Final Portfolio

   Well, for the final portfolio, I reworked nearly everything.  I tweaked and tightened up everything, making everything look it's sharpest...at least that I know how--- all in the hopeful expection to impress my client and recieve an A in this class :)

The set of color thumbnail color comps that i chose actually came from the very first assignment that we did. For some reason I thought

 the thumbnails had to be in color, and they were really well done and tight. They were to advertise that the writing center is open. So I went back into my t

humbnails and tightened them up and made them even more beautiful than before! 

This next one that I have here is my best 

example of a marker comp. This one was also my first attempt at marker comping. Originally it was alright, and it served it's purpose in it's time. But the flower just wasn't good enough for this portfolio, soI wen in and

 took more markers

, pens and color pencils and really made it pop!

Copyfitting was difficult on my

 first try, and it turned out sloppy and m

essy. But on the 2 page magazine spread it turned out much better. BUT you could tell it was still free-handed-ish. So I did a really smart re-do...........and then I messed that one up........so I di

d it again.......and it went well......very well :)

 

Well, those were my hand-done projects. Now for the computer work. 

For my best example of a creative concept I chose my HOTWHEELS design. I liked this one because it was all my work, my copy, my car

 etc. This project in a sense was probably one of the more open ones, so it provided oppportunity for me to

 be creative! :) I chose the headline the the event, the colors, and even found a special font for this one out in dafont.com! 

My best use of typography as well as my best design would definitely be the Marceline pamphlet that we had to do to advertise the

 disney attractions there. I like this one a lot because I had to do a lot of  "pre-designing" to do beforehand for this one and although it tur

ned out slightly different than my marker comp, it ended up being a very good difference. For the first time I really li

ked the arrangment of text as well as the colors of the headlines etc. 

which i e

xtracted from one of the p

hotos in my layout

. The whole composition seems much better than anything I've done all semester! I am please with the use of text in the gi

ven amount of space as well as my use of photos, and the way they were photoshoped and all :) 

To demonstrate proficiancy in InDesign, I chose the two-page magazine spread. This piece has my own graphics, as well as a phototshoped image off of google, and some other links and fonts I like it because it is simple and men like si

mplicity, so it draws the right crowd 

it, but it also is easy to read the way the layout is and the concept of the "one" image being sep

arted into two als

o seems to work pretty well.

and for photoshop I chose my mood illustration. It was good as it was, I really didn't need to go in and fix anything from when I did it last semester, but I decided to see if I could do anything special to really make it look real. So i messed with the color curves and brightness and contrast stuff, and worked it a little 

to make it slightly more b

elievable. Th

e mood is suppose to be "Hope." 

And last but not...ok maybe it is least.... :) JUST KIDDING...oh its the car alright! For proficiency in illustrator I chose the car t

hat we were assigned to do durning the first half of the semester. It was already pretty well done---EXCEPT there were a few spots on the hood of the car that showed through and weren't very tight. So for the final portfolio I went in with fine detailed corrections and made it much better! 

2 page fishing magazine

This layout was a whole lot different than the Marceline pamphlet. I had more text and more space to deal with as well as a more solid concept as well, as pictures that Rusty gave us to work with. But with this spread, we only had two pages to deal with and we had to find our own pictures.

A pulled a picture from google. But the photo I chose for it to be 300 ppi would have been like and inch big. So when I maximized it to be like 8 x 8 It was super pixalated. So I ended up making a graphic out of it in photoshop. But that worked out nicely because I needed to make a graphic for my little fish on the other page of the spread. So I think it matched up well.

 I will say Rusty, that I'm actually lagitimately enjoying some of this stuff. I love explaining these things to other people. It's really fascinating actually. 

I dont' know if I have my next fifteen years quite figured out, but I do know, that I've come this far with Graphic Design, and I don't think I could bear missing out on all the things we will be learning in the next 3 years.

 :)

Finally Marceline Disney Pamphlet:

I am SO happy about this pamphlet! 

So thankful!

It's Spring!!!!

umm... I can't really complain. I suppose learning is the point, so all the problems I came across taught me things I didn't previously know.

A couple of problems I came across was figuring out how to do 300 ppi and having the correct physical size. So essentially with my big photos, I made them into graphics, which was fun to discover. 

The second problem I had was the printing process. I had to get some upperclassmen "pro" help because Rusty never explained the process :). But anyway I think I figured it out...so...cool!

