Beautiful morning!

Let's try and hide the fact I didn't sleep.  I avoided Spanish and did spreads.
Hopefully will show Chili stuff to Rusty today and then edit this post.

Huzzah!

I made a small bit of progress with re-learning HTML.
I couldn't add drop shadows to text with the blogger template, so I found out how to add one myself to my blog title with html/css!  Will be fuddling around more with how this blog looks this week.



ALSO, this is it!  I must be horrible conceptualizing colors, but I know I have a great taste for color.  Therefore, I'm going to attempt using pics as inspiration to pick correct colors for some of my future projects.  AND!  I'll make it work.

For How Safe, this awesome fashion combo.  THIS WILL WORK RUSTY I SWEAR.

EDIT : It's working!  Need to add ants + napkin / coffee-stained lace or whatev.

Ramblings & Updates

Redesigning my food spreads at the moment.

Feeling Full is feeling better...heh heh.

Orange or Pink?  AHHHH!  I tried a pretty Mint but it didn't work out as well with the photos.  Help me!

I'm trying Rusty's ideas for redesigning my How Safe Spread.  I am failing.  I need to do something new completely at this point or else I'll never have anything good for my portfolio.  And why am I using so much orange?  Beware, Rusty!  I may use baby blue soon!  >=D  I have some ideas, so I gotta figure them out.

I have my concept for chili finally down too.  All I need now is to photograph and COB out my peppers and seeds.  I just need to figure out how to make a kick-ass jar label now that fits in with my party-fun-just-enough-tease feel I'm going for.  Idea process & sketches here.  Highlighted stuff is my final decision.

The book cover is getting work done.....and I have SOME ideas / sketches as you can see for the History Month illust. and SOI posters.  

Black History Month is the hardest so far.  I just don't think I have the experience or confidence to pick an empowering concept.  I also have a hard time thinking of any race as a minority.  Maybe in the numerical sense, or in the sense that others regard them as one.  But why can't we just celebrate all races and heritages at once and all the time instead of singling them out?  But I'm the lowly designer-peon at this moment in my "career" and just need to pump out something kick-ass.  So I will do so.....it'll just happen slowly.

As for SOI, I'm having more nautical visions.  Ugh.  I'm thinking astronauts underwater.  BTW, have you heard of James Cameron's adventure to the abyss of the Mariana Trench yet?  If not, look into it.  Super cool.  I love the ocean, but fear it probably the same amount.  It really is as alien as space is to us.  Awesome.   

So...either that, or I'll do a beautiful drawing of some sort of girl looking really pensive with lots of color explosions and floral textures and explorative-item-globe-compass-ship sketching to go along with it.  No real concept other than emotions of identity, direction, and contemplation of art.  Gotta do some thumbs and let Rusty pick.  

Now....with so much to do....my test will be correctly determining priority of projects.  I hate starting things while others aren't even close to being complete.  However, I've gotta get started or I'll have no time to finish!  

OFF TO OPHELIA....after I'm done here at newspaper.

Back to Work

I am back from Denver!  It was a wondrous trip!  I had so much fun, saw so much, and learned so much as well.  Shot nearly 1000 pictures and picked up many prints, pins, and business cards.  I filled a whole notebook from Threadless with notes and had a blast with my friends/AIGA.

Now, I have to finish the work that I have begun and get a hold of my spreads, book cover, posters, and packaging.  We've all stayed up-to-date on the blog while away so we know what is in store for us, and we are admittedly somewhat frightened.  We'll pull through somehow.  At least I am now once again brimming with inspiration.

I, also, am being inspired by the great weather outside.  It's so green and the air is so clean!

 

In addition, it's a bad sign when my phone's camera is taking clearer, more focused shots than my digital camera....  D:

OH NO

Great.....Fahrenheit doesn't have that "GH" in it......I should know better.

I don't know what I should do....you can't evenly divide 13 letters.  I could have done 14 but 13 just kind of sucks.  Stupid prime numbers.

Well, I'll figure that out tomorrow.

For now, I'm working on the layouts, waiting to add more smoke later.

EDIT:

Got some layouts for the cd case.  I want this one to be based on one of the templates rusty provided.  I like the idea of the cd being held in a pop-out pocket, and then, it could seem like a book engulfed by flames.  Will edit the idea tomorrow.

I'm torn between black outside (like the book) w/ orange inside, and the opposite.

However, I think I'll go with orange outside, with the shortened logo, and the black be speckled burnt inside that will make the flames pop.

