Projects through the semester
J365 was my first introduction to the world of Graphic Design in the media. I produced 4 major projects and a number of exercises to help me learn what it took to master these key techniques.
Project 1: Front Page
Karabeth Narvell and I recently created our first-page newspaper design. Since we were given the stories, images, quotes, etc. you’d think it’d be easy to decide what stories you wanted to do, and the images would be self-explanatory. It was not, we first sketched the newspaper outline and where we thought we wanted each image and story to go. We looked up examples of other newspaper designs to get some inspiration for our own. As soon as we came up with an outline, we chose our stories. At first, we were confident about the stories we chose until that one day in class, then it was back to the drawing board. We at first chose the 9/11 story for our centerpiece, but after realizing that that may have been not a “front page story” we went with the “Crestwood” story. Karabeth then picked out the images she thought would be best for the paper and then looked to me for my opinion, we had a little photo that was captioned within the text of our centerpiece that looked a little out of place and hard to distinguish what exactly it was for the “Crestwood” story. After conversations with Professor Layton, we decided to change that photo to a relevant quote in our centerpiece text. We also added a quote within the main photo, adding a bit of dimension but not taking away from the photo itself. Maintaining whitespace within the centerpiece was also a main factor in how we displayed our story text layout. We ran into issues with our column and the spacing, wording, and text size to get it to be non-hyphenated. After taking out a word or two we were satisfied with how the column looked. Then to our bottom two stories, positioning the photos correctly, and headlines not running together was very tricky. We wanted it to look visually pleasing and easy to read. It took a bit of time to position the visual of the Walmart photo, but we were pleased where it ended up. This project helped us both learn a lot and I enjoyed having Karabeth as a partner, she was reliable and her communication was great.
Project 2: Magazine
First, I wanted to begin with how this project challenged me, not only with my time management skills or my design skills but also apply things that I learned through our classes and using them in this assignment. Starting with my cover it was probably one of the most difficult parts for me, trying to find an image, font, size and design layout that didn't give my magazine a tourist feel. I went through about three images that I thought would work, one being the black and white image of the woman and the umbrella and then another one being a photo of a soldier in the red coat. After my project was analyzed in front of the class, I just decided to redo my cover with the photo that I chose and change my layout so it wouldn't be so touristy and more graphic design-oriented. Picking the font of the title was probably what I was most picky about because that's what everyone was going to see right off the bat. I chose one that wasn't so crazy and that I thought represented London well without that touristy feel. With my text tabs on the side, I decided to do more of a condensed font because of the way my image was, a lot was going on at the bottom with the rays of light and I wanted to keep it as clean as possible. Then my wide spreadsheet was the one that didn't take me as long because I wanted the image to be the main focal point of that page. I made the title of the page “Under Ground” and made under and ground kind of mold together to create that under effect. With my text, I made it very small yet easy to read following the same font as my body text on the next page. I also created a column where my text was to make it easier to read and not disguised in the image. Next was my article page, this page wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be, although I did run into struggles of displaying my text in a way that I could get all of it at the bottom while still having the images I wanted on the page. Also picking out photos that I thought matched the article well and went with the ongoing theme of the page. Designing a page that was more of the serious side and then my column where there was more of a colorful display was kind of difficult because I didn't want total attention to my column, but I feel like adding a bunch of images to my page also drew more eye attention. I also went with the designated font being serif, so that wasn't hard to pick out at all. I struggled with the captions of the images I turned my assignment in a lot earlier than the captions were sent out, but I did make boxes to where my captions would go. Other than that, I feel like my page was simple and easy to read and went along with my widespread page the page before it. Finally, the ASF page, this one I had no idea what to do. I feel like it was one that we kind of put on the back burner of class, and it ended up being kind of an afterthought to me. I was so caught up in following the overall theme of my magazine that this just threw me for a loop with all the crazy album cover colors. I wanted to keep this page simple yet add a bit of color. I only used the first 3 albums, I did not use all five I felt like that was a bit extreme. Overall, I felt like I improved my Indesign skills tremendously figuring out the Ins and outs of how to do shortcuts and what all I could do with it Photoshop also.
Project 3: Infographic
My partner Bianca and I decided to have an overall theme and use the data revolving Taylor Swift. This project was challenging due to just figuring out what exactly we wanted to display on our graph and what exactly we wanted our audience to understand. We found a common denominator that was Taylor Swift and decided she would be a good theme for our infographic. We used vibrant colors on a dark background that we felt displayed Taylor Swift using girly type of colors. Finding graphs that we felt displayed the data well and that you were able to easily distinguish what was digital and what was vinyl while following the overall theme of T Swift. The last graph was easy due to following one graph and showing the increase of most of Taylor’s songs that were in the top 10. We displayed the albums on the tops of the bars to show the type of discs talking about vinyl. I also feel like the typography goes with the design of Tswift and the data that we are trying to portray.
Project 4: Poster
This is the poster I submitted for our poster project in J365. The background of picking a theme for the poster was very difficult. There was quite an array of things that I could make for this project. The examples we reviewed in class helped me narrow down what exactly I wanted to do, whether that was a movie ad, restaurant, specialized drink, or sport. Over Thanksgiving break, my family and I are going to go watch the new Wicked movie. That was on my mind, and I knew there would be lots of different ideas to pull from since that is a big deal right now. I went through quite a lot of different visuals I wanted, and just looking for ways I wanted to take this poster, whether that was the drawing of a witch or a princess, a yellow brick road, or even just the garden of roses leading up to the castle. I don’t have any background in drawing or tracing or any type of art experience, so this particular project was difficult just because I have these great ideas, but I don’t exactly know how to execute them to the best of my abilities. I came to the trouble of some of my drawings being too like something had already been done, which is very hard because the witch and the princess are basically on every poster or advertisement for the movie or even the musical. I needed to do something different so that way I wouldn’t run into the trouble of something being done before, which would be very likely if I chose the drawing of a witch. I knew I wanted the “OZ” to be very prominent in my poster because I’ve yet to see that in any search I’ve been doing for inspiration. I made the “OZ” gold and a type of texture that kind of looked like the yellow brick road I wanted that to be the main focal point of this entire poster. Next, I figured out what I wanted to do with the background I tried the witch route, but it was just way too tricky to be original, so I disregarded that in total and decided to move on to maybe what wasn’t that big of a deal of in that being the castle which is the end game for the witch to get to. Then, for the birds, I traced just a photograph of a bird that I thought was easy and that was doable and then made my shapes with it, like moving it around, tilting it, and scrunching it. Writing out the movie tile Wicked was easy, just making it the same as the oz, just not as big and bold, but Wicked is such a prominent thing that everyone would know what the movie poster was if Wicked was the second eye focal point. After that was all said and done there was something I still needed and thought that my poster was missing I couldn’t just do and the wicked and the birds and call it a day. This poster was supposed to be based off of our own drawings things that we could do using the pen tool etcetera, there was nothing like this that I’ve seen with the castle in the back, everything that i’ve seen so far has been a in depth different color different layout different exaggerations on the castle and I knew I didn’t want the castle to be my overall focal point so I thought it would be a great way to still add in the wicked features but not do anything that anyone’s done.