The Alumni Are Coming!

Hey all!

So as I promised, we wanted to showcase a few of the alumni that will be here soon for The COMMference! We're really excited about the variety of alum we were able to find to participate in this event. We'll start off with Sarah Moore from Arnold, Missouri.

Sarah graduated from Truman with a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and an emphasis in Journalism in 2010. Dr. Yaquinto has stayed in contact with her since she graduated. Sarah was very eager to come back and help us out. Since the start of this, she has been so helpful and responsive. It has been great knowing that she has been excited about this just as much as we have.

I don't want to give everything away about her, but I will share a little teaser with you. After she graduated she took a position with the Webster Groves-Shrewsbury Area Chamber of Commerce as their communication coordinator. She was promoted after six months as the interim president and chief executive officer. Such an opportunity for a recent graduate! She currently works as a hospital administrator in Arnold, Missouri. In addition to working, she volunteers for various non-profits.

In just a few years, Sarah has become very successful. I am interested in hearing more about the job transitions and how her Communication degree helped her get her to where she is today. Well, just a sneak peek for now! You will just have to come to The COMMference in a few weeks to find out more about her.

Have a good rest of the weekend and as always let us know if you have any questions :)

COMM COMM COMM COMM COMM CHAMELEON: Choosing colors

After creating the logo the next step was choosing the colors. While this may seem like a trivial part of the design process (I mean come on, how many color combinations can there be), it ended up being one of the more difficult tasks. 

Sara and I started with colors we liked and disliked. We thought we wanted to stay away from purple because of the excess of Truman purple on EVERYTHING. We started by looking at the website Design Seeds which features color schemes based on photos. If you are a design/color nerd like me, watch out, this site is addicting. 

After looking through pages and pages of beautiful photos, we found a few color schemes we liked. We began choosing mostly cool (blue and green) colored things that focused on one specific color palette, staying away from girlie pinks and purples. 

Once we found the colors we wanted we had to create them in InDesign. Each color is coded by a hex code or a 6 letters and numbers that stand for the components of a specific color.  Every color is made of up of different percentages of red, green and blue (web/screen design) or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (print design). I copied the hex codes from Design Seeds and then applied them to our logo.

We didn’t have much success directly copying the color schemes, so we moved on to choosing one color and then going to this website to create our own palette. 

Eventually we found a group of colors that we thought looked well together and wasn’t too heavily focused on any one color. Here are a few of our color choices...

 After looking at all of these (plus more) we picked the last one (as you can see by the completed logo at the top of this blog). We thought it showed a nice array of simple colors while accenting the Truman purple as the core of the C. 


-Carrie


ps. If there is something you want to know about the visual side of the event, leave a comment and I'll blog about it!


pps. Thanks to Blaise H-S for the name of my blog, she submitted it as a potential name for the COMMference and I took it...

Alumni Panel

Another week has gone by, which means another week closer to The COMMference! I can't believe how fast time is flying. Now, as I promised: a little more about our alumni.

Our goal was to bring back a variety of alumni. We wanted to cover all of the tracks that we study here in Communication. Our only issue is we had no idea where to start. Thankfully, Dr. Yaquinto and Dr. Clark were willing to help and knew where to send us. Carrie and I were very eager to get started and contact a lot of Communication alumni. We figured we might as well contact as many as we could. I think the number ended up being close to 15 people. I'm glad we did it this way because we heard back from more people than we expected, which of course was only a plus to our planning stages.

Once we heard back from those who were interested, we had to let them know the details, one of which included we are on a very limited budget. We thought this would be a hindrance for us in moving forward, but the alumni we have coming were very excited to work with us regardless of the limited funds available.

We're now in the stage of getting more details about our alumni and finalizing their trip here. They all seem very excited to see what the Communication department still offers and share their knowledge about what they have learned. Come back and visit the blog for more information on the alumni panel this week!

And we're still accepting submissions! Practice for upcoming projects or just help share your work with the younger Communication students. Whatever feels best to you-submit something!

Event Planning: The First Stages!

Hey, all!

Carrie was able to share with you a little bit more about her specialty in this process and now it’s my turn to elaborate. I first became interested in this event last year when Kelly Fox and Amanda Goeser created it. Carrie and I were their little minions and tried to help them as much as possible. That’s when we decided to take on the project ourselves for the following year.