BTW, I pulled an image for the flames, but it will be something that won't be hard to make with brushes in photoshop.  The pocket might even have a flame die-cut!  EXCITING!

Scorching nearly done

Got the rest of the letters scorched.  Gotta add some smoke now.  Oh god.....that took too long...

Updates

Here's what I have for the cover-cover part of my book design so far, and my attempt at making thin text smolder.  I've only got the text on the first row done, but will see how it looks on the others as well.  I'm getting sketches for my cd cover and will have that laid out and printed tonight.  I've got to put money in my print account as well, so I will do that with Rusty tomorrow morning.  Gotta get here early!

As a reminder, here were my initial plans  (chose the one on the right), and then here are what I've accomplished with Photoshop and Indesign so far.

I decided flames would look cooler on a dark background, so I reversed what I had from my original plan.

Feeling Full = Done

Okay, spent a good few hours finally laying this out.  I also started stuff for the Chili ideas for tomorrow.  Hooray!

This is my layout.  I just saw the bottom of the .RTF file though that said we shouldn't use overweight-sensitive imagery though.  Oops.  Oh well, I will take pictures of deserts in the dining halls tomorrow then and put them in where my existing imagery is.  That'll be fine and may even work better.  I saw this great pie and cheesecake spread that was very delicate and airy and got inspired by that and it's small, sans-serif, gray, largely-leaded body copy.  I'll keep the secondary color pink or go pastel.  Yeah...pastel sounds best. I can see why fruits and veggies and stir-frys might not go well with the spread, but I'm overweight and it doesn't bug me one bit.  I love desserts and such but I love my fruits and veggies just the same!

Anyways, here it is.

Safety Updates

2 hours of work and still have only worked on one project.  Ugh.  Gotta push through!

I am definitely the kind of person who can get indecisive.  I've made 3 revised layouts based on Rusty's recommendations.  One to start, and then 2 flipped versions.  Then using the photo with and without curve color altering....I think I may be leaning toward the unaltered photo, but we shall see.  I'm glad to upload them all since I'll be able to figure out which one I like best when I look at them all together.

Here is my new photo, without and with curve.  

I did the curve first, but realized the original colors may work better.

IDK maybe I could make the shadows in the curve one more dramatic....I kind of got rid of them while curving to make the hand and avocado stand out a bit more.

So here are each of the spreads with the curve.

Here they are without the curve....tough decision.

New Quarter!

Beginnings are always exciting.  It's spring outside, finally warm, there aren't many immediate due dates, and I feel refreshed and reenergized for Viz Comm work.  I am also ready to keep a more thorough record of my work steps and processes on this blog.  Heres to hoping that recording my thought processes more closely will give me more constructive insight into how to work better and more efficiently.

First things first, I did some brainstorming for my layouts.  As always, they include more text and scriblings  than any detailed sketching.  At most I'll do unintelligible thumbnails.

Next, I finally went out and took some photographs at the dining hall, walmart, and in my dorm.  I also picked up a BOOK for my book cover project for 35 cents while I was out.  Great deal!

Last night, when I was done with working on scholarship applications and at newspaper, I only had time to complete one of my spreads.   I really liked how it turned out, but Rusty totally tore it apart.  His suggestions make sense though.

RED.....red everywhere!   Doesn't help that printouts turn out really dark as well.

Midterm Portfoliooooooo!

Let's do this!

First for my portfolio, I have my Typeface Poster : Baskerville w/ web page

Time allotted : 6 hrs

Total Time used : 2 hrs 20 min

I very fondly worked on this poster.  It feels like it was so long ago that we worked on this since it was the second one we did.  It reminded me heavily of Typography class as well since we had a very limited pallet and were limited to one typeface as well.  My webpage for this was probably the only thing I've shown Rusty that got approved from first glance.  Hooray!  I didn't spend nearly enough time compared to what was recommended.  However, I don't think it ever would require 6 hours to do.  I went through several typefaces before I got to Baskerville - many sans serif.  But there is something about the lone Serifed font that looks positively artistic and regal to me.  I would have loved to see this printed, but I wanted to print things that offered more color.  Hm...maybe if we had been allowed 3 prints?

Second, I have my Jazz Poster & iPad pages.

Time allotted : 10 hrs

Total Time used : 8.5 hrs

Jazz was fun....and I felt really really puny while I was making this.  Ha!  I think it could be offensive if one doesn't have a sense of humor but I mean it in the best way!  I love listening to live jazz and wanted to do a really suave vectored musician for this poster.  Very poppy and sharp and as energetic yet laid back as jazz can be.  I went through quite a few revisions for this and struggled a bit trying to reformat it for iPad pages especially since I lost the original file.  I think it ended up nicely though.  I'm glad we were given 10 hours....for some reason I spend the most time on this work - despite my memory.

