The Identity Project - Final

In the end, I'm really pleased with the end result. I didn't make too many changes from the rough draft, but there were some. I took Adrienne's suggestion about using all caps for the name, and I think that helped solidify things a good deal. I also played around with the idea of integrating color, but it just threw off the unity of the piece. It would have been cool to add some element of red to my hair, but I think the glasses do a good enough job identifying as the figure.

I think that this project has been one of the most beneficial. I really think that I will end up using this logo in the future.

The Identity Project - Roughs

So for many of the roughs, there wasn't that much difficulty in their construction, so I'm not sure how much I can talk about them without waffling on about meaningless details. But I'll do what I can.

Starting with the simple monogram, there wasn't much to it. I found a good serif font and then expanded the forms so I could move them about freely. One adjustment I did was that I thinned the posts of the H, they would have been too thick otherwise. I did have to look around for an "s" that really fit. About halfway through, Adrienne offered the suggestion that it might work better if I tilted the s so it could interact with the h. I wasn't sure how I felt about this but thought I'd give it a shot so I made another design really quick. This went over very well in critique. We came to the conclusion that my other design, while I still like how it looks when I draw it by hand, looked too stuffy for a personal logo when generated on the computer.

The blockfort design didn't really change from what I had in my thumbnail sketches. I struggled a little bit with getting the rectangles to the size I wanted, and moved the internal lines around a lot. After critique we decided that it might work better if I thickened up the lines. I could also try to level the lines in the s with the lines in the H. I couldn't think of any good use of color for it though. I simply have an aversion to color in general. It comes from working in drawing for so long. Whenever I added color to drawings their quality went downhill and they quickly look childish. So I stick to black and white. That's why none of my identity designs use color, as a reference to my drawings, which is my major focus.

The shattered S was a disappointment. It may simply be my treatment of the piece, but it definitely reach the lofty heights Adrienne thought possible. I think it may have worked better if I had use different shapes as opposed to the linear method I used.
Please disregard the phantom s to the right, I must have forgotten to delete it in my AI file. I'm bad about tucking things off into corners on that program.

The chain design turned out much better. I set off the T from the rest of the H by a subtle value difference. Otherwise, it was fairly easy to connect all of the letter forms together. This was one of the favorite during our critique. They thought the connection was good, and that the T was hidden enough it didn't smack them in the face. Suggestions were that the sideway s drew too much attention to the left. A possible solution to this would be flipping it vertical and wrapping it around the T that way. I'm just afraid of that looking a little cliche.

Finally came the silhouette design. I ad my roommate take pictures of me so I could use my own profile, and I think that really made the extra connection. For the font at the bottom I just used Eurostile because I really like the simplicity and straightforwardness of the letterforms. I just traced it with the pen tool and and made the shape of my glasses white. Then I just made me lean up against the H and there it was. This was by far the favorite of everyone during the critique of my work. They thought it captured my personality the best, and they really enjoyed how the silhouette could easily be identified as me. There was the question of how it would look if you could see my arms and legs. Luckily, I had made a test version of that as well. In the end, the all black version worked better because the grey in the other design was too distracting. I'm going to continue with this design, and I don't think I have that many changes to make. Adrienne thinks it would be wise to make the name at the bottom all caps so as to minimize the up and down movement, which would in turn help ground the entire piece. I also needed to pull in the letters with the edge of my shoes. Adrienne also thought it would be interesting to maybe make the figure a different color, but as I mentioned earlier, I prefer to black and white. I'm not saying I won't give it a try, but I'm highly biased.

The Identity Project - Thumbnails

Our final project for Visual Communication 1 was to design a logo or graphic identity for ourselves. Our guidelines were that we our design had to be reproducible in in both large and small sizes, and we had the option of creating both a color and black and white version of the design.
Adrienne suggested that we start off by asking our friends and family to give five words that describe us. I decided to give it a shot, and sent about 50 emails to people. The next day my inbox was flooded, and I had to sift through about eight million adjectives. Luckily there was some element of overlap between them all. As much as I wanted to do a design emphasizing my "gangsta"-ness, I decided my design would be geared towards the more common descriptions. Some of the more common words were: intelligent, genuine, calm (laid back), kind, curly red hair, passionate, sincere, and unique. I was a little daunted by the task of graphically representing these things, but I guess thats why we needed to make 50 thumbnails, so we could have lots of mulligans.

