Week 4: Creativity

 The last two posts I was using a longer list from the same website- but for my last one for the class I decided to go with a different one. This week, after going over a few different websites, I chose a article written on Indeed, from their career guide. 

This list was interesting cause it had more ideas that went away from the typical putting pen on paper based content- and having my last few posts centered around producing content I wanted to find something that actually sparked creativity rather than pushing for just an outcome of it. One of the prompts suggested sitting back and enjoying an album and to try and picture it around you, to build up imagination in your brain, music is typically what I use for background noise when creating my work so I went with this option to be able to immerse myself in the music compared to just listening to it.

I recommend this to anyone that enjoys music, sometimes when we get busy in life we forget to actually sit back and enjoy things, below I'll attach a few of my favorite story telling songs that have quite a fun and imaginable world behind them.

Week 4: Design

 This week 

This week I spent a lot of time catching up on missing work, guilty as charged, and finally got a good chance to go through our textbook and reread the earlier chapters and highlight them- this week I had gone through chapters 8-9 and took away quite a bit of information.

The key things I took away from these segments of the book was-

• How to communicate with posters
• Structure throughout a piece

Week 3: Project

 Project week 3:

For this weeks project we had to replicate and create a magazine cover, but of "next months edition". While looking through the provided sources that broke down the different vocabulary of the elements that make up a cover page of a magazine- It had me thinking about what magazines I see often, my household is very, very hockey orientated, so there's a few magazines that I knew off the top of my head to use. Later on I decided to stay away from the big name magazines, as the fonts and styles are super uniform and plain, there is another, lesser known hockey magazine called USA Hockey, which is exclusive to members that pay to play in the nation. The style of magazine, while professional, gives off a young teen vibe and is super poppy, stylistic, and never follows strict uniform. The fonts they use differ vastly between each cover, which in it's own unique way is exactly what makes their "uniform". 

Going into photoshop the header of the magazine was pretty simple to make, the logos were readily available as SVG files (which I prefer over anything for logos). However I was not able to find a close enough type family for the "hockey" segment of the header- but I found this website called www.myfonts.com that uses photos you import to find you the closest alternitive of font. 

 

After building my header I went into choosing a background for the magazine- which was the photo the Utah hockey Club used to announce their jerseys, I took this in photoshop and used the "select subject" tool to be able to separate the players from the background so I could later add text behind them. 

Here is my final rendition;

Week 3: Exercise and Learning

 Week 3:

This week was filled with lots of new methods to continue utilizing photoshop. We covered the use of different blending layers, and more so we covered the use of fonts. In the online world of fonts there are many platforms that provide free to use type-families, like Dafont.com and Adobe fonts! After going over where to find fonts for our projects, in class we were able to see just how many different tools there are for just text alone, this included reshaping, resizing, and even being able to have the text follow a path made with the pen tool. All of these really helped me breakdown how graphic design in the wild uses tools like these.

Last week for my creative choice I had used a website that provides other artists with ways to get out of art block or to do simple doodles to keep up with their skills, I decided to use it again! As it had about 32 different choices. This week I went with this prompt: "Take a different route home and take photographs of the new things you see along the way" typically I jog home from work into my neighborhood, which has an alternitive back trail open, so I went the back way instead, this time keeping my eye out for photo opportunities.

Starting from work, in the parking lots we typically have a few types of birds that hangout by the grassy areas- I suspect this one was a type of cattle egret.

Sticking on the theme of birds, after leaving my job and heading into the back trail, there are a few powerlines, typically never of interest, but this day there was a lonely crow, who looked a little disheveled. 

Almost home! The sun started setting which made the clouds look pretty, I was also intrigued how closer to my work the whispy clouds had almost completely disappeared, as compared to the road next to my house having a really cool gradient effect. 

When I had gotten home there was a small cane toad hanging out on the back door, so I got as close as possible to take a photo, the frog stayed unbothered.

Finally when getting inside from a long work day I was able to sit and relax- my cat was quick to join me, and pose for a photo, I think the light mixing with her fur turned out pretty cool.

Week 2: Project and exercises

 This week:

This weeks project was to create a travel poster, this time utilizing even more things we had learned throughout the week. In the week we mostly covered different blending layers like darken, multiply, ect, and then we also covered how to use masking layers, which create a very interesting cutout effect that can later be changed with black and white. Additionally to what we learned in class, there were also a good amount of useful thing in the book chapters we were assigned, as I get further into the book, the more interesting and new things I get to learn. 

 In our projects we had to fill out a design brief, which is used to organize what your project will entail- below is what I had filled out.

Project Name: Visit the great white north!

 

Name of Client: The Canadian tourism sector.

 

Project Requirements:

 Natural wildlife of the area, the nation’s sport, and incorporation of the country’s flag leaf.

 

Target Audience:

(Write a few paragraphs describing who the audience is intended to be.)

The target audience of this piece is for those who seek adventure outdoors. The piece is made to encourage tourism in the colder months of the year as that is typically when it starts to die down. The travel poster will include several elements pertaining to things the target audience can do, both reaching out to those traveling with or without family. Aiming for the 20’s to 40’s age range.

 

 

The Goal of the Project:

(What are you hoping the audience will do?)

The goal of the poster is to encourage people to travel and improve tourism in the country (Canada) during the colder month.

 

Intended Message:

(How is taking this action going to help the audience member achieve their goal?)

The message is here to show the audience that Canada has any travel options, not just during the summer, but rather putting a new focus on the winter months. So visit the friendly white north!

 

 

Types of Imagery:

(What imagery will you use to help the audience take the appropriate action?)