Third, is my Highway 63 Newsletter

Time allotted : 6 hrs

Total Time Used: 5 hrs 40 min

I must be weird.  I didn't think I would like this because it is so copy-heavy but I actually liked this finished design.  I'm not sure why....it's gotta be that thing about lone type again.  I'm glad I got everything to fit and think it would have been much harder to do if we actually had graphics that we needed to try to fit in.  I enjoyed printing it out on 11x17 and actually physically feeling it's completed and folded version.  Laserjet is how most flyers are printed so it really felt like a finished product.  I got super close to my time requirement while still needing revisions so I view this time use as a success!

Fourth is my Yellowstone / Tetons Poster w/ iPad pages

Time allotted: 6 hrs

Total Time Used :  5 hrs 45 min

So puuuurrrrrttttttyyy!  This one was pretty simple but I focused on eye-catching color for this poster.  The tagline took a while to think of and kind of just came to me when I was looking for fonts. The triangles were inspired by the rainbow in the foreground of the photo.  I think it works pretty well and is a very dreamy element but also mirrors the awesome colors of (pulled straight from) the photo.  For the iPad page, I had to make the tagline white so it could pop from the detailed background.

Fifth I have chosen my Detours Newsmagazine Spread

Time allotted : 10 hrs

Total Time Used : 7 hrs

I kind of like my Detours spread.  I think the story and concept wasn't exactly what I would prefer to work from, but hey!  That happens all the time as a designer.  I did the best I could and came up with something I was nearly going to print.  I really liked my first two pages, while the second just got reworked and reworked so much that I can't really stand to look at it anymore.  I know the serif face is easier to read, but I secretly still really like sans serif in body copy.  Came under the recommended time but I still put a lot of elbow grease into this.  10 hours seems a little over what it should have taken.

Sixth is my Herpetology Poster and Animated Banner

'

Click to see animated!  vv

Time allotted:  6 hrs

Total time Used : 5 hrs 20 min

Herp Derp Herpetology!  I immediately knew I wanted to do an illustration and came across a photo of the cutest rainforest frogs.  Loved doing them in watercolor and plopped them into the diagonal layout I had created.  I felt it was still missing something so I put in a watery-parchmenty bg that I scanned from the library.  The banner took a while but I really enjoyed making it.  That Flash project in Type really got me used to using keyframes and such.  I can't wait to use this for personal banners!  I came close to the allotted time, but part of me still feels I could have used another hour or two to figure out a more pleasing design.  I like this, but maybe it should have been horizontal or something.....IDK but it's bugging me!

Seventh is my Native American Heritage Poster series and banner.

Click to see animated!  vv

Time Alloted : 6 hrs

Total Time used : 6 hrs 40 min

I went over budget for this, but I think I should have considering all the many elements of these THREE posters.  Holy cow.  I'm glad images were provided but I had to doctor a few for the banner or poster so that the composition or darkness would be right to suit the type.  I like them and the concept except for the banner that I made at the bottom.  I like the banner but not how I aligned the type.  I had to make that when I had my pc with no nice fonts on it and didn't have enough energy to edit all that in all 3 posters on my refurbished mac.  Meh.  Maybe that is why I like the banner so much more.

Last but not least is my Stress Magazine Layout.

Time Alloted : 6 hrs

Total Time Used : 3 hrs 35 min

What the hell!??!  This came out of nowhere and was literally the last thing I worked on, but it turns out to be the best, the thing I like most, what I printed, what took little time to do, and even Rusty said it looked cool!  Maybe.....omg...just maybe I am getting better?  Or this is my once-a-semester burst of inspiration that struck me?  Anyway, I think it was really all based around the photo.  The man was surrounded all by black and cut off on his left side, so I had to edit it to allow for white on the right and a continuation on the left.  The white was definitely needed for the type to be readable.  After more adjusting, everything finally fits and looks great.  I really like the modern feel that it has.  It's very different from everything else, but I think this is a big turning point for me.

HOORAH!  I'm very excited for next semester.  I have a feeling that it is going to be very package heavy vs the print heavy we had this semester, so that is scary.  But now that I know how everything works, I'm actually going to be missing having stuff to design over break.  Maybe I should start that food layout.....?