Well, as you will notice, this is the same pamphlet design and layout from my past post. But Here I have finished up my copyfitting and I went in with some of my graphics with markers to tighten them up. Every other person in the class came up with there own graphics and other pictures from the internet. That didn't even cross my mind really, since Rusty included so many options to choose from on titanium. But people had some really good ideas, so I might include a graphic or two. But I also thought that since my pictures are so large on my layout, that I might not need to include anything more.

I worked more hours on this puppy than most!......and yet....I still hadn't finished my copyfitting. Copyfitting is an interesting concept and when you've done one paragraph correctly you feel like you've really accomplished something. I came up with a problem though, I could hardly duplicate the process more than once. You would think it would get easier. I suppose maybe it will eventually :) For my presentation, I will finish up the copyfitting, and tighten up my graphics.

Well, I like this layout quite a bit. The biggest problem will be finding and image that is big enough for a 16x 20 layout. An other big problem is making sure all the text fits. But I like the look, and the order of things here as well as the colore. If those two big issues become an unsolvable problem, I have a couple of other thumbnails that I am decently pleased with to fall back on, that don't have very large images and have more space open for text.

This is was the thumbnail design chosen to be done in a full-blown -out marker comp! Basically the top right quadrant, would be my front page and the headline will say, Disney comes to town. here the photo I chose to incorporate was the photo of downtown Marcalene with the Disney logo. Page #2, or the one on the bottom left quadrant will have an image on the right and an image on the left with text around it, while page #3 I was thinking of having a transparent photo and putting text on top of it, but that might look a little wonky right next to page #2. On the last page I would have the photo image of Disney world along with the statue of Disney himself and Micky pointing up towards the last page of text/map of marcalene. But I might be switching page #3 and #4 's concepts. I probably will have to play around with it a little more before I marker everything up.

I had a lot of fun with this project,

I integrated a couple of my thumbnails into one, to create a more visually interesting composition.

I think the weakest part of my comp. is definitely the type, everything is crooked, something that can easily be resolved on the computer :).

Chili Poster

Well, originally I wasn't very pleased by the choice of which chili poster I was going to have to re-do, being such a simple design. But in the end when i had to re-make graphics and text etc. I was thankful for the simple design my partner had chosen. The good thing about her decision on which thumbnail she chose, was that she suggested I use a few of the graphics from one of my other thumbnails. So i incorporated in a graphic from one of my other thumbnails, to give the simple design a little more interest and appeal. So when I enlarged the thumbnail to be a 11x17 I got a few suggestions here and there on how to fix and rearrange some space. I made my graphics in Illustrator, then copy and pasted them over to InDesign and included all the text I had in mind. In class critique not much was said in favor of my design, but then, not much was said as a negative either. i think my design in the end was over-all maybe technically correct, but did not give off much of a "Chili feeling" :). My creativity with design on the computer is limited, mostly because I feel paralyzed a lot of times by the technical difficulty....BUT I will conquor and move past that aspect.

The reason there are two scans, is because by original mounted layout was too large for the scanner. One of my concepts that I went with was "HOTWHEELS Come to Life!" on Aug. 31st etc.... i really like this concept because my car is sporty and, well reminds me of those little hotwheel cars that my brothers used to always play with. It is hard to make ten different layouts with the same one image. Basically you either zoom in on it or zoom out on it :) So that is basically what I did with the diffferent layouts, trying diffferent colors and a couplel of different concepts. I also thought of that famous saying... "This is where the Rubber meets the Road", this kind of suggest getting right to the point! or "No more messing around". And the odd 0ne in there with the tree was mostly because I love to draw trees and I really wanted to make the tree and the car work together in the same layout, so I wrote something silly about the environment. If I use that layout with the tree I think I will flip the car image to face the other direction and make my promotion concept a little different. But I will most likely go with one of the HotWheel layouts, those are my favorite!

