Final Portfolio: Final Word

Today is our last day in Digital Software and Processes (DSP), well unless you count Final's day in which we are having a breakfast/party.  I'd have to say despite the amount of projects and work we put in this class it still went by pretty fast.  I know, how cliched.  Unfortunately due to a number of factors I am no longer an art major.  I've dropped art to a minor and picked up Computer Science, my previous minor, as my new major.  I just think it fits me better.  DSP however has been the most influential and helpful art class that I've taken over the last year.  It will really help me even in a Computer Science environment in a number of ways as subtle as they may be.  

I was talking with my dad on the phone the other day and he was telling me that it was a very great exercises to be taking computer classes and art classes as they work both sides of the brain. My dad who works at the State Health Center works in a computer environment and has told me that some of the smartest people he knows are total slobs when it comes to being organized or creative in their work.  If you can be a creative programmer you have a lot more potential than some one who just follows along with everyone else.

My history teacher also commented on my major switch.  He gave me a very down to earth comment.  He said that my major/minor combination was very unique and that I should design computers.  I think he was taking a comical approach to the whole thing but it was a serious thought that I appreciated deeply.  I would like to work with art but I think I'd like to do it for myself instead of being pressured by someone else.  I'm OCD enough as it is so I'd be a rather hard client for myself.  I like to draw little comics and customize my personal space at home so I could definitely see myself as the guy with the coolest office in a computer business for what thats worth.  But seriously, learning how to use Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign has been very intriguing and will definitely be useful for business and social tasks alike.  

So before I sign out for the last time I'd like to thank Mr. Nelson, my professor, who despite having me go to class at 7:30 AM, was very helpful and friendly throughout the semester.  I won't be back in the art building next semester but after that I hope to continue my minor with a few more classes down the road.  I hope you all have enjoyed this intellectual trip through a semester's worth of DSP classes.  I thank you and present my final portfolio.

Final Portfolio: Photoshop Proficiency

My best example from Photoshop is my Mood Presentation project shown here.  I chose laziness as my mood and had a fun time coming up with the concept.  I used a lot of clipping paths in this project along with masks and transparencies to create the echoing effect you see on most of the objects. Everything was laid on this cool clock background that I found online. After piecing all of these together I added a blue gradient over the entire thing to create a hazy sleepy feel.  I like the infinity sign in the center quite a bit because it was orginally just an ordinary symbol but then I added a cool neon effect and some blurs to it and it came out looking quite original.  I just really like the look of this project.  All of the clocks and the infinity sign, wishing their was time for everything.  I hope you enjoy as much as I do.

Final Portfolio: Illustrator Proficiency

This portfolio entry is from my Dream Ride project from first term.  I chose it because of the sheer amount of work that went into it.  While the overall look is quite nice, it's attention to the little details and shadows that most stood out to me when looking back on it.  Using Illustrator it was nice to be able to use the gradient mesh tool to simulate those rounded corners of the car.  Transparencies and shadows also played a large role in adding some realism to the windshield and floor.  This was my first completely regulated Illustrator project where I took care of all my nodes and their placement, making sure there were no incomplete paths or errors anywhere.  Looking at it now it looks a little dated as I have been working with the Illustrator frequently since then but I still enjoy seeing it and asking my friends and family if they can tell it apart from the real car at a distance. That's always fun.

Final Portfolio: Indesign Proficiency

    For my best Indesign project I chose the magazine spread rework.  We had to find a magazine spread and copy it down into Indesign as best as we could so we could see how much work goes into something like that.  I chose this interview from an art book that I have.  It's an interview with the level designer for the very illustrative Prince of Persia video game released last year.  I picked this spread for its content as well as its aesthetics.  I really liked the concept art that was presented as well.  While creating this spread I had quite a time figuring out the typesetting while keeping it all within the margins.  I wasn't sure what font or size they used so I did my best to duplicate it.  The pictures after being scanned in turned out quite nicely and I was pleased with their overall quality.  The page numbers, corner designs and logo were all made within Illustrator and ported over.  I spent a lot of time going over the specific files on this project.  Making sure all links were in CMYK and at proper resolutions.  All of this combined effort leads to a very solid presentation I'm glad I could share with you.

Final Portfolio: Most Creative Concept

Looking back on the multitude of projects we had to do it was a little hard to pick the most creative concept because I'd say that most of the projects we did involved quite a bit of creativity.  I chose my Mood Presentation because we were given basically nothing to go on.  No pictures were given to us, and we were basically told to just go and do it.   I picked laziness or procrastination as my mood.  I thought I would use clocks because when I'm procrastinating I tend to look at the clock a lot whether or not that is a good thing is hard to tell.   Also if it has to do with time what else can you really use to illustrate that besides a clock?  So I decided to use a lot of different clocks and arrange them in an effective manner.  One of the cooler things that I did while creating this composition is the reversal of the bottom left clock.  It says it is 80:01 well it really began as 10:08 and  I just flipped it which I thought was pretty creative and unique.  Also adding the infinity symbol added to the procrastination mood as I wish I had an infinite amount of time so I wouldn't have to procrastinate in the first place.

