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.