So I could describe each and every one of my thumbnails and the thought process behind it, but instead I'll just go over the five designs I decided to turn into roughs.
The first one was simply a monogram that I've been signing my drawings with for some time now. I first began thinking about designing a personal monogram after writing a paper on Albrecht Durer last semester. I really liked how he incorporated his initials into his work and I decided to see what I could come up with for myself. The design up in the left hand corner is what I came up with.

The next design I decided to work with was what I would later call the blockfort logo. It was just a simple representation of an S and an H. It was simple, yet united, so I think it fit with my list of characteristics. My favorite part was the lines I used to define the crossbar of the H were actually T's, which made the subtle reference to my middle name. Adrienne and I discussed that this would also be a good design to incorporate color into.










The third design was really just a blip of an idea, that I would make an S out of my last name. Adrienne was surprisingly taken with this idea. She thought though that rather than using type to make the S, I should just try and make sort of broken letter form. I thought that might not be too bad, and it would be unified while still comprised of smaller parts, which I think I can relate too.







Next came a design that I based on the idea of a chain. Chains are flexible but strong, and I think that it would make a good reference to my own personality and work. At first I couldn't think of a way to interlock all of my initials. The T was the big problem, but Adrienne's suggestion of incorporating it into the H seemed like a great solution, so I thought it would be cool to see how this design would turn out on the computer, so I decided to work on it some more.
Finally, my last design was yet another playful design. I thought it would be cool if I just had a the H with a silhouette of a person just chilling up against it. I really thought this wouldbe neat because I'm often the person sitting back and observing while things are going on. I like to take my time and enjoy things as they come. I thought this would be cool, so we'll see how it and the others turn out in comps.

Social Action - Final

The final draft of my hourglass design had several changes from the design seen in the roughs. For one, I decreased the amount of sand in the top bulb. Previously it gave more of the impression that we have time, and I wanted it to feel like time was running out. In addition to this, I added a small reference to a skull in the lower bulb. I like the placement, it doesn't jump out but viewers can see it after about 20 secs or so. Finally I worked with the text. I tried bolding the font like Adrienne suggested, but it seemed way too heavy, and weighted the design towards the bottom. We eventually tried a way where we slightly increased the line thickness. Later I had the idea of trying to have a reflection, and I think that works out fairly well. If I had to mat it again though, I would have gone with a 11"x 17" size, because the 8.5"x 14" seems a little small.

Social Action - Roughs

Creating the roughs for this project wasn't all that bad. They came together fairly easily and I still had a hard time deciding which one I wanted to use as my final design.

The design with the bomb was actually fairly straight forward. I just found a good image of Little Boy, made a pen object out of it, then combined it with a pen object I made by tracing an image of the Capitol dome. The hardest part about the whole process was tracing the dome, with the pillars and windows it took a little while. during the critique the biggest problem was with the background. I had felt like it was a little distracting and everyone seemed to agree. I needed to find a way to simplify the background, since it was competing for attention. We also discussed how it would be more effective as a sort of political statement, with the bomb moving towards a certain target or something.

The hourglass design was a bit simpler to work with. Once again I found a good image of and hourglass and traced it. I worked with the colors for a while, trying to decide whether or not to fill it in with colors referencing wood or metal. Finally I decided to try leaving it empty, except for the sand. I think that it draws attention to the fact that time is almost out. I really liked the was the word "disarm" came out. I used Eurostile as the font and I like the way it works. Comments for this design was that maybe I should try to incorporate some shapes like skulls or bombs into the sand. Adrienne also suggest that I try to bold the text to give it a little more punch.

Finally, the Risk design was I think the least successful. I was going to try and bring my board from home so I could scan it in, but I wasn't able to make it home. So I ended up using an image from the web, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted. I didn't really make any adjustments from the concept idea. After the critique, I think it would work better if I had a hand holding a risk card with a mushroom cloud in place of one of the other symbols. It would allow a more direct connection with the viewer.

I decided to continue working with the hourglass design, so we'll see how it turns out.

Social Action - Thumbnails

This assignment was all about creating a poster with some sort of social action message (peace, environment, sexism, etc.). We could use any colors we needed the only other requirement was that it needed to be at least 8.5" x 14". As I mentioned in the thumbnail section of the photo collage project, I have a certain fascination and interest in nuclear weapons and disarmament. I decided that would be the basis for my thumbnails.

