the header font, the sans serif font, and Junction is the one that's got a really, that's the text font, it's got a really, it's not quite a serif font, but it sort of functions similarly. Another one I really like is a font called Oswald, and those are all available on either 1001 fonts or DeFont for free. Cool, all right. So we're about at the, still after 11, sort of about the end of our full hour here. Does anybody have any last minute urgent questions? Get them typed in there. There's just a few thank yous that came through as well, Megan. Thank you, enjoyed it, found useful ideas, and someone said, just comparing this presentation to others I've seen recently makes the importance of good design clear to me. I'm not sure if they mean your content or that you designed something better than someone, other ones, but we'll just... Well, thank you very much for the one. Yeah, let's see. All right, now it looks like just a whole bunch of thank yous, good presentation. Thanks so much for being here, coming through. So I think that we will wrap it up then from that. Yes, thank you very much, Megan. This is yet, like I said, we had a request for this, and it's definitely some good ideas here that I think we'll be using. I'll be borrowing, as I said, for my work that I do. So I'm going to pull back, present your control to my screen now. And there we go. Waiting for it to pop up. Okay, cool. All right, yes. Thank you very much, Megan. Thank you, everyone, for attending this morning. As usual, the show has been recorded, so we'll be available maybe later this afternoon, depending on how long it takes to process and get everything together. Megan, will you be sending me your slides or post it somewhere? Okay, yep. We'll have the slides. I have also grabbed all of the links that she mentioned, all the different websites and resources to the Library Commission's delicious account here. So you can see them all in here, and so we will have this included as well in the show notes afterwards. We always post our recordings on the Encompass Live website, down here under Archive Sessions. So let's see, does this one have the... Recordings go on YouTube, presentations go on in our slide share, and the links in are delicious. So this one will be there as well with all those resources for you. So that will wrap it up for this morning's show. Thank you very much for attending. I hope you'll join us next week when we have an exciting guest. We have Courtney Young, current ALA president. We'll be on the line with us to talk about the strategic planning process that ALA is in the midst of going through right now. Working on redoing how ALA is handling some things. So she's going to be with us next Wednesday to talk about that. So please do sign up and join us for that. And for any of our other shows, you can see here our topics that are listed on our website. Also, if you are a Facebook user, if you're big on Facebook, Encompass Live also has a Facebook page. Go ahead and like us over there. It gets loaded up here. I post reminders of when you can log in to the show that's happening right now. I announce when our recordings are available, reminders of upcoming shows. So if you are big on Facebook, this would be a good place to keep reminding, getting reminders of when the new shows are coming up. Other than that, that wraps it up for this show. Thank you very much for attending. And we will see you. Just want to double check and see. Just double checking my questions and look at anything else came in. Just a lot of great presentation. Thank you very much, Megan. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much, everyone. And we'll see you next time at Encompass Live. Bye-bye.


Dumb There may be bugs in some of these mugs, but there ain't no mugs on Jake My name is Jimmy. His name is Jake and this is the weekly dumb. We had ourselves another Successful Jeff Passenday Jake. Congratulations. Thank you highly successful Jeff Passenday Broke some news stories a lot of talks about that and your dog Maisie has some terrible farts He's growing. She's growing thought yesterday. We last night.   She's just been farting.  No, I'm kind of not really a win It's not really a win what happened in the sports world Jake we had some interesting news James in the sports Albert pool hosts arguably the best right-handed hitter of all time He goes to the Los Angeles Dodgers Crosstown from the Angels a horrible franchise to the Dodgers a very well-earned franchise. Oh How about that doesn't have to travel far our good guy Jake here had it on episode of talking baseball He said maybe the Chris Rose. I'm Trevor Ploof.  