Perpetual Rhythms • Senior Capstone
Herron School of Art & Design
Senior Capstone is focused on "capping" off your undergraduate career with one semester long project. For this project, I was able to choose a Problem Space I was super passionate about. Below is my journey and process as well as final deliverables for my Visual Communication Design Senior Capstone.
Problem Space & Justification
During my senior capstone, we were told to pick something that we were passionate about and solve a problem within that passion. One of my many passions is music and performance arts. I'm a huge advocate for the education world because of the impact it has had on myself and my students.
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During this time we had to frame the problem by conducting our own primary and secondary research. Since I am an educator myself, I used my own experience and the experiences of my colleagues to form the problem space. Take a look at the prototyping document below. This helps define the problem space through research. It justifies the problem, outlines the solution, and shows an analysis of the landscape.
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Music and performance educators lack the support and resources they need to succeed at educating their students. Thus more time is focused on getting what they need rather than educating their students.
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First comes defining the problem space and next comes proposing the solution. My proposed solution to this problem is Perpetual Rhythms. Perpetual Rhythms is a consulting group that helps music and performance arts educators. They assess and help each program get the support and resources they need for them to excel.
Prototyping & Branding
Alright you are probably wondering where the I got the name Perpetual Rhythms from. Don't worry, I will get there now. After a long week of brainstorming and asking people what names they liked best, I was able to narrow it down. For some reason Perpetual Rhythms kept standing out more than the others. I liked the idea of the name having a similar meaning with the impact I wanted the business to have on the educators and their programs but there was something more about this. After thinking a bit more, I realized why I was so drawn to the name. I had subconsciously put together those two words because it was the name of my first ever performance in color guard. Nostalgia flooded me at that moment and I knew I had to go with this. It was the show that started it all. The show that changed my life.
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Enough with the sappy, I began branding as soon as I had the name in mind. I won't go into the nitty-gritty details but you can find everything about my process below. To give a synopsis, I went through three prototyping phases with the same three people in each. I gave then choices on logo design, typography pairing with that logo, and color studies for the brand and logo. I even came up with an interesting way to make the prototyping more tactile to the users.
Branding + Identity
After all the prototyping I soon refined everything and came up with my final logo mark. You can read more about my process below in my thesis document. This outlines my process during the whole capstone but also focuses on other parts of the brands.
Dan's Experience
On top of the identity, I was able to create a mock experience of an educator using Perpetual Rhythms. Between researching and brainstorming, I was able to define the best process Perpetual Rhythms could use for their clients. Below is an User Experience Map that I created to visually represent the process.
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Essentially, Dan's problem is that the parents and students have an inaccurate representation with his programs. As a result he feels like his programs are suffering. Perpetual Rhythms helps Dan through this by created a set of materials he can use to help with his problem.
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Feel free to use your arrow keys on the PDF to go through the Experience Map.
Information Packet
Part of the Perpetual Rhythm's solution for Dan was to create an informational packet of all the programs and their information for students. This would be a booklet given out to help with the misunderstanding. View it below. Understand that to save space, I saved them as spreads rather than individual pages.
Audition Folder & Packet
The audition folder and packet is aimed at making sure parents and students understand the roles and responsibilities of the program the student is auditioning for. It also helps the parents and students understand the audition process. It also includes a letter from the director of the program.
Implementation & Research Guide
This is aimed at making sure the educator is knowledgeable on the problem that exists at his or her school. This also talks about the solution that Perpetual Rhythms has proposed. This can be used to help keep track of data as well.