We had to make 20 thumbnail sketches for this project and I think I came up with some good ones for the most part. After looking over them with Adrienne, I picked out three to continue working with. The first was an image of a bomb, except that the warhead was the dome from Capitol Hill. I wanted to make a connection about how these actions are put in motion, and who are responsible for the decisions to go to war and bomb populations. This was supposed to be focused on nuclear weapons in particular, so I used a photo of Little Boy as the body of the image. Adrienne also suggested making a later design (plain type with the words "NOCLEAR WEAPONS") a sort of letter mark in order to make a stronger connection with atomic weapons.

The next design was really kind of simple. When I put it down I didn't really expect to use it but Adrienne thought it had potential and after discussing it I agreed. It was simply an image of an hourglass with the word "disarm" underneath it. In the thumbnail I had meant the two bulbs of the hourglass to be made out of warheads. After deciding to work on this idea further, I decided to make it more of a general figure rather than trying to make too many specific references.

My final thumbnail was another one I put down without much thought. The idea was to use the image of a risk board, with lines charting out the paths of missiles, and then having an ominous message at the bottom. I was surprised at how much Adrienne liked this design. Once again, talking with her made me see more potential in this image when I first thought of it. The idea that the game is Risk, and that in games someone is always the loser, both have multiple connections with the message I wanted to get across. I want to point out how foolish it is that we have more than enough nuclear weaponry to destroy most of civilization, not including the effects of fallout and radiation.

All three of these design have potential and I'm in the unfamiliar situation of liking them all. I'll just have to see how the roughs turn out.

Photo Collage - Final

There isn't much to say about the final, there were only a few minor changes I made from the rough. The first was of course moving the picture from the upper left hand corner. I placed it at the foot of the mushroom cloud and then moved the lady out. I also added a watercolor effect to the background in an effort to take away of of the inherent graininess. I wish that I had been able to increase the size, but the resolution wouldn't hold up. Otherwise I'm fairly satisfied with the outcome.

Photo Collage - Roughs

For this project we only had to choose two concept ideas to work with, in this case I worked with the design incorporating victims into the mushroom cloud, and the Truman design. I think they both showed promise, but as with the postcard project, finding images was a problem.

For my design to work I needed to find both a high resolution image of the mushroom cloud from the bombing of Hiroshima and pictures of victims. It took me a while, but I finally found a picture of the cloud that was fairly large, and I also stumbled across a website that had numerous pictures of victims, though some of them were too grainy or small for use. I opened the cloud file in Photoshop and began working with incorporating the other images. My initial trouble was with finding a way that I could blend the picture into the background rather than just slapping one picture on top of another. I finally found that by using the eraser at various opacities gave me the effect I was looking for. I also used the smudge and blur tools on the edges of the pictures. During our critique I received numerous different opinions. For the most part people liked the subtlety of the design. The biggest problem was the image in the upper left hand corner. I had placed it there in an effort to combat the negative space, and give the piece a stronger sense of balance, but it stuck out like a sore thumb.

The Truman design was a harder problem to work out. First of all, I couldn't find very big images at all. Placing Truman over the background of Hiroshima was obviously not that big of a problem, and I was glad to see that he blended well with the values of the background. I had worried that it would be much darker or the light source would be coming from the wrong direction. My biggest problem was the newspaper. I had previously found a picture of a newspaper from the end of the war (seen here), that I wanted to twist and put in Truman's hands but I couldn't find a good way to pull it off. So I decided to blot out the "Dewey Defeats Truman" on the original and then just put the headline of "Peace". To do this I just took the Eyedropper tool and grabbed the color closest to the letter, painted it out, then blurred it all together. Then I imported the newspaper image, and made pen tool objects out of the letters. From there it was only a matter of rotating and placing. This design wasn't as popular as my first. Many people thought the headline stood out as having just been placed on top of everything.


Time to work on the mushroom cloud design then.

Photo Collage - Thumbnails

After working extensively in Illustrator and InDesign for most of the semester, we were assigned a project that would give us some experience in Photoshop. The assignment was that we need to chose a historical event, and then depict use at least six images to depict it. It needed to have an emotional impact on the viewing audience as well.