It's actually kind of a simple formula pool still crushes lefties The Dodgers kind of struggle versus lefties this year the Dodgers as a team are hitting I Don't know I had it. They're not hitting well versus lefties pools crushes lefties Max Muncie can slide over to second base put pools at first base versus lefties because noisy Lux McKinsey haven't really been getting it done And then you have the slowest right side of the infield in the history of baseball But they're mashing and taking walks Jim This is Sandoval when the playoffs come around if you want to start Albert for two at bats Where's the left-hand starting pitcher and then sub him out cool or he pitch hits against the lefty. That's it This is fun. This is good. And I read that Placido Polanco is part of the is that the right name as part of the Dodgers and he's like Paul's best friend So if it is Placido Polanco is one of the best heads ever ever ever Zach just put up just as That sucks for Zach. He's got to do that. Are we doing this? Are we just going I guess so well Well, he was a chugging race dug out mugs Does Zach time us or anything? Do you want me to put a timer on Zach's putting the timer on three two one? start I Think I beat him in the table. It was a dub. Is that sink water that tastes awful. Yeah, why'd you why didn't you use the good water? Thank You dug out mugs Code dumb Jake next segment we do is called tape on that I think I hit Jimmy the next segment is almost a breakdown. This is a fun one. Tim. We're leaving baseball We're going to basketball the nets had a play that looks like when you and your buddies are hanging out in the pool And you say alright, I'm gonna throw it here. You're gonna tip it there You're gonna tip it there you're gonna tip it there and then we're slam it in and there's some accidents made along The way but the group of a friends persevere which makes the celebration even that much better, right when you do it perfect You're like, okay Well, now we're just dude perfect and we did something we practice when there's like a slight miss bounces off the dog Yeah, yeah, so that's what happens I think the best part you noted this first time you saw it the calves played along Yeah, so normally the opposing team wouldn't be involved in this at all, but they got in the mix They started yeah, they batted lead off the calves started. We're gonna bounce it around No one actually hot potato. We're a hot potato this no one grab it and then Blake Griffin had the actual most skilled Scoop behind the back toss. That was awesome. So really cool play that was talking nets check out talking nets Let's go to more sports. Jake. We got a story here. That is Interesting Jim this is close to home for you a pitcher's arm was stolen out of his back seat of his car What Jimmy? Yes, Parker Hansen college baseball player woke up discovered his backpack was missing a thief walked in stole his backpack It had his prosthetic arm in there. He's Jim Abbott. He's a pitcher. He's got one arm Throw-in catching Perseverent overcoming. I didn't realize he went to Augustana. Yeah, and you know, that's your favorite band. Yes Oh Maybe it's the opposite. Yeah, so he goes to Augustana Jim Where did they find this arm in it in his backpack? Oh, no And then the thieves found it and just threw it in the recycling plant So then the guy was doing a second plan was like, hey, I think I found your arm I will I want mic'd up conversation with the thieves when they go through the backpack What we get what we get and they're like my question was gonna be fair or foul by the thieves because okay You've stolen something and you find an arm in there. Yeah, do you go to the recycling plant? Is it do you just like kind of put it in a lost and found the thieves are definitely like though We didn't steal his arm. We want the arm.  Oh, I do. Oh, yeah Yeah, I just realized that that's what you meant when you throw it to me Yeah, I have a mannequin hand in my glove compartment have had it since high school cop pulled me over one time and He opened my I opened my glove apartment. There's a hand in there He like reached for his gun and I was like, oh, dude, that's just a mannequin hand Be cool about it.   Your name's not but fucker 3000 So your name isn't but fucker 3000 and the guy's like He had no idea what was going on Be cool, man. What did you hear about me like what what common parking ticket?  Yeah inside Joe I'm embarrassed. I'm sorry and the judge just hits him with a well. You should be Sit me here next to Britney Spears our employee of the week goes to Mr. Nolan we're a high school social studies teacher taught us everything we know we tortured him We both emailed him because we wanted him to come on a show because Almost all of our good memories in high school come from mr. Nolan's class and he got back to us Which makes him an employee here and he said Don't want to come on your show. I will thanks for reaching out. Thanks for reaching out. No interest Please don't email me ever again. He didn't say that but he said that Felt You guys send me two emails after I didn't respond to the first one Yeah, and now I'm responding to say like there better not be a third and no I don't want to come on your show that old stories from JJ R if you haven't checked that out go check it out But yeah, it was kind of like a whole like he could have came back with one cheeky like oh, yeah I remember this day that was pretty wild and it was just like no I put you in that my rear of you Please stop you email me you guys ruin my life for a year Go back to 2004 look at us now Pat Ha, ha, ha get him with some Jada Today's program was brought to you by dugout mugs They now have the dugout mugs early bird Father's Day sale happening now first 500 orders with the code dumb Get you 35% off all MLB dugout mugs Click the link below and use code dumb for 35% off a dugout mug of your choice Where did I see this tweet and I'm trying to find it now Plus your Planco hell yeah works with the Dodgers front office pulls best closest friends in baseball I nailed it memory of a genius