Final Portfolio: Typesetting

For my typesetting example I chose 

my redone Magazine Spread.  I had to type in the copy myself then I had to find a similar size and font to fit everything into the layout.  Setting margins and tabs while controlling leading made for a very interesting job. For some reason my tabs were acting oddly when I started the formatting but in the end they decided to cooperate with me.  I tried to get the paragraph

form and text to line up as close as I could with the original and in the end it didn't turn out too bad.  Luckily there wasn't too much in the lines of text wrapping around photographs.  There was a small issue with size though.  It took me a while to adjust the point size and leadding so that the text would fit but would also look similar in size and style.  

My favorite part of the typesetting was probably going in and adding the extra text throughout the layout.  Anything from the super easy page numbers to the picture caption and title heading, it was fun because it was fairly simple, usually just messing with colors and type faces, and it really helped add resemblance to the original piece.

This piece in my portfolio was a tough choice.  I had a few other projects to choose from that had a lot of text flow but because this one gave me the most trouble I decided to choose it because overall I was just as pleased with the result when I was finished and that means something to you when your finished.

Final Portfolio: Structure

I thought that my best example of structure came from the Chili Cook-Off poster.  The simplicity of black and white really helps you focus on the layout and structure because you aren't distracted by color and other details.  I really liked this layout because of its simplicity but also because of its not entirely symmetrical feel.  It looks very clean and organized but there is enough asymmetrical kinks thrown in to offset it and make it interesting.  Also I thought the chili pepper illustrations and the font went very well together.  When I look at this poster it just seems as good as it can get layout wise.  I can't really think of anyway to improve it in the slightest which is better than I can say about some of my other projects.  There's almost always some little thing I could tweak if given the chance but not on this one.

Final Portfolio: Copyfitting

My best example of traditional copy fitting has to be from Marceline dummy layout.  We didn't start copy fitting till fairly late in the semester so this was one of our first projects where we actually did this.  Copy fitting, for those of you who don't know, is the process of speccing out how large a given block of text will be on paper when it is finished.  You need to know what font you will use and what point size it will be beforehand.  I'm not a big fan of copy fitting, especially after this project as it required quite a bit.  Math and I don't mix very well and although the math is fairly simple multiplication and addition there was enough of it to make me start to resent it a little.  

In my pamphlet I specced it to 9 point verdana with a 12 point leading.  I was afraid for awhile that I wouldn't be able to fit the massive amount of copy that we had but after sizing down the last page's local attractions to 8 point verdana with 9 point leading I barely fit it all on in there.  Having a pamphlet design can really limit your space as each fold creates another margin which uses up some more of your space.  For the most part my dummy layout came out fairly close to my final production.  I did end up changing the layout a bit but the copy fit the same none the less.

Final Portfolio: Marker Comp

This was actually our first marker comp that we did in class this year.  I chose to put it my portfolio because I spent a lot of time on it and for being my first real marker comp I think it turned out pretty well despite some color overlapping issues.  I'm still not sure that I really enjoy doing colored marker comps but I'd have to say they do have this certain style to them that I like.  While I enjoyed the end result the process itself involved with these markers comps can get a little messy.  I'm used to using pencils and fine ink pens so a bleeding markers was a little too bold for me but if you take your time it's nothing you can't handle.  

Final Portfolio: Colored Thumbnails

These are the thumbnail comps from the Social Dancing magazine spread.  I chose to put this in my portfolio because I had a lot of fun come up with the different designs.  I really appreciated this set of comps because it helped me identify some problems with some of the ideas that I had and helped me choose the one that in the end turned out better than expected.   All the pictures in square frames had been previously picked out while most of those that were stand alones were just created on the spot, I would either had to have found a similar picture or done an illustration.  Overall have the color in their helps to bring a little more life and style to what your design is going to look and even if you change most of the colors like I did it helps to give a sense of what the design is going to feel like when it is completed. When viewing these take note that they are rough sketches and not too detailed up close.

Final Portfolio Incoming

The rest of this week will be spent touching up our old projects and refining our processes in order to gather together a digital portfolio similar to the one I presented at Midterm.  I'm not entirely sure of what I'm going to present.  I believe most of my greatest Illustrator and Photoshop work was from earlier in the semester due to the second half being mostly magazine and pamphlet spreads.  I'll have to go searching through my library of files that I've amassed and see what I can pull up.

Social Dancing Final Production

We were instructed to finish our opposite sex magazine spreads over the weekend.  I finished mine up in the lab before leaving for home and came back to a nicely printed project Sunday afternoon.  The only unexpected result was that the background color on the print is slightly darker than intended but it still looks fine.   Overall I am quite content with how this project went.  No major hitches along the way and it looks nice and clean.   The only OCD thing I can comment on his the position of the women on the second spread.  I would have liked to have had her leaning more into the text.