I decided that for my historical event I would do the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Not the most cheerful subject I know, but I have horrified fascination with the subject of nuclear weapons. I am a big advocate of nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, I even wrote a paper on it for Comp 120. But moving on with the design process, I sat down and started making various thumbnails. Initially I wanted to do a sort of time line, with pictures leading up to the bombing. There would be a big picture of the mushroom cloud and from there the time line would split. One line would be that of the US, celebrating the end of the war with grins spread across their faces. The other would be the time line of Hiroshima, with images of the destruction and victims of the attack. I also had various designs that tried to fit images into larger shapes, like a bomb or japan or something, but they felt rather empty.

The concepts that I decided to work with were sort of varied. One idea was that I wanted to find the image of Truman holding the paper with the "Dewey Defeats Truman" and superimpose that image over a picture of the wasteland that was formally Hiroshima. I wanted to make people realize that even if a war is won, there are still enormous costs.

Another image I wanted to work with was an image of a mushroom cloud that would be composed out of various pictures of victims of the bombing. My only concern is finding enough images to make a composition that big.

The final concept that I was going to turn into a rough was the image seen at the top of page two. I thought that just a simple picture of a mushroom cloud, with images of victims (and possibly perpetrators) surrounding it. This would allow people to make a connection between the event and the aftermath. Adrienne also suggest thatI might superimpose a pictograph of an atom in the picture, adding transparency of course.

Event Postcards - Final

The 2nd design was fairly easy to modify to the point of completion. I experimented with various methods of filling in the negative space in the tan background, using silhouettes of instruments and musical scores. Eventually I decided to go with a more abstract route. This way it fills in the space in a pleasing manner, but there are not any distinct images to distract from the central focus of the faces.


The back design was a little trickier. Obviously placing the jug took no time at all. I struggled with the typographic elements for a while. I decided to use the Rosewood STD font for the band's name. I think the style fits with the overall image of the band as well as the music they play. I took me a little longer to find a good secondary font. Finally I decided on Blackwood Std, but my only problem was that it was a extremely horizontal in orientation. Adrienne helped me solve that problem, and I now feel comfortable with my typographic choices.

Event Postcards - Roughs

So the roughs for this project ranged from fairly easy (Chavez), to ridiculously complex (Drops 1). I've had a lot school work lately, so I've been having to squeeze this in around a bunch of things, but I managed to get them done, and if I say so myself they aren't too bad.

We had a different mode of critique this time. We were split into groups and then went over each of our group member's designs. I was in a group with Kendra and Andrew and they gave me some helpful feedback about my designs. First we looked at the design for Chavez day. It took me forever to find a high quality image of a vineyard, and even longer to find a decent picture of Chavez. I played around in Photoshop for a while trying to mesh the two images, but it looked too fake. I ended up importing them into Illustrator and running them through the tracing tool. Now I had two stylistic images that when combined had a better sense of gestalt. Andrew and Kendra seemed to like it on the whole, they thought that I should make Chavez the same brown tones as the background. Andrew also suggested that I Include more of Chavez's neck and shoulders o whe didn't seem so disembodied.

My second rough was the Chocolate Drop design with the faces. After a certain amount of searching, I found a picture that gave me a good view of all their faces, (incidentally the same picture that has been running on our college website). I experimented with taking the faces and chopping them out in Photoshop and then importing them into Illustrator, but this was with limited success. Finally I took the entire picture and put it into Illustrator and ran it through the tracing function. I realize that it sound like I'm getting away without doing too much work but just wait. Once traced I had to expand and ungroup all of the pen tool objects. Then, one by one, I selected the various parts of the faces and moved them out. This would have been the end of it except for the fact that parts of their faces were the same relative color as the background. This meant that I ad large segments attached to the face. So I ended up going through everything and trimming it down with the knife tool. I increased the size and decided to set them off with the white border against the tan background. Response to this design was good. For the most part was that I needed to add something to the background to make it less plain, some sort of design perhaps. I plan to continue working with this design.