Hello everyone, please if you can hear us, please just write a message just to check that you can hear us so that we can get started Oh, we can so I thought yeah great. Okay, cool Very sorry about that delay. Thank you all very very much for waiting We just had a few technical difficulties and our side and as someone rightly commented We're doing the sound logo masterclass and obviously we wanted to make sure that the sound was working and it was all good to go So yeah, let's get straight into it because I'm conscious that we're running slightly behind So welcome everyone. I'm just clicking my clicker to the right slide my Clicker now doesn't want to work connection loss Sorry everyone. Okay. Here we go. So yeah, welcome everyone. Sorry about all of this We are here to do the masterclass in music production of sound logos And I'm sure you all know by now that next month we'll be launching We can make a Wikimedia's global sound logo contest, which we're really really looking forward to So as Wikimedians, we wanted to give you the first glimpse of the project and give you the essential information And the knowledge and skills that you would need to know to be able to create your own sound logo entry and to enter the contest And I meet the team so we are music And we are a global creative music agency founded just over 20 years ago And we deliver everything that a brand could need within the world of music voice and sound and one of those things is Sonic branding which you'll hear more about during this presentation and a huge part of sonic branding and a fundamental part of it are sound logos as Well, and so more personally, I'm Emma and I'm an accountant project manager in our London office And my conversations with the Wikimedia foundation started probably just over a year ago on this project And it's been really amazing to learn so much about the movement and all the amazing work that you do So it's been a real honor and privilege to be working on it And I'm really excited to be sharing our work some of our work with you today So I'll just pass over to Joe quickly so you can do a quick intro Thanks Emma I'm not sure if it's just me, but I'm getting quite a bit of feedback on the When you're speaking it's kind of doubling up so I'm not sure if there's anything we can do about that Yeah, it's the same for me. Actually. I haven't heard anyone else speak, but I'm getting the same issue Joe I'm not sure who can ask about that Yeah, just Hopefully the studio manager can join and help fix it. It's good to know the chat can hear us clearly It's slightly distracting To present when it's the audio is doubling up so hopefully we can Maybe we can just continue if it's okay for everyone else and we can just persevere Joe or a few I don't know on your settings on the left. There's different input and output. I don't know if you click Emma, I'm not sure I can hear you now. Are you still getting the feedback Joe? How's I can't hear you either Are you back? I was just wondering, um, yeah, if you could just I think there's a bit of feedback coming up When we all speak and then I couldn't hear Joe or Taz just then You still getting feedback Joe Oh, yeah, a little bit. It's very quiet and someone's just said they can't hear me speaking anymore Sorry Stella's just said it Joe if you can push through With echo that'd be great because I think it's coming through great on youtube and also in feedboot So if you could Shall we Joe can if you say something can be Okay, great. Well, if everyone can hear us, um Fine, then that's probably the main thing. Um, we're all doing individual slides So we could just go as is and not hear each other which is a bit of a shame But glad that you can all hear us. Um, let me just Message Joe and Taz um I can hear you now, Emma Okay, great Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, awesome. Do you want to push on Joe? It doesn't seem to be an echo now. I think everything is yeah. Yeah, that's yeah Let's go ahead. Thanks for everyone's patience. Um, yeah, so I'm Joe. I'm a senior creative strategist I've been working in sonic branding. Um, and making sound logos for years and years now. Um, so yeah, it's good to be here Great. Thank you. Um, thanks everyone for waiting again. Um, yeah, let's get into the presentation and get started So Yes, so first thing we wanted to do is go through a bit of a basic audio terminology So give you some of the musical language of terms that we often use day to day and that become useful for you whilst entering the contest So the first thing we want to look at is track. So track is essentially a long form piece of music So it's anything from a one-minute pop song or it could be something much longer It could be a symphony or an opera Or also what we're going to be looking at today are sound logos Which are much much shorter and they're usually just between one and four seconds long Next we have keys. So major and mine you may have heard of these before They're fundamental when it comes to talking about music and music itself So we use major and minor keys for our chords scales notes and key signatures And I think for the purposes of this masterclass