Art and Design Portfolio – CedricHayes.com

Season Calendars for NMT PAS

Every year, a season calendar is published by New Mexico Tech Performing Arts Series to outline the upcoming performances and special events as well as recognize the sponsors that support NMT PAS. Every year the calendar is redesigned to keep it fresh and interesting; a handful of patrons have even started to collect the designs. I worked on the last 4 season calendar designs and the last 3 are shown here.

Ad Booklets for NMT PAS

Along with the season calendar, I also designed 3 of the last 4 Season Booklets that NMT PAS published. The booklets have the same theme as that year’s season calendar. They also provide important advertising revenue for NMT PAS. The booklets contain more detailed descriptions of that season’s performances and include ads and coupons for local businesses. Above are the pages from the 2018-2019 booklet. In addition to the booklets themselves, I created some of the ads in the booklets for businesses that did not have the means to design their own.

Posters, Print Ads, and other Advertising Material for NMT PAS

: iLuminate A Frame – part 2

: iLuminate A Frame – part 1

: iLuminate A Frame – part 4

: iLuminate A Frame – part 3

: Print Ad

: Phoebe Hunt A Frame – part 1

: Phoebe Hunt A Frame – part 4

: Phoebe Hunt A Frame – part 3

: Phoebe Hunt A Frame – part 2

: Computer Ad

: Print Banner

: Poster

: Poster

: Print Banner

: Computer Display

: Print Banner

: Poster

: Poster

: Computer Ad

: Poster

: Computer Ad

: Poster

: Poster

: Print Banner

: Poster

: Print Ad Insert

: Monthly Ad

: Monthly Ad

: Monthly Ad

During my time at NMT PAS, I designed almost all of the advertising material for their shows. This included posters, large banners, print ads, ads for computer displays, A-Frames, and the occasional billboard for each individual show. Similarly, I designed monthly newspaper and electronic ads for the upcoming set of shows in the season.

Achievement Badges for CLASS Department

I was hired by the Communication, Liberal Arts, and Social Sciences Department at NMT to design badges that reflect student achievement in an English class with the goal of improving student engagement and motivation. The above images are the designs I created for the specified 4 levels of progress as well as an icon to represent a missing badge.

Sponsorship Brochure for NMT SAE Mini Baja Team

During my time at New Mexico Tech I was approached by the NMT Society of Automotive Engineers Mini Baja Team to design a small pamphlet to generate more sponsorship revenue for the team. I worked with the team lead to create the color scheme, text, and layout for the pamphlet. The pamphlet was designed so that it could easily be printed on standard sized paper with minimal trimming and so that it could be used as presentation slides.

Designing Environments and Directing Attention in Games Presentation

: Game designers can’t build everything into their games. So they need to have tools and techniques they can use to guide players through the environments that they do build and not notice how limited the virtual world actually is.

: There are some simple design techniques that game makers employ to guide your eye. Guiding lines draw the eye from one point to another. In the image above, the primary guiding line the trail leading from where the player is standing to the tower on the hill. High contrast areas and light draw the players attention. Lighted areas also tend to attract players, especially in dark environments. Frames and portals focus your attention by limiting what you can see. In this example the tower is framed by the trees to focus attention on the player’s goal of reaching the tower.

: Movement and sounds attract players attention and entice them to investigate. Usually sounds are used to draw players into an area, and movement is used to focus a players attention on spot where the action is happening. In the game “Firewatch” the player is sent out to find people who are using fireworks in the forest. The light and sound of the fireworks and music playing leads the player to the general area, and the movement of the people pinpoint their location when the player is in the right area. Unlike sounds and movement, signs are non-event based ways of guiding players. They are always there and serve as reliable navigation tools for players.

: Portals frame a scene and focus the eye on a key area of the screen. This is a technique that is used a lot in architecture. By masking out some of the environment, designers can frame a particular scene or objective that they want the player to see.

: You have likely encountered a door before that you knew you shouldn’t or couldn’t opened. In the real world, this is usually accomplished with signs. But unlike in the real world, in games most doors don’t open simply because the environment behind them hasn’t been built. However, designers can’t simply put signs on all of the doors because it would break the illusion of the virtual world they built. So designers have to find other ways to show that a door can or cannot be opened. A few ways of accomplishing this are to cover unopenable doors with foliage or other obstructions, texture openable doors with a lighter color than unopenable doors, put lights near openable doors, and give openable doors more detail than unopenable ones.

: “While developing the new theme park Walt remembered that he could lead the dog wherever he wanted with a “weenie”, so this is the term he coined for describing to his Imagineers how to get the guests to go to certain places and directions.” Weenies are typically large pieces of architecture that dominate the skyline. They provides an ever present and enticing end goal in the distance. Because weenies are so identifiable and are almost always visible they are used as points to orient oneself with.

: One of the most unique things about games is that how you interact with a game defines how you see your environment. For example, the primary game mechanic in “The Witness” is drawing lines to solve puzzles, like the orange puzzles on the left. And after a while of solving the puzzles that you are supposed to progress in the game, you start to see puzzles in other parts of the environment. Perhaps after a while of walking past a tree you see that the branches line up with the background lighting in such a way that that it kinda looks like the puzzles you have been solving. So you draw a line to complete the puzzle and tada! You unlocked another path! This kind of interaction makes it possible to redefine how a player sees their environment and can lead to eye opening moments where they realize the potential of the environment they are in.

One of the presentations I gave at NMT was on the tricks and design techniques that game developers use to make game worlds feel larger than they actually are. This presentation was given to the Design for Innovation class to highlight the design innovations in environment design.