Finally I began to work on Chocolate Drop Design that was based on the whiskey jug. I had more difficulty with this design than I had anticipated. Oddly enough, I wasn't able to find any good images of whiskey jugs. Even a trip to Istockphoto left me with no results. (Someone could make a killing on photos of whiskey jugs) The best image I found was pretty small, so I once again decided to go with the tracing option. (I swear I didn't intend to go crazy with this tool Adrienne, it just allows me to increase the size of images indiscriminantly) After finally getting my jug, I tried for an hour or two to wrap the text convincingly around the body of the vessel, but it always ended up looking too flat. I decided to try a different direction, and ended up with the design on the right. The flat brown of the table was a problem. I tried to find a good image with about the right angle but once again was unsuccessful. I should probably buy a camera so I can begin to take my own photographs. I thought the chocolate drop would be a nice visual connection with the band, but I think it ended up coming out as distracting. Andrew and Kendra agreed that while the design was interesting, perhaps it would be better to use some of the imagery here on the back of the 2nd design.

Event Postcards - Thumbnails

Our next assignment was to prepare a design for a two-sided postcard advertising an event on campus. The designs needed to be 6" x 4.5", and use only two colors. This seemed at first like a fairly easy assignment, but in reality it ended up being pretty time consuming.

So, back to square one - thumbnails. I wracked my head to come up with event on campus that would conducive to multiple designs. I decided to go with Cesar Chavez Day and the Carolina Chocolate Drop concert. Both of these event had numerous images associated with them and I lfelt confident in my ability to prepare successful design for them.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. For some reason I struggled with the thumbnails again. Was I in a creative rut or something? I had had trouble coming up with thumbnails for the KT Week t-shirts as well. Eventually I was able to put down some thoughts, but I still felt that I didn't have any developed concept ideas.

The first event I worked with was the Cesar Chavez celebration. Chavez was a Mexican-American who worked for farm laborers rights throughout the 1900s. He was famous for his non-violent tactics, and especially for his fasting. During one of the most famous disputes Chavez organized a strike of the grape-pickers in California because the pesticide used on the vines was detrimental to the health of the workers. During this Chavez fasted for thirty some days as a sign of solidarity with the workers. I thought about this story when planning out my designs. I used the themes of grapes, unions, and a little with imagery of a lily, which has become associated with Chavez. After talking it over with Adrienne, I decided to work with the design of Chavez looking out over the farm workers. I thought that this would be a good front image for the postcard, and that for the back I could put some watermarked grape bunches behind the event information.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops were even more challenging in some ways. The Drops are an African-American string band who, through community conversations, are going to play a free concert here at Maryville on April 17th. This is going to be a big deal, considering that we've already had calls asking how much tickets are going to be. As far as the thumbnails went though, I wanted to keep them rather simple, which fit with the overall persona of the band. One of their CDs had an interesting logo on the front using a silhouette of an old fashioned whiskey jug. I thought it would be interesting if I could work with the image to put the logo on an image of a real jug. The other idea was to have just the faces of the band members on the front, in a sort of stylized relief. I thought that this would catch a viewer's eye, and make them flip the card to see what it was about.

So I took these three concepts and began working towards producing roughs.

KT Week - Final

My final design was the one with the bricks on the front as seen below. I did try to follow the advice about making the brick wall on the back 3d, but after I actually did it the back seemed a little crowded. I did move the logo farther away from the wall, and switched it for the logo with the corrected dates. Overall I feel that this is a successful design and I have hopes for its selection by the committee. The only problem I think that it may encounter is that it may be viewed as not serious enough for the event and the target audience. Personally I think it would work for everyone, but we all have different opinions. We'll just have to wait and see.

