Fish Slaps A Baby

Craft & Communication with Jason Santa Maria

Behind a secret door in the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store lies 826NYC, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 5-12 with their creative and expository writing skills. The 826NYC students have created Fish Slaps a Baby, a blog where they are free to post anything they desire. As the final project for the Craft & Communication class, MFA Interaction Design students have designed a custom site for Fish Slaps a Baby and 15 unique blog templates to house all their content. The design for each template is inspired by a child's story.

• Michael Yap : Baby Dog

  

  The theme that informed the template created by Michael Yap was Baby Dog. As told by the theme’s creator, Baby Dog is concerned with cute animals, “not necessarily ‘cutesy cuteness,’ rather the kind of cuteness that puts a smile on your face.” Yap captures this quality of cute in the representative animal forms found in the page background, and, particularly, in the Fish Slaps a Baby logo. Formally, Yap puts to work concepts gleaned from material covered during the semester, such as, the hierarchical grid and typographic contrast. For Yap, the most satisfying moment of this project was when he had the pleasure of giving an impromptu Adobe Photoshop tutorial to his theme’s creator. He hopes that she will put those lessons to good use someday.

• Allison Shaw : Bottled Paper Applesauce

  

  The creator of my mood board, Pew Pew Man, is one of the older students at 826. As such, I wanted to create a design that was respectful of his age but still reflected the title of his concept. To that end, the page is restrained in its look and feel, and relies almost entirely on texture and typography for its character. At the same time, I tried to capture a bit of the movement that Pew Pew Man’s original mood board contained, and so there are spilled and bubbling bottles, and a hidden easter egg: if you resize the browser window, the hand coming from the side of the page reaches and pulls away from the bottle on the bottom left. 

• Catherine Young : Cat Slap

  

  My client, Frankenstein, did not like cats and thought they should be slapped. Instead of designing a violent scene and scaring some kids, I decided to do a funny illustration of a frightened cat who had just jumped on top of the post. I wanted to immortalize my client, and thus placed his name on the background, as though “Frankenstein was here” were etched on the wall. As for the logo, I drew the skeleton of a fish that was eaten by the terrified cat—excellent retribution.

• Benjamin Gadbaw : Fat Chicken

  

  Fat chicken ate too many pancakes and hamburger. Fat chicken has seen someone kill a chicken once. With a knife. She likes eating both chicken and eggs.

• Erin Moore : Frankenstein and Maxstein

  

  When designing this particular template, I was given a small pencil sketch of Frankenstein and his dog, Maxstein, and strict instruction to make it “green and creepy.” I wanted the layout to suggest more than it explicitly showed, so I focused on the two most identifying features of Frankenstein: his hair and the bolts coming out of his neck. I liked the style of the student’s pencil sketch, so retained that style in the final layout. Maxstein, watches over the post from the upper left hand corner. 

• Cooper Smith : French Fried Bumper Cars

  

  French Fried Bumper Cars is about the madness that occurs when French Fries and Bumper Cars come together. 

• Tina Ye : Green Team

  

  “Green Team” is the name of a guerilla vegetal army out to battle tomatoes everywhere. It also happens to be the nom de plume of my young partner-in-design at 826NYC, who dreamed up the whole story. Green Team consists of all sorts of green fruits and veggies, led by the intrepid broccoli (who throws asparagus spears). They live on an idyllic farm populated by broccoli-shaped trees. This blog design seeks to capture the action-packed cartoon world in which Green Team lives, while giving the imaginative writers at 826NYC ample space to voice their creativity.

• Adjoa Opoku : The Cliché Pit

  

  The concept was described as somewhere you can be boring and unoriginal for hours and hours. The result is an alternate reality located somewhere in outerspace where all thing that are no longer cool come to die.

• Christopher Cannon : Tomato Comics

  

  Tomato Comics is a theme imagined by a kid with a vivid imagination that encompasses supermarket-dwelling superheroes that shoot ketchup from their stomachs. This design tries to capture the essence of that with the use of vintage comic scans, ripped edges, handlettered headlines and the color red.