Since starting my education at Truman I have realized how much I love event planning and every aspect that goes along with it. I wanted something that kept me busy and call me crazy, but that was in a high stress atmosphere as well. I hope to work as an event planner or something similar as soon as I graduate in May. I knew working with this for Communication students would give more experience in this field.

Over the course of our semester of planning, we have planned out week by week what we would like to do. Of course this has changed many times. Because we’ve changed our schedule so many times, it has helped remind us how flexibility is a key aspect of event planning. This aspect of planning an event can both be thrilling and stressful, but no matter what comes along, we have to deal with it in the best way we can.

We’re very excited to have such great alumni come back to Truman, but this has probably been one of the most difficult aspects of the process! The Truman alumni coming back are very successful and we’re thankful that they are taking time out of their schedules to share their expertise with us.  We’re going to start featuring who will make up our panel soon and I will be delving into the process of how we were able to bring the alumni to us in my next post.

We’re still taking submissions so make sure and submit something you have done in the Communication department. Have a good week and look forward to hearing from us on Wednesday!

A Glimpse Into the Process: Logo Design

When Sara and I sat down for our first meeting about the COMMference, we realized we had a lot of work ahead of us. We made an four month schedule and then realized what we needed first was new a name and then a new logo.

As a typeface obsessed, creative-type, wanna-be designer, I was given the second task.  My initial reaction was to freak out, obviously.  I have designed many posters, fliers and t-shirts but a logo, that’s serious work.

My only instructions were create something. I started my creative process by thinking of words that I wanted people to associate with the logo and with the event.

Bold

Modern

Simple

Connection

Identity

Communication

I doodled a few ideas and then headed to my favorite place on campus, the Mac lab. Every artist’s process is different but mine always starts with sketches (mostly during class, oops) and then lots of online research. I spend a lot of time perusing around design sites looking at color schemes, typefaces, business cards and logos.

I think the best logos are simple, distinct and find the essence of the message. I started looking at the letter C (for COMMference and communication) and thought about a way to break this up into parts.  These parts would symbolize the many facets of communication: student media, public relations, advertising, journalism, rhetoric and forensics.

I came up with six logo drafts and then discussed them with Sara and Dr. Y. We made a few minor changes to the one we all like the best (make the COMM capital instead of lowercase, adding the grammatical apostrophe) and then we had our logo.

But how did we choose what colors to use? Come back next week to find out…

Submissions!

Hey, everyone!

As we continue the planning process for the upcoming COMMference, this blog will be a way to stay connected with students and alumni, as well as a venue to display student work. We want to thank everyone who has already helped us in picking a name, especially Teresa Bradley for creating the winner. We’re excited to get started on the next phase of planning: submissions.

We need your help. We’re now accepting submissions for the presentation portion of the evening. This part focuses on exceptional student work since January 2011. These submissions can be papers, projects or presentations. Since only a limited amount of presentation spots are available, submissions will be selected on a first come-first served basis. We reserve the right to select the submissions to be presented based on the variety and need for the evening. Those that are not accepted for presentation at the April 21 event will be posted on our blog so others may still benefit from your hard work.

Guidelines for Submission:

1. All participants must be a communication major or minor or a member of Communication Department-related student organizations or affiliated media (Examples include: Ad&PR, Lambda Pi Eta, NCASC, National Broadcasting Society, Forensics, the Index, News36, Detours, and KTRM--The Edge).

2. All works submitted must have been completed at Truman after January 2011.

3. All works must be related to a Communication course or be affiliated with the above organizations that are affiliated with the Communication Department. 

4. Each student may make no more than two submissions.

5. Group projects must recognize the work of all members. If a project was produced by more than one student, all group members must consent to its submission. 

6. Each submission will be involved with The Commference in one of two ways:

- Formal Presentation at The Commference 

- Featured on The Commference blog 

7. Formal presentations must not exceed 10 minutes in length, and may include an excerpt and discussion of the submission. Examples might include showing clips of a news package, reading a passage from a course-related paper, or sharing a portion of a PowerPoint presentation.

8. All submissions must include two parts:

- Completion of submission form by Friday, March 23

- Electronic copy of work sent to thecommference@gmail.com 

Please go to the link above and submit something. Thanks!