and for you to understand It is and recognize the difference between major and minor is to think about if you're listening to a piece of music And it sounds happy or bright and its emotion feels like that and it's probably in a major key And if something sounds a bit more sad or melancholy, it's often in a minor key And we've got two examples for you now of a major key and then a minor key Unfortunately, I couldn't hear those examples Please write in the comments if you could hear those examples. Hopefully you heard them They were working just before Oh, okay, great. Well, okay, perfect. Let's just carry on if you could hear them. That's the main thing Okay, great. So next up we have got tempo and speed So when we're thinking about music all pieces of music has a tempo And so Italian as I'm sure in Italian as I'm sure some of you know That is of course the word for time and we're talking about the pace and the speed of the piece of music Usually we measure this in beats per minute or bpm But often we also describe a piece of music as being either up tempo or down tempo So we've got two examples for you now one is a piece of music that's up tempo So it's faster in pace and one is down tempo. So it's a bit slower in pace. So we'll play those for you now slower, hopefully the last one finished and so Next up we have instruments and timbres. So Instruments are our tools that we need to be able to create music So it's anything from a piano an oud or even our voices our voices are fantastic instruments when it comes to creating music And also with instruments you have the difference between real instruments and synthesized instruments So when we're talking about real instruments, we're thinking of live instruments or acoustic instruments And if you're going to be creating music We'd quite often record a live musician playing that instrument and then use it within your composition or your piece of music And then also we have electronic instruments, which are synthesized instruments Also, we've got Bring from instruments we've got timbre as well and timbre is essentially the the characteristics of the sound So you could have two instruments playing exactly the same note On exactly the same for the exactly same length of time But because their timbre has a different feel or tone It sounds different. So that's for instance why you might choose one instrument over the other because of the different feel that it gives Um, I'm just checking you can all hear. Yep, everyone can still hear great good Um, just attacking that Joe and Taz can hear me. Sorry about this everyone um Okay, yeah, great. Um, okay, perfect. Um, I think For the purposes of making sure we can get through to the main bit of this This presentation I think I might push through these next few slides Just to make sure that Joe can get through the essential bit of why you're all here in the music production So, um, there is going to be a glossary that's sent around after this that we've already written that has these key terms on there So you won't miss out and we can send the examples as well. Um, but I'm just going to skip through them quickly I'll pass over to you Joe Okay, great. Thanks, Emma. Um, I hope everyone can hear me clearly. Um, so now we're going to talk about sound logos in particular So where does it all begin? Well sound logos have been around for Years and years and years, um originating back in the 1920s with wheaties Famous wheaties jingle Was used widely on the radio And really kick started, uh, the sort of jingle boom when people saw how effective it was Um, this continued up into about the sort of mid 1990s really for saturation points And that's when the the jingle kind of became a Cheesy um thing to use so brands kind of started to shy away from that But then what took over was technology. Um, you can see the Nokia classic phone there And the Nokia ringtone really became a big part of culture. Um, people realized that sound could be in your pocket Um and technology was a really good vessel for carrying sound and music. Um, and this is what we call The the audio and revolution really starting, um at this point So now we're in an audio driven world When you think about podcasts when you think about sound on platforms like tiktok or when you think about, uh In home devices like uh, there's amazon device here voice activation We are living in a sound on on world and that's why audio branding and sound logos are especially important. Um in this day and age We have a nice stat here, um about sound and how people react to it So people react to sound 17 faster than they react to visuals. Uh, this is from the university of gongan And yeah, it's a really insightful statistic to show you how powerful sound can be when it's used. Um in a branding application So why do we want to use a sound logo? Well sound operates directly on our subconscious So it's a really effective way to modulate emotions We react really emotionally to sound, you know, whether that's the sound of your mother's voice or, you know, the sound of Uh, a song we used to listen to you when you're a teenager Um, and you hear that again at any point in your life. There's a deep emotional connection created there Um, so yet the right sound logo will add significant emotional depth to how The