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.