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I’m Caleb, a multidisciplinary graphic designer with a passion for art direction with eight years of experience across agency, corporate, and freelance settings. I believe that successful graphic design lives at the intersection between art and communication and aim for that point in my process.

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Caleb Peters

Gradi3nt

A lesson in the consequences of scope creep

2020

IDENTITY

COLLAB W/ Madison Provines

Gradi3nt was a project originally envisioned as a standalone wiki to aid in departmental communication and collaboration, built and styled with visually striking typography in contrast to the more utilitarian aesthetic wikis usually take on, as an exercise in both information management and the use of UI as an art form. Ultimately, we were pushed quite far from the original vision and now, retrospectively, Gradi3nt serves as a lesson in the importance of establishing a project’s bounds and progressively evaluating whether it is truly worthwhile to expand beyond them.

Getting Started

VISUAL EXPERIMENTATION WITH RISOGRAPH

As an exercise and developmental step, we experimented with a loose and flexible visual language which enmeshed the aesthetics of both the front and back ends of the internet alongside elements related to the department that the project would be serving. This would serve as our base for the wiki’s visual direction and as collateral marketing materials to distribute around the building.

First Creep

KEEP THE WIKI, ADD A MESSAGE BOARD

We were encouraged by both peers and faculty to grow this project into a group of collaboration tools rather than a single, centralized source of truth for the department. We accepted the challenge, and shifted gears from the wiki and launched a message board alongside it.

Second Creep

PIVOT AWAY FROM WIKI, ADD CHAT FUNCTION

After launching the message board, concerns were raised that Gradi3nt offered no way to communicate with peers in real-time. After many conversations with faculty, we settled on a solution: setting up a departmental Slack instance and integrating it in some way with the other two facets.

We were also approached by a few of our peers who seemed entirely uninterested in learning how to navigate and operate within this kind of tool. We were encouraged to drop the wiki entirely, and instead focus on a collaborative Tumblr, which we would give the same visual treatment as we intended for the wiki. A network of tagged blog posts would serve as an archive and loose network of information, right? Right?

This was the point at which we realized the project had gotten away from us. We had strayed too far from our original goals and, in doing so, we found ourselves far outside of our areas of expertise. We were graphic designers, not backend web developers; between the two of us, we had just enough knowledge to install, configure, and style a single Wiki.js or Mediawiki installation. We were prepared to step out of our comfort zone to do that, since we were confident in our ability to do all the identity and marketing work that would follow.

Final Creep

KEEP THE WIKI, ADD A MESSAGE BOARD

We always intended to create an array of promotional materials and collateral marketing—after all, that’s how we planned to tie all this back to our actual field: graphic design. Thankfully, we had managed to stick with the visual language we came up with during our initial exploration, so we had a wide variety of assets to use.

We hadn’t planned for Gradi3nt to be featured in an exhibition. It was a web platform, after all. With a week or two before the exhibition our other projects were to be featured in, we were informed that Gradi3nt not only needed to be featured, but needed to be woven into the exhibition space and experience.

For our primary installation, we constructed an interactive piece through which museum-goers could provide us with their thoughts on themes of community and collaboration. As participants contributed throughout the night and posted their cards onto the glass, a coarse gradient was formed.

To weave Gradi3nt throughout the space, we created a series of prompts related to each student’s projects, printed them on vinyl alongside a phone number, and implored guests to send an SMS response to one of the prompts. Near the exhibition’s entrance, Gradi3nt’s Slack instance was displayed for public viewing, and as guests sent in their responses, they would be automatically posted in real-time.

When the evening ended, we were left with a few hundred people’s thoughts about all of the projects featured, which tied back once again to themes of community and collaboration.

Upon Reflection

WHAT EXACTLY DID WE ACCOMPLISH?

What did we actually make? We signed up for a Slack account, customized a Tumblr theme, set up a half-baked message board that never got used, laid out and applied some vinyl decals, and built an installation piece that had an incredibly tenuous link to the original concept. I’d wager those on the outside looking in could hardly recognize that this project was even related to graphic design.

Looking back, I feel comfortable calling this project a mess at best, and a total failure at worst. We had fun, of course, but my collaborator and I never felt as though we ever produced a product worth using—or even worth showing.

In retrospect, the cause of the mess is rather obvious: we allowed others to slowly force Gradi3nt’s scope outward. This was our first interaction with scope creep. The project’s purpose—to contribute positively to collaboration among students—was lost entirely because we did not resist outside influences.

Gradi3nt, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, did not take off and become an actual departmental tool. Six months after the exhibition closed, we cancelled our hosting and relinquished its domains. It may not have provided the department with anything significant, but it did teach the two of us the importance of setting defined goals along a set timeline, which helped us tremendously in our careers.