wikimedia movement really is perceived So we have some examples of sound logos here Um, and really there are two schools of thoughts. Um, in a very simplistic way So firstly we have what we'd call a melodic logo. Um, this is a sound logo that contains a melody Something that you kind of replicate you could sing you could hum So let's have a listen to an example of a melodic sound logo now So you can hear clearly that melody there playing in that short form sound logo Alternatively, we have what we'd call an atonal logo and this is where the melody is removed and really we're relying on Kind of timbre and sound design elements to create the sound logo. So let's have a listen for that So there we go. There's two examples of what we could do with sound logos But obviously this is very very top line and there's a lot of detail you can go into One other part of this process process, which is really important is the idea of storytelling through the sound So why is storytelling important with this project? Well, what it means is it gives your sound logo a unique identity So we can translate the wikimedia movement's values into the sound by doing this And what this does is it helps make your sound logo more individual and have greater meaning You could have picked any of those logos that we just heard to represent the wikimedia movement But actually they have no relations to the wikimedia movement. There's no story there So we're asking why is that logo the one that we're going to use So we've got an example of a Concept really a story. We've we've created a fictional non-profit news organization called the optimist and the optimist share only good and positive news headlines through their app And their online publication So if you imagine this brand exists the brief for the optimist sound logo could be how to capture the sound of optimism And positivity and sound. So what does optimism and positivity sound like in music? Maybe it's the major scale as we heard earlier or maybe it's all bright sounds So there's a few different solutions that you could have to this brief If we go on to the next slide, we can see some of these so perhaps we could use a sound that Moves upwards in pitch or in volume. So some kind of rises up sort of suggesting that positive outlook Or perhaps it could be an angelic sound that also feels digital So the reason for that is we've got to remember that the optimist are an app. They're an online publication So the kind of uh juxtaposing an angelic human sound was something that maybe feels a bit more relevant So to where they live And then lastly an open free guitar strum in a major keys So a really simple way of distilling happiness and optimism in music there. So let's have a listen to these Here's the first example a rising sound moves upwards in pitch or volume So we get a simple sound there. What about the angelic sound that also feels digital? Let's have a listen to that So you can hear that angel there, but also this kind of digital sound underneath it And then lastly an open free guitar strum in a major key So that's all coming through clearly some just three simple examples of how to bring that brief for the optimist to life in music And this is similar to what we're going to be doing for the wikimedia movement of this project So now we have to look at music production and give you a little overview on that This is how we create the sounds that we're hearing This is it's really important to kind of get some knowledge on this Some of you might know some about this already. Some of you not So we're going to keep it very top line for this presentation So firstly, let's have a look at the tools that we can use to produce music Really on a computer There are a few different options that we're including in this presentation and these are all freely available options We have ableton live lights Audacity, which is an open source piece of software waveforms traction Pro Tools first and qbase le so these are all available for free to download and they have different kind of Styles really It's up to you which one you choose for this presentation. We're using ableton live lights It's something that we use our company a lot and it's a really good piece of software for getting really creative quite quickly with sound So moving on to our first step in the production process. We're going to talk about recording Recording is a vast complex subject But today we're going to distill it down to two really simple ideas. The first one is microphones And the second one is midi So microphones I'm sure a lot of you know what a microphone is or maybe you've used a microphone before If you use zoom or online meetings in any way, you definitely will abuse the microphone But this is how we translate acoustic sound in an environment into digital data essentially We can record what we're saying or what the hearing or an instrument and then that will be rendered in Our music production software of choice Then we also have midi midi is a Digital language essentially where we can program notation into our door our audio workstation And this can be played on different instruments You can select an instrument you like perhaps it's a piano Perhaps it's a kalimba and you can be really flexible with that information that you record So we've got