Final Comp of Marceline Pamphlet

After going back to the art building and fixing my first print, which got cut off by the printers no print zone, I finally finished the Marceline Project.  I think it turned out fairly well.  The only thing I would change would be the paper type.   I used glossy photo paper which sounds clean and professional but in this case it made it extremely hard to fold neatly.  Despite the paper problem the folds were not as bad as they could have been.  Looking at everyone else's project I'd say mine fits in nicely.

Social Dancing Marker Comp

Today we put our opposite sex magazine spread up on the board.  We examined everyone's briefly and gave a quick overview of any problems we might have.  Professor Nelson said mine was pretty solid and I would have to start working on it before I could really identify any problems.  I'm most cautious about the header as I'm not sure if I want to add a photo backdrop or not and if so whether or not to add cut outs of dancers along the sides.   Also the peach color in my marker set is absolutely horrible.  Both the people in my marker sketch look like they went tanning for about 2 days straight.  Anyway I was satisfied in my fairly solid design on this project and I look forward to having a smooth transition with the digital version.

Marceline Marker Comp

Today our class was told to give a presentation of our design that we had made over the week.  My design was pretty solid, I felt but the marker job could have been a lot better.  There were quite a few people who had very impressive marker comps.  Quite a few people had some very unique designs usually with some custom illustrations they planned on using.  I need to examine my design and see if I can fit in another picture somewhere if I can to make things a little more interesting.  Over the next week we will be working our designs into Indesign and getting the whole thing printed out for next Friday

Social Dancing Magazine Thumbnails

Our next project is all about designing a composition for a audience of mainly the opposite sex.  The guys, myself included were assigned an article on Social Dancing, in essence any type of ballroom dancing.  The girls were given an article on fishing.  I had a few different main ideas with my layouts.  They are supposed to be a 2 page spread for a magazine so I have to keep in mind how much I can fit into those 2 pages while still having enough room for all the copy.  I really like the idea of the couple dancing across both pages, as seen in the middle but I think it would create quite a mess with all the copy that needs to be fit in.  I think the bottom left layout is the most efficient and clean.  I'd like to go with that and perhaps add a more decorative header with a picture dropout of a ballroom behind the title to give it some interest.  There would also be a box near the end of the article housing instructions or specific information about dancing.

Marceline Pamphlet Design

Our next big project is a pamphlet for Marceline Missouri, the town in which Walt Disney was born.  The first step was to come up with some inked comps from our sketches and then share them with a fellow classmate.  We were to discuss each other's designs and help pick out which one we thought would look best.

My partner had a few sketches with different Disney cartoon characters present in each.  In the 

end we chose the one featuring Pinocchio, his trademarked nose would have a leaf shaped like the state of Missouri with a star to denote Marceline's location.  This would be the inside spread of the pamphlet while the out

side would feature a picture of Disney and some personal information and a map with direction on the back cover.

My sketches were a little more general,  I didn't have time to

 add in color but I spent some time coming up with some different layouts, making sure to have room to fit an essential map in to all of them.  I also had to make sure there was enough room for a description of each of the attractions as there were quite a few in the list.  My Partner and I settled on the comp you see below.  It's a foldout design tha

t features a picture of Walt Disney on the front with a picture of Marceline layered underneath.  On the inside 

you have a large foldout map with detailed information of each attraction on the 

sides.  On the back it will have some additional information regarding tours and travel information.  My inspiration for this layout came from the pamphlets you pick up at theme parks, those that contain a big map of the park with numbers associated with each attraction located on the map.  I thought it would be nice to have all of this if you were visiting a new area.

If you like to see my other designs here they are.  The rest of these are all booklet layouts meaning they are only folded once down the middle as opposed to my foldout pamphlet that I chose for my final design

 

Criark Paints Final Design

Here is the final version of my Criark Paint advertisement.  I think the paint effects turned out surprisingly well.  They were all done within Indesign using the pen tool and then messing with the opacity.  I created the paint bucket from scratch, adding a label and shadow to make it look a little more real.  For the company logo I used the Casual Apple font which look fairly unique but I tried to add a little reflective quality of paint to it by giving it white highlights.  It didn't work quite as well as I had hoped but I think it gets the point across.  I think the design I originally had translated to the computer really well.  The parts that had to be added in don't look too out of place and everything seems to fit together which is all I could have hoped for.

Criark's Paint Marker Comp

Here is the final result for my car promotion design for Criark's Paint.  Criark's is a made up paint shop that will be advertised by this poster.  Essentially the poster shows my dreamride project having paint smeared on it with what looks like a paintbrush from a regular old paint can.  In the copy it says "Leave this job to the Professionls"  to kind of imply that car painting is not a do it yourself kind of job.  

My next step will be to recreate this on the computer using illustrator and indesign and then to print this off as a 13x19 poster.  I'll make sure to post the final print when it's completed.

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.

Grand Opening

Hello everyone, this is Kevin Gathright. I have started a blog at the request of one of my college professors as I thought it would be a great way to keep people updated and informed on some of the cooler more entertaining side of culture. I'll be back to check your poll information regarding content and will update with more suggestions. Thanks for checking in.