Jacob Feit Mann

Design Work

AVID Fitness - Branding and Website

AVID's greatest asset was its strong sense of community, so while we experimented with some pretty "out-there" ideas for the rebrand, the owner, Avi, and I decided on a new logo that kept some attributes of the old one, but with a more energetic and sleeker feeling.

Logo and Branding

AVID's greatest asset is its strong sense of community, so while we experimented with some pretty "out-there" ideas for the rebrand, the owner, Avi, and I decided on a new logo that kept some attributes of the old one, but with a more energetic and sleeker feeling.

Old logo

New logo

Website

avidstrong.com

I built AVID’s website with WordPress, using a theme called GoFiz. I customized the theme to fit the branding we had created in the first step, keeping in mind the themes of community, energy, and motivation which were core to the business.

AVID uses a software called MindBody which takes care of tracking customer information: class enrollments, payment info, etc. I customized MindBody’s web widgets to match the brand, and embedded them the HTML of the site.

Amoriem Labs - Logo and Branding

Amoriem Labs is the undergraduate game development club at Yale University. Before I was project manager as a junior, I started as a first-year designing logos and UI elements. Amoriem’s name comes from the first game produced by its members. From Amoriem’s website:

The name is an anagram of memoria ("memory" in Latin), and includes the words amor ("love" in Spanish) and mori ("to die" in Latin).”

While my design philosophy is usually about emphasizing aesthetics and tone over gimmicks and “visual puns”, I decided to go against that guideline in creating the symbol used in the logo. In the landscape orientation, it resembles the buttons and D-pad of a typical gamepad layout. When rotated to the portrait orientation, it resembles (albeit abstractly) a skull with a heart on the forehead - a nod to the etymology of the group’s name.

When choosing the brand colors, I first considered using Yale’s signature blue, but decided against it. Many clubs at Yale use those colors, so I figured that in order for our flyers and such to stand out, we would need to go a different route. I went with colors that were vibrant, exciting, and a bit unconventional to reflect the enthusiasm and slight avante-garde bent to the club’s game development ethos.

Since my time with the club, the logo has been updated and streamlined - and I have to admit, while the skull imagery has been lost, the new logo is a fair bit cleaner and easier to read. Nevertheless, I’m happy with the original version, and glad to see that its DNA is still there.

The new logo

Yale Collections: 18th Century Chinese Gaming Tokens

In the fall of my junior year of college, I took a course called Graphic Design Methodologies. One of the larger projects we were asked to produce was to produce a set of promotional materials for a hypothetical exhibition of something from the Yale Collections. After some digging, I came across a collection of Chinese mother-of-pearl gaming counters from the 18th and 19th centuries. If you’re interested in learning about the history of these pieces, I highly recommend reading more about it here: https://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/beinecke.gamingcounters

At first, I was unsure how I would entice people to come view the exhibition. There were many potential angles of attack. I thought, for instance, that I might try to create materials that emphasized the multi-cultural history of these artifacts, which originated in China but mainly used in the West. But considering the wide array of materials I was to produce, and thinking about the hypothetical audience of these materials (busy college students barely glancing at bulletin boards), I decided on a more sensational approach. When I had initially visited the Beinecke Library to view the collection and take photos, I was interested in the unique shapes of many of the tokens, and in the iridescence of the mother-of-pearl surface. I decided to see what I could do to emphasize these qualities. Iridescence is a hard thing to capture in a static photo, since its effect is only noticed when a surface is viewed from a variety of angles.

We were asked to produce a series of flyers, postcards, promotional instagram posts, and finally a mockup of an installation to be shown along with the artifacts.

Postcards

First version of promotional postcard, 1/2

First version of promotional postcard, 2/2

Second version of promotional postcard, 1/2

Second version of promotional postcard, 2/2

Flyers

Installation Mockup

I created a video showing what it might look like to have a blown-up image of one of the tokens, with a lenticular effect, such that at certain angles, an image of the family who owned this token would appear.

GRIT - Logo

I started to see a lot of graphic design content on social media, and felt inspired to practice some new techniques. I wanted to try my hand at creating a wordmark for a logo from scratch - that is, by constructing the letters myself rather than using a pre-existing typeface. In order to do that, I created a grid system and a set of rules that each letter would follow. One rule (or guideline, really) was that each letter should have at least one segment where its outline extended past the corner.

In keeping with the theme suggested by the word ‘grit’, and again inspired by trends on social media, I worked with some texture assets to get an effect that I thought worked well.

Early attempt at incorporating texture

Final result

New Matrix Group - Logo

While helping build some of the underlying data pipelines for a business intelligence startup, I decided to take a bit of time to create a logo for the company, since we did not have one yet. I wanted to match the tone of our pitches to potential clients. Many of the clients were mid-size clothing retailers that had been using the same business intelligence solutions for many years, so we wanted to emphasize that with our solutions, we could provide easier access and deeper insights into a company’s accounting and sales statistics.

Afternoon Cupcakes - Logo

As an exercise, I challenged myself to make a logo for a bakery, and came up with this. I did this back in high school, but I still think it's cute. I remember being pleased with the font at the time (Abril Fatface if you're curious).

Programming Work

MIDI Signal Augmenter

A program for turning single note presses into chords and arpeggios.

MIDI Signal Augmenter

GitHub: click here

This was a project I did for an elective in college on computer music. Using this program I wrote in SuperCollider, musicians can play notes on any common peripheral controller, and have transformations applied to the MIDI signals which can cause a number of effects, such as creating chords from each note press, or automatically playing a held chord as an arpeggio.

Chord mode and Arpeggio mode can each be toggled independently. When only chord mode is on, single note presses result in a whole chord being output. Users can choose between major, minor, diminished, major 7th, minor 7th, dominant 7th, sus2, sus4, and augmented chords.

When only arpeggio mode is on, any notes held down will play one after the other in a loop. There are several patterns to choose from:

Upward: plays notes starting from lowest to highest before looping

Downward: plays notes starting from highest to lowest before looping

Random: plays notes in completely random order

Random Walk: plays a random note, then randomly plays either the next highest note or next lowest note

Ping Pong: plays notes starting from lowest to highest, then highest to lowest, and repeats

Users can also enable both modes at the same time, allowing them to create complex arpeggiated patterns with a single note press.

These functions usually exist in most commercial Digital Audio Software (DAW) programs, such as the one I use, Ableton Live. I decided on this project because I wanted to see what it would be like to build these things myself, and to learn what sort of technical challenges I might be taking for granted under the hood.

"Alien Egg" Sculpture

An interactive sculpture built with clay, ultrasonic sensors, and sleep deprivation.

"Alien Egg" Sculpture

I built this sculpture for an exhibition of artwork by Yale college seniors. I had no prior experience with any of the materials I used - I had never made anything with clay, and more technically challenging, I had never built a physical circuit before or had any experience with Arduinos.

I went into the project a bit unsure of what I was going to build, but after a few sessions at the pottery studio, and several all-nighters at the maker-space on campus, the project started to take literal and conceptual shape.

What I ended up making was a small clay vessel, about the size of a football, with many holes along the surface. I crammed a bunch of LED strips inside, connected via an Arduino circuit to an ultrasonic sensor.

Link to GitHub repo of Arduino scripts for this project

Wide angle shot of the Alien Egg sculpture in the gallery — The egg sitting in its enclave

I placed the sculpture on a pedestal, tucked away under the staircase in one of the showrooms of the gallery. As members of the audience approached the sculpture, the ultrasonic sensor would read the distance to the nearest person. This information was fed through the circuit such that as people approached the sculpture, the LED strips would shine brighter, and as they moved away, the lights would dim.