Chili Poster Final Layout

Here is the final layout for my Chili Poster design.  Getting this together took a little extra effort because I have CS4 on my pc so I had to convert it and do a little extra work to get it to run on the CS3 software in the lab.  The next step will be to print this out as a 11 x 17 poster and then mat it for presentation.

My advice on this piece had been to add an echo image of the chili pepper fading away just beside the original but with just black and white that would have been extremely hard so what i did was add another pepper but mirrored and resized it to add a bit of variety and balance to the whole thing.  During our critique I was told that I should adjust the Chili Cook-off Header by removing the frame and underline and resizing it to take up more of the space.  Also the boxes at the bottom had some formatting issues that need to be touched up.  Other than that I'd say I really like the look of the poster.  To me it is nice and clean and easily legible and that's what I was going for.  If I could change anything that I'd done it would have been a more creative design, we were the ones picking them out though, because there were a few people who had just great ideas so even if there layout was a bit funky their posters still looked fantastic.

Dream Ride Poster Thumbnails

Today in DSP we were told to meet with a classmate to discuss our thumbnail sketches and to pick our favorite design from the ten.  The person I met with had some greatly detailed sketches but the one we chose was fairly simple compared to the rest, it had different four different colored squares, red, yellow, green, and blue, and each had a washed out copy of the car in it. The only thing that didn't quite work was the type which made the layout kind of hard to read.

 

As for my sketches we picked out the one advertising a Automobile Painting company that I made up.  Alot of my sketches were pretty stingy with color has we had just come from using only black and white.  I also had a hard time focusing on a specific thing to advertise so my sketches had a variety of subjects. Anyway the one we chose has a car that has had a bucket of paint splashed on it and it will have a line in it somewhere saying, "Leave the paint to the Professionals."  I like the idea but the logo and the paint can will have to be hand created and look really nice to fit in with the detailed illustration of the car itself that we will be using from our Dream Ride project.

Here are the rest of the sketches.

Helvetica documentary

Earlier this week we watched a full length documentary on the history and influence of the typeface Helvetica.  The documentary had several designers and artists talking about their experience and impressions of the font.  While watching this film I was suprised to see how many businesses use Helvetica in their logo.  It is absolutely everywhere and I am very curious to see how it would look in a few of my own designs.  From what I gathered most artists who like the font do so because it is very clean and professional.  On the other hand those who dislike it think it is very generic and bland when compared to other unique type faces.  

The history behind the font was somewhat interesting. It was created during the 1950's in Switzerland and became a very popular font for magazines and logos over the next few decades.  Today it can be seen almost anywhere and you probably wouldn't ever know it unless someone pointed it out to you.  Helvetica is almost everywhere you just have to know what to look for.

Classroom Critique

Today we were told to write a critique for one of our classmate's Chili Cook-off competition poster layouts. 

  "I found that the landscape format and giant chili pepper along with the dynamic heading really stick out and work well together.  The area where the text will be put however may need careful attention as it could be a  bit too small, depending on the font size you use.  The chili pepper illustration looks fine but you might consider adding something like a bowl or cookbook to add a little more clarification to the event.  You might have to adjust the size of the illustration as well.  Keep it big but make sure it doesn't crowd the layout too much.  The text heading is interesting  but you might consider keeping it consistent.  Either tilt the word Chili as well or look at putting it a different way all together." 

Spring Semester begins

This week marks the beginning of our spring semester here at Truman. Fresh from spring break, except for the major cold I caught, I'm ready to tackle our new projects. Today I am presenting my Design II project which is a 12' X 12' cube of the game clue. It is set up with different planes of the mansion on the inside and with mystery murder themed information on the outside.

For my Digital Software class, we were tasked with redesigning this poster for a chili cook-off held on campus. However this will be the first time that we will have to design on paper and then put that design and recreate it on the computer. This process will require a little extra care in certain areas. One aspect pointed out by our teacher was 'copyfitting' which we were supposed to look up and here is what I found.

Copyfitting is the process of making sure a line or block of text is not too small or too large once you have figured in point size and font. If you go over the space you are given it is often called an overset. To combat this you could adjust the font size as a whole or the space in between individual letters, lines or paragraphs. Sometimes complicated situations arise but each must be dealt with in a slightly different way. Using the skills we have learned in Indesign so far I'm confident this won't be too big of an issue.

Midterm Portfolio

The last piece is a mood composition.  We had to illustrate a mood and I chose laziness.  I used a bunch of clocks and tied them together with an infinity symbol.  Finally I added some overlays and a nice relaxing blue tint.  I chose to put this in the portfolio because it looks really cool at least in my opinion. This file wasn't loading with the others so I posted it seperately, enjoy!

Midterm Portfolio

Finally we have the Photoshop projects.  The first was a touch up for a damaged photo we had.  My photo had some wrinkles in it and I used the clone stamp to fix it up.  After that I used contrast levels to fix some of the areas where there was a bend in the photo. I decided to use this excercise because the end result looks almost perfect compared to the original so I'd say mission accomplished for all intents and purposes.

 

Midterm Portfolio

These are my Illustrator projects.  The first one is a vector drawing of a japanese print that was given to us in class. We had to go over it with the pen tool and add colors to match those of the print.  While my internal layers got a little jumbled during the process the project turned out looking pretty decent.    I ended up redoing the entire thing in the correct way, keeping my layers seperate and clean.  This is the original followed by the vector.

This was our first big project, our Dream Ride.  This project had us picking out a vehicle and then reproducing it using vectors in illustrator. It was quite a big project but fairly straight forward. This was the first project where I was completely aware of what to do in illustrator.  I was finally able to keep my layers straight on my first attempt.  The grill on the front of the car definitely took alot of work but it came out well.  I went back and touched up some aspects of the interior and side of the car for the portfolio. I also added a gradient background to create a showroom atmosphere. This is the original with the project directly below it.

Midterm Portfolio

This week is midterms here at Truman. For my Digital Software and Processing class I have to submit a portfolio of works from Adobe Indesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop.

Here is my project from Indesign. This was featured in my last post. It's an interview with the level designer for the new Prince of Persia game. Our task was to recreate it in indesign.

2 page Magazine spread

Hello everyone, This is what I've been working on the last few days. It's a redesign of an interview with the level designer that worked on the new Prince of Persia game. This was a project for my Design Software and Processing class at Truman University.

All in all I thought it came out well. There's definitely a lot of work that goes into each individual article. As you can see with the background and transparencies. I couldn't get the image in the back to match up but I created a similar effect.


These are the orginals, followed by the redone versions.