KT Week - Roughs

So after a rough start with my thumbnails, I resolved that I would produce some decent roughs. While I didn't go back and do twenty more thumbnails, I did sit back and think about them for about half an hour. I thought about what I would want for a shirt and how I could apply this to the designs. I really appreciate simplicity, and if possible a bit of humor. For these reasons for two of my designs, I chose to leave the logo by itself on the front. It helps people look at you when they're talking to you, rather than being distracted by a lot of action going under your face.
First of all, I worked with my favorite and most promising design, the one with the campus map on the back. It took me a while to find a campus map online, and ten times longer to trace everything with the pen tool. After I got all of the outlines, I went in and filed all the shapes with value. It wasn't as hard to use a range of different grays as I thought it was going to be. I was afraid of ending up with a formless sea of gray. I also change the phrasing to "Where would you like to make a difference?", which connects with the mantra of "Be successful, make a difference." With that text I had a little bit of trouble finding the fonts used in the Kin Takahashi logo. When I eventuallyfound out what they were, they were both fonts I would have had to buy, so I just used very similar fonts. I think it is still just as successful.
For my second design, I thought I would work with the image of a couple of bricks that Adrienne thought could be interesting. The bricks themselves I just traced with the pen tool, and personally I like how they're sort of irregular, as opposed to having perfect edges. No one has ever seen a brick with perfect edges, they've always broken or worn off. I had to to think about how to make it more interesting. I finally came upon the idea of trying to make a little witty caption under the bricks, like a bunch of the shirts you can see being worn around campus. The number referenced is the approximate number that Kin and a group of students handmade for the building of Bartlett. On the back I have the phrase "...but I still made a difference." This works in two ways, one relating to the phrase mentioned previously, and the second way by allowing the wearer make a personal connection. Sure they might not have done something as glamorous as making thousands of bricks, but they still helped, they still made a difference. I really like this design, and judging from its reception during critique, I'll continue to work on this one design. The only real suggestions being for me to move the logo a little further away from the bricks, and try to make the wall bricks look a little more three dimensional.
Last comes my least favorite design. There really isn't too much to say about it. The general idea was to continue with the brick wall theme, while making it more inclusive. I put the text in the different bricks trying to impart some of the virtues and activities the KT Week deals with. But the bricks are too small and difficult to read, and the design feels incomplete on the whole. The only good thing I can say about this is how I got the hand image. I must have spent 15 minutes online looking for a hand that might look like it was laying a brick. I was beginning to get frustrated when it hit me. I'll just take the picture myself! But where would I get a brick? There was one holding open the door! So I grabbed it, positioned my hand, and took a picture with the PhotoBooth. I have rarely felt so innovative.

KT Week - Thumbnails

Our next project was to design a t-shirt for the volunteers to wear at Maryville College's annual Kin Takahashi Week. During KT Week, altruistic alumni, students and faculty volunteer a week of their time to help do small repairs and additions to the MC campus. It is named after a distinguished who made a name for himself by doing things such as organizing and helping the construction of Bartlett Hall.




I began as always with the creation of thumbnails. I decided to do the front designs separately from the back. I wanted to keep me from being too fixed in my ideas of what should fit with what. Unfortunately, this isn't enough to compensate for bad design. For some reason I struggled to come up with ideas. On the front I generally just played round with moving the logo and a portrait of Takahashi. As far as original designs go for the front, the closest thing here was the pile of 3 bricks on the second page. It helped serve as an independent symbol for what the week was about.





The back designs didn't go any better. The idea I liked best was the idea of putting a map of the campus and saying "Where do you want to help?". Otherwise I didn't come up with anything I was particularly excited to use. Adrienne agreed that my designs weren't very well developed so I would have to step it up on in order to produce some viable roughs.

The Project of Olympic Proportions - Final Poster

Here it is.

The Project of Olympic Proportions - Final Draft

I just made a few changes to the overall design of the archery poster. I tweaked the title so that it seemed a little more dynamic as opposed to just another lie of type. In order to do that I had to learn how to turn type into objects, so I could play around with the shape among other things. I also added a sort of watermark of China in the upper left corner This helped deal with some of my previous issues with negative space. I also added the second line of text in the title, which by offsetting it I think it helps the design from feeling too heavy on the right side. I also added a target behind the date to try and help draw the viewers attention.

As for the font problems, I changed the font for the main body of the text to something that was a little more readable and made it follow the edge of the quiver. The jpg file on my thumbdrive of the final edition is corrupted, so I'll post the image tomorrow.

The Project of Olympic Proportions - Roughs

So, through a combination of Blogger making a few of my posts disappear and then not letting me log on, I'm going to write a little retrospectively.

For the comps, I managed to get them all done in fairly quick order. I started with my favorite idea, the soccer ball with the image of China in place of one of the pentagon panels. My goal here was to not overwhelm the viewer with motion. I wanted to create a sense of ideal anticipation. The hardest part in the construction of this piece was the creation of the ball itself. As anyone who has ever tried, a soccer ball is quite possibly the hardest thing to accurately depict. Luckily, my job was much easier since I just had to trace an image with pen tool. I will admit that tracing China took a little while though. My only problem with this design as it stands is the font. I had trouble figuring out a font that I thought would fit really well with the design as a whole. I also didn't want to get very wordy with the rules of the game. As a certified soccer ref myself, I figured all an audience would really need to know is the concept of scoring, how many players are on the field, etc.