two examples of these now the first one is microphones And this is a recording of me using ableton to simply record a finger switch. So let's have a look at that So there we are. That's me sat where I am now clicking my fingers into a microphone and recording it in ableton I now have that sound And the second example is me recording a simple white note scale in midi. So let's have a look at that So there we go that time the sound that's used as a piano But like I said, we could change that sound to anything you like the main thing is we've got that notation now And we can use that in many different really creative ways So now we're going to look at editing Um, there's again a big subject this but we're going to cut it down to these four areas Adjusting cutting copying and pasting. So, you know, we copy and paste all the time on computers Well, that's some word documents powerpoint presentations wherever it's the same with music and audio Um, so I think the best way to look at this is to look at an example of me doing some editing in ableton So if we can go to the next slide, you can have a look at that video and I can talk you through what's going on So here we are back in ableton What I'm going to do is I'm going to cut up my finger clicks that I recorded earlier So I'm just snapping your audio there Um, just at the start of those three clicks that I played in and what I'm going to do is I'm going to put these on the grid. So they're going to be in time They're going to be I'm going to drag them to a set tempo So they play as a pattern as a rhythmical pattern rather than a random pattern So you can see I'm moving them dragging them into place there I'm going to duplicate this last one and then I'm going to loop them and then we'll hear it So what was a random selection of clicks is now a very simple rhythm Um, and that's some kind of basic audio editing in in ableton Next up we have mixing Um mixing is how we start getting really creative with audio and how we start changing and transforming sounds that we have recorded Um five areas that we're looking at today are volume So how loud or quiet something is we're looking at eq which sounds for equalization Um, so this is how you sculpt sounds is how you remove or add frequencies to add more bass or add more more high end We have compression as well compression. Um is a tool which is essentially a way of automating volume over a period of time We have reverb which is how we give sounds a sense of space So you can make something sound like it's in a room or it's in a cathedral We can do that on a on a computer and then we have delay as well delay is the last piece And this is really like an echo essentially so a sound that repeats after you hear it So again, we have an example of these being used. Um back into ableton. Uh, let's have a look at what's going on So we have our clicks again, um that we snipped we snipped up just now So they're there. Um, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to eq some of the low end some of the bass out of these clicks So it's just a higher frequency sound So that's a higher frequency sound now. We've got rid of that bass I'm going to compress them so the volume is level over time Our rather than being as variable as it was Okay, now what I'm going to do I'm going to add some reverb. So I'm going to give it a sense of place I'm going to put it in like a hole So you can see that sort of has more of a hole and more of an acoustic environment around it And now you've got delay So you can see I'm giving a sound an echo there So what was a simple finger click has transformed into something with more interest Um and more of a story to tell essentially So now let's look at the wikimedia sound logo And and what we're doing uh with that So some of the objectives that we have for this project I don't know if you could skip on the slide that would be great Yep, so the objectives are to feature proof wikimedia for audio and new platforms like we saw earlier With amazon Alexa and things like that want to create this positive sentiment around the wikimedia movement Want to invite a global audience to engage with the wikimedia movement and its projects So what's the brief for this we saw our brief for our imaginary brand earlier But now we've got a real one for wikimedia So we want to create a sound logo it should be between one and four seconds in length Format wise we're looking for delivery of a WAV file an mp3 file or an ogg We'd like to use original sounds or the clear samples that have been provided for you The logo should contain multiple layers textures and sounds to create some kind of some story and to make kind of interesting The sound should also be global and not pertain to one particular culture or style because we want to represent the wikimedia movement So we want to represent something that feels sort of culturally and generally agnostic And we don't want to pertain to one place more than other want to be global in how we represent this So likewise for our pretend brief we have some creative prompts for the wikimedia sonic sonic logo So why we should do is imagine the sound of connections forming of question and answer of trusted information Free and open knowledge or knowledge growing and what I'd like to do is I'd like you to