The imagery I will be using in my design will be relevant to the things Canada is most known for, that way it is easily recognizable who the poster is for and where its located.

 

 

Color Choices:

What colors are you going to be using and why?

#E41116- This is a bright deep red, which is represented in Canada’s flag, in the maple leaf.

#877A83- This is a darker grey with a red undertone, I’d like to utilize this darker color to contrast the red while also remaining somewhat neutral.

#991023- Another red, much darker than the other red used, this will be used to help support the brighter red.

#B4BCC2- Much like how I have 2 reds to support each other, I added another grey to bring more value and contrast.

#D6CAB8- Many travel posters border designs with a cream/tan color, I’d like to experiment and try to utilize this in my piece.

 

 

Type Choices:

(What kind of typefaces will you be using and why?)

A lot of vintage posters have script/cursive used in them, so I wanted to use script mixed with some more blocky and modern to make it more attention grabbing. As seen in my mood board older posters were my inspiration.

Possible types-

 Backstroke (script)

Josefin Sans (geometric)

Lemonmilk (geometric)

 

What is your call to action?

The call to action in my piece will be the tagline, “Yours to discover” / “A vous de découvrir”

 

 

 

Prep Material:

• Research
• Mood Board
• Thumbnails/Roughs

After I filled this out I then proceeded to work on my mood board, which included a handful of inspirations that I wanted to try and incorporate into my final design. I also added a few colors so I could base my layout around it. Attached is my mood board for reference. 

Week 1: Learning and exercise

This week:

 

This last week was the first of our graphic design class. During the week we got to learn about the photoshop basics and got to dabble in the topic of the different meanings and forms colors come in, both on a digital level, but also in more psychological stand-point.

 Towards the end of the week we got to work on a project revolving around drafting up our own business cards, here we were given a few limitations and the opportunity to explore the various tools within photoshop!

Project 1- A

  This was the first iteration of the project where we were asked to create a simple black and white design, using 1 type of font, while also utilizing the various weights the font has. Additionally we were shown to add logos/images to help emphasize the implied shape the bodies of text may create. Here I chose a stag, as antlers are always fun to work with in design, the unique shape makes it easy to get cluttered, so I wanted to find a way around this issue.

Project 1- B

Here is the second version I did of my project, this one includes color, background, slight changes to the font, and a slightly edited version of the last logo. With this edition I had a lot of issues getting the photoshop "paths" to work with me, but after reviewing the teachers video and some personal research into a few of the tools- I was able to get around these problems. One thing that bothered me about this version was the outlines around my fonts, trying to get them to become not so muddy with the background was quite a learning curve.

Project 1- C

This is the final product of my first project, after the last design we had to go in and add another type of font to add some more variety, so on this version I added one of my favorite fonts, called Lemonmilk, which is a blocky more bold typeface which fixed my previous issue of having the words muddle into the background, it also helped me take away the stroke edges- I also went and scaled the logo to be a little larger to take away some of that emptiness throughout the rest of the card.

-Creativity Exercise- 

While researching into different ways to exercise my creativity, I came across a list online that had a good amount of fun ideas! 

Click here to read!

The site is called Readymag, which centers their content around bettering graphic designers creativity and building specialty websites.

On their list they recommended collaborating with others to get out of your comfort zone- so I reached out to one of my fellow art friends to help me think of an idea we could work on. Immediately we decided to collaborate on a piece of music merchandise of a smaller music artist we both follow.

The artist we chose is a country song writer, named Dale Hollow, who is from Nashville Tennessee and an upcoming star in the southern music industry. 

After brainstorming a few songs (shown below) we finally decided to go with one of his lesser known songs "High Horse". My friend gave me his rough storyboard idea and I got to work on the program I often work in, Autodesk Sketchbook.

I will link each song to the storyboards incase anyone is interested in seeing our though process behind the ideas.

Don't Wanna Do Anything- Dale Hollow

This was supposed to be a more broad design that only related to the song a little and focused more on the singers brand as a whole. I decided not to render this one as it seemed a little to plain to have any challenge.

I'm a Lover but I'll Still Fight- Dale Hollow

In this design we wanted to do a merch design more similar to how Coors markets their shirts, this song is also his more popular one, but again, the reason in not choosing this design was because it lacked creative challenge, additionally the song we did choose inspired me much more.   

High Horse- Dale Hollow

Notorious in the art world horses are incredibly difficult to draw, and as someone that primarily draws humans- I was inspired by this challenge to try and tackle it, not only in a way to draw the horse but to be able to simplify it enough to where it makes a good merch design- for the sake of this assignment and time, we decided a shirt would be a good enough start. Looking at this little storyboard my friend whipped up for me- he gave me fun font shapes to try and replicate around the focus of the bucking bronco, then added off to the side what lyric from the song would best be replicated onto this subject.

In the end I took creative liberty and didn't go with the horse head for the front design and rather went with a more text based logo that could be used interchangeably on different pieces of merchandise.   

-Final Design Mockup/What I learned-

Working on this exercise was a lot of fun, it's intresting getting feedback from an outside prospective, sometimes when working on a piece too long you start to not see your mistakes, while fresh eyes are able to point them out immediately. I chose this exercise because it really pushes the fact that on a industry level most of your work will likely be collaborative, which I feel is a very good thing to get used to- being able to communicate with a client can save lots of time and hassle when it comes to delivering what they're looking for. While not all will be able to storyboard what they would want like we did in this case, it's a good practice to try and see a project not from your own lens but rather as an outsider looking in. I would absolutely recommend this exercise to any designer, as it is a nice middle ground of both fun and challenging, to get out of your comfort zone.