Halvetica

I think the biggest thing I took away from this video, was the jobs that some of the people who were interviewed had. I mean who would have ever thought there would be jobs out there for people who know allll this stuff about what i use to call a font. When I was a kid I used Word, or PrintShop, or PaintShop, programs which had max like 10 different options except Word possibly had a few more. But little did I know there were thousands out there, and that people actually knew these typefaces by name! Not only that but worked with them for a living to send thousands of different messages each saying something completely different as you walk down the street. Before I knew anything about Halvetica I had just began to notice that it sent certain messages across that you couldn't communicate with any other font. When I discovered this, in my head I was thinking I had almost uncovered a secret about type. Little did I know that secret has long been revealed and is already almost outdated. Makes me wonder what the "new halvetica will turn out to be :)  

This image out of her/his 15 different sketches, was the one I thought was the most visually interesting. It might not be the most exciting one, but something about the flow of the graphic as well as the headline draws my attention to it in a good way. Also the image and the graphic seem to lead my eye down to read the text in the way it should be read! Also I like the corner gradiant triangle things, they don't distract, but definitely seem to enhance the layout. Good job!

For the peices I chose to include in my portfolio, I went through and chose the peices that demonstrated the best technical, and design skills out of the other peices I've worked on. One of my biggest problems with the exercises that we have been doing in DSP is actually the technical issue, saving things the correct way, putting things on titanium in places where I can find them, turning, making sure pages are the right size before I start, margins and columns are hard for me to figure out as well as document sizes. But these peices I had more help with

 and hope they demonstrate a least a small measure of growth from where I was to where I am now and where I'm headed in this class! :)

Photoshop and I didn't get along very well in the beginning, so the first couple of projects I did were just me using the computer and tapping into this foreign language that was beautiful but unwilling to let me enjoy in it. But after a while we communicated slightly and I learned a few tricks and almost enjoyed it! The daymap is the first composition I chose to include here in my portfolio it demonstrates at least slightly my ability to crop and transfer images as well as deal with layers and photo discoloration.

The second piece I chose here was a similar project in that we were suppose to take several images and put them into one composition, but instead of just randomness, it was suppose to create a mood. A young friend of mine just takes pictures all the time, wherever she can and  posts them on her personal blog for people to enjoy and use, so I grabbed some images of a trip that she took to Europe with her parents and then a couple from her home in Texas. The mood I was shooting for was something like bringing hope to the stone jungle or life being brought forth amongst no life. Basically "Hope" would be a good summery of the mood I was trying to create. This was definitely an easy project for me which surprised me and I was excited to create something I liked that accomplished the assignment and the purpose and mood I was going for ---and that I got it done quickly!

The InDesign piece I included is the magazine spread exercise we had to complete for an InDesign project. I chose this one not because it looks super impressive, but because it is clean, correct and looks good, as opposed to a lot of the scattered InDesign projects I've done in the past. The bumps I came across along the way were dealing with de-screaning the image in the first place and making it the right size to fit the document. But with a little bit of technical help and tightening up other areas of the peice, I think it ended up a lot sharper than I was expecting which is a very good thing!

The next one here are my sweet sunglasses! I was very excited during and after this project because, I went into it knowing I could handle it and finished the project satisfied, I think it demonstrates some hills that I FINALLY crossed over when learning the pen tool, gradients, colors etc. 

The next illustrator project that we had assigned to us was "The CAR". I went to google and found a simple smooth blue Venturi for my project, so that I could focus on getting past a few more of those technical humps like using gradient meshes etc. But this project ate me alive! For the first 10-15 hours I realized I was happy with maybe two shapes out of all I had been working on! I asked the computer several times if she wanted to fight. But really it was just a matter of simplifying shapes and gradients, and creating a much smoother and unified peice rather than getting intensly lost in detail that didn't even look good. After I realized that things were finally falling into place, I used some of the skills I'd aquired while working on the suglasses and perfected, and tightened up some edges, and created a few more highlights and shine to finish it off. I turned it in much too late, but at least I learned from it and at least it looks good :)

2 page magazine

For the font I used ITC Machine for the headline, and Times New Roman 10pt for the text.

I had some difficulty with the sizing of my pages and margins, I was trying to get the page to be the size of my graphics, but got lost and confused in the process...surprised? Don't be.

I've was also confused as to the bleed, I don't think I did it correctly. Also when I scanned my images they scanned in nice and clear and I tweeked them in photoshop and then transferred them over to InDesign. But when i did this the quality was lost. So I tried saving it as a tiff, didn't work, then I tried saving as an EPS, that didn't work either...I think I missed something. I used .5 margins, and chose three columns. Over all I think if the excess edge was trimmed and the picture scanned correctly, and a possible bleed, it would look PERFECT :)