Working With People Who Have Actual Artistic Talent

I'm no artist. Composing concepts is one thing, but execution? Not so much. Give me three hours and no distractions, and I can just barely sketch a leaf halfway-decently from life, though the shading will probably be way off. Drawing from imagination is utterly pointless, because proportions are hard and perspective is out to get me. And finally, I don't have the dedication to work hard and learn those skills; unlike artists, I give up instead of practicing.

UMBC's IRC Fellows, on the other hand, know enough about visuals and how to produce them to base their studies and future careers on them. The Visual Arts IRC Fellowships are designed for people with outstanding computer graphics skills. Sometimes, that means that they create things like the visual effects in this 2009 theater performance, "The Crystal Egg":

We, of course, need them for a more prosaic purpose. As this urbantells.net blog post by Prof. Steve Bradley shows, the IRC Fellows will be working with us on creating a cohesive visual aesthetic and specific images to associate with and represent this project. (Yeah, I think that sounds much nicer than "branding".) Some of the t-shirt concepts they've worked up so far are in that blog post. They're all really lovely and worth checking out; it's just cool for me to see them in progress.

Logo and image design, I think, is slightly sexier than copy editing, but still an aspect of professional life many tend to overlook. The importance of projecting a clean, coherent image, like having copy that is correct and tonally appropriate, can make a huge difference in reception. That's not to say that people are shallow, or that you can't begin to operate without workers trained in those skills--rather, I mean that the public at large is just more likely to trust their time and money to operations that look interesting and "legit". Finding a way to create that gestalt, those icons and logos that can make up our project's conceptual visual identity, is a very strong step forward in our presentation to the public.