My next design was to be for the archery events in the Beijing Olympics. I think that it turned out fairly well. The quiver helped direct attention to the title, while emphasizing what the poster was about in a single glance. I was also very pleased with the effect of the flights on the arrows. I had been afraid it would have just been a distraction, but they actually worked quite well. On Adrienne's advice, I had incorporated the Olympic rings into the object of the quiver. This was a good idea. It allowed the rings to be used in the design without beating the viewer over the head with them and screaming "This is for the Olympics!" Once again I feel that the weak point is my font choice. I thought about using something medieval looking as a reference tot he age of the sport, but I thought that would be too specific and might be a little too centered on Western culture when this is an international event in an Eastern country.



Finally comes my design for the Olympic table tennis competition. Once again I was shooting for simplicity. I had trouble in my thumbnails with coming up with something interesting, without being over the top, because it is still ping pong. It is a rather simple sport, and wanted to try and reflect that. Initially I was going to use just a stationary paddle but after talking with Adrienne about the thumbnails, I decided to add a little motion to it. In contrast with my other designs, I think that the font works well with the overall feeling of simplicity.

During the critiques, Brett and Chrissy helped me out with a few things. They gave me a few suggestions of different fonts I could use, and warned me against being too fond of negative space. I'm planning on working with the archery design for my final project. Previously, I had thought that my soccer design would be the most successful, but everyone appeared to be more fond of the quiver design, so I'm going to go with it.

The Project of Olympic Proportions - Thumbnails

After the completion of our projects dealing with pictographs, our visual communication class needed to move on. We spent a day or so learning the basic ins and outs of In Design. It seems like a really neat program. I can definitely see how handy it would be for multiple page layouts. We have the option for using it in our next project, but I'm going to see how far I can go in AI first.

Our assignment is to develop a 8.5" x 11" poster for one of the events at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. We need to include some of the game's history, the rules, and the times of broadcast for here in the United States.

Naturally, the first step of the design process is to come up with a batch of thumbnail sketches as a method of brainstorming. I chose three different sports with which to come up with 20 different poster designs. First, I chose soccer because of my love for the sport. My other choices were archery and table tennis. Archery because I've always thought it was pretty cool, and ping pong because I think it's under appreciated.

I like my thumbnails on the whole. On the whole, I think these are stronger than my last bunch. I particularly liked most of the soccer ones. The only problem is that I felt that they would be more successful if they were designs for the FIFA World Cup (ex. the one where it is the world fading into a soccer ball). After talking with Adrienne, I decided to work with the design that placed an image of China in place one of the panels on a soccer ball ( It would be even better if we were working with France, but you can't have everything).

As for the archery and ping pong designs, I think that the designs chosen were definitely the best available (the quiver and the math problem). All that remains to do now is to develop these into some rough designs for Friday 29th.

The Pictograph Project - Finished Product

So, after several several changes to both of my designs, I completed my designs to about my satisfaction. There is still the part of me that feels that things could be a little better, but I'm sure things will be smoother as I grow accustomed to using Adobe Illustrator.

There isn't too much to say about the changes I made to the jellyfish design. I made the person swimming as planned, and had him/her being stung. Otherwise, the only main difference is that I rotated some of the jellies in the background to give it a more natural feeling. Difficulties I ran into were getting the proportions of the swimmer's limbs correct. I feel that this feels about right however. There was also an issue with getting the water to act transparent, but with Adrienne's assistance the problem was resolved.

As for the pictograph dealing with shoes, the redesign went much more smoothly. Here the biggest problem was getting and outline around the arm. It took a lot of playing with the pen tool to get it right. The only problem I have with the finished work is that I wish I could have overlapped the shoes a little bit. I tried for a long while to figure out how to trace the edge of the shoe in white, but ended up settling for the design seen here.

There were little problems here and there, but for the most part I think that the project went smoothly. It was definitely a good way to become accustomed to using a new design program before moving onto more complex projects later in the semester.

The Pictograph Project - Comp Images