pick one of these to start with So think about how we could represent one of these ideas in the sound Just in the same way that we represent positivity with a big bright guitar strum How might we represent some of these ideas in sound? So we've got some examples. Let's have a listen to what connections forming could potentially sound like So an interesting sound there lots of different layers It kind of has two parts, but it also has these sort of percussive elements that to me feel like they're kind of Talking or forming or you know becoming something that's bigger than just their individual parts Next up we have question and answer. So let's have a listen to that So a logo there really of two parts this You know, you can get the sense of this question being asked and then the sound resolving and answering that question And lastly we have trusted information. So let's see what that sounds like So warm grounded sound there nothing to kind of out the box or too surprising. It feels very kind of calm Very trusting and very pure as well So that's just some examples of what these could be. Obviously, we want to look at some tonal prompts too So how the logo should feel when you're thinking about actually creating the sounds and the timbres So we want it to be human inspired smart and warm as a starter And we want to make sure we avoid things that feel too technological or cold or synthetic or aggressive You know, we want to make sure we're sticking on that human kind of real sound So we've got some examples of creating some of these logos now The first one we're going to look at is this idea of knowledge growing So for this we're going to go back into ableton and I'm going to make a very quick logo Around this idea of knowledge growing. So let's have a look So what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag in my my finger snaps again. They're being reused And I'm going to line these up on the grid like we did in the editing sequence And just to make sure they're in time with one another So as you can see I'm cutting out the audio deleting it and then duplicating So three very very faint finger clicks Um, but I want them to be slower than that. So I'm going to add some more space between them And I'm going to automate the volume so they gradually get louder over time So there you get in here Gradually getting louder. I'm going to add some midi in here. So add a melodic tone So a little jojo bell there instrument I'm using and I'm going to do is with this midi notes that I've recorded I'm going to line it up with those finger snaps So they'll be playing at the same time as one another kind of add another layer to that sound So that jojo goes playing in time now, which is great And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a human layer So I've got this kind of chatter sample that I've found Of people kind of talking in a room They turn the volume up on that slightly and I'm going to put that underneath everything I'm going to also automate the volume on that to rise It's a little bit too quiet for me though that chatter sample. I can't really hear it So I'm going to turn the volume up a bit more So I hope you can hear that kind of just underneath there Um, and I believe that's it for for that logo. Um, we can hear it on the next slide, um in full Sorry, just picking up the connection again There we are. Um, just a question. Do we want to Try and use some time for questions or should I continue with the the next example Taz? Um, do you think? Can you hear me now? Yes, yes, let's go with the next example for sure Great, okay So we've got one more example for you of a logo being created And this is the idea of connections forming So let's go in and see what we can do with this So back into Ableton and I've got the sample that's from the the library that's been provided to you It's a sound on a kitchen clock But the first thing I'm going to do is record some million. So I've recorded kind of like a An african instrument there and I've played a chord in on On Ableton there and what I've done is I've used an arpeggiator to kind of make them And though it's run through rather than have solid chord being played I'm going to do is just align that midi up so it comes in at the right time Just clean that clip up there And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to automate a parameter on the instrument that makes it more bright Over time. So last time we did volume this time we're going to make it sound brighter as it plays through So I'm just automating that parameter now. You can see there So you can see that that sounds just growing and opening up as we move through now. I'm taking my sample At the kitchen clock, but what I want to do is I want to speed it up slightly So the the second hands tick more quickly. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to warp this sample on Ableton Which is a slightly advanced technique right speed it up And now I'm going to lay that Again, that's a little bit quiet for me. So I'm going to turn it up in volume so I can hear it I'm also going to add some reverb So there we go. That's kind of coming together a little bit now But what I also want to do is automate the volume on that and Shelf out some of that low end to remove some of the bass from the sound Okay, and I'm also going to add a compressor to level out the volume of the clips Okay, so we're going to starting to come together again now But I want to make some more movement on our on our african sound there So I'm going to add a filter that sweeps over the frequencies As we play through the sound to give us a more movement So you can hear it's opening up a little bit there and we've created more of a An in-depth logo that has more layers. I know there's a little bit more complex So let's have a listen to that logo in full So clearly they were both made very quickly So you can spend so much more time on them than I have there But it does give you a good idea of, you know, how you make these how you start to build Music using using different techniques and different ways of recording as well So I believe that means we've come to the end of the presentation and we've got some time for questions If there are any Yeah, please feel free to just write them in the comments and thank you again all for for sticking around Sorry about those technical difficulties we had at the beginning, but yeah We've got a few more minutes just to answer any questions you've got And I also think Taz was updating some useful info about where you can find more about the contest on the chat So hopefully you've seen all of that Yeah, I've put some info in the chat I just want to say thanks very much to Emma and Joe for a great presentation Presentation will be available on commons Soon after Wikimania so everyone everyone can review And pause at their leisure and have a go at making some great cell logos just some information for everyone In case they didn't see the chat or on youtube They weren't able to either just to let everyone know The sound logo contest will launch on september the 13th And in the meantime, you should definitely familiarize yourself with the contest page That link is in the chat Also, we have five community liaisons that are working with the sound logo project team You can get hold of them and the sound logo project team at sound logo one word At wikimedia.org So we Myself and my three colleagues on the project team Mototo Mardad and Lena will be checking out that email address And we'll be forwarding on to the liaisons as well There's also a great collaboration space called the sound lab Where you'll be able to kind of get creative share thoughts And work with other Wikimedians as well If you have a concept and you're not really sure how to create it or develop it We'll be offering workshops Soon after wikimedia as well a bit closer to the contest So feel free to show your thoughts via that email That I gave you sound logo at wikimedia.com and lastly we're looking for Volunteers to join our screening team. So the screening team will be reviewing sound logo submissions as they come in. So they'll be mostly reviewing them for technical Factors like length and file type file size length vandalism things like that If you're interested, we'd love to hear from you. Please Get hold of us at the email sound logo at wikimedia.org to join the screening team as well Just checking if we've got any questions I'll hand back to Emma and Joe Just to see if there's any questions if not Yep, we do have a question from Ludovic who said Already asked in q&a but in case this doesn't get across how much uniqueness and originality Do we need for a sound logo in sort of legal and practical terms? So As part of the contest you can create sound logos Either using completely original sounds or you've also got the copyright free samples that are available to you in the sound bank So We obviously understand that within music you're not going to know every single piece of music in the entire world But you need to either make sure that any sample you're using is completely copyright free Or to very much the best of your knowledge. It isn't The same or very similar to something that you already know that exists So yeah, we encourage quite unique and original concepts or not concepts original ideas for those sound logos Hopefully that helps answer your question But there'll be more about it on the sort of FAQ sections of the contest platform as well Um, where can I get the tools to make the sound logos? So the list of Free production platforms that we shared today Will be I think if you google them or search them online You'll be able to find them very easily and they are all free to use But you are welcome to use any other music platform production platform that you know of If you prefer to do that then then go for it And that list will be available on the contest platform as well Is there any other questions I don't Think I can see any other questions. Probably got one more minute if anyone has any anything else I think that's probably it then and we are just about out of time. So yeah, thank you everyone Thanks so much for for sticking around to the end of this Masterclass hope you found it useful And yeah, we're really looking forward to this contest and looking forward to hearing your submissions and hopefully meeting you again Throughout the process and whether it's in the workshops or otherwise But yeah, thank you very much and thanks Taz and the sound logo team and and yes everyone and thanks Joe Thanks everyone Thanks Emma. Thanks Joe take care everyone