Bibi Card

   

This project required us to find a bind in or blow out card which can be found in most magazines and use our Adobe Indesign skills to recreate it. Since I have worked with Indesign many times before, I did not find this project to be too challenging even though I did run across some difficult parts. I chose a bind in card for People magazine as my card. For the People logo, I used the font Cairo and for the other wording throughout the card I used Helvetica and Arial. When recreating the People logo I had to kern each of the letters to make it look exact. The lines on the front of the card and the People logo was most tedious. It took awhile to space the lines correctly and kern the People letters. It was also difficult to pick out a color blue which looked like the one of the actual card. At first it took me awhile to figure out spacing for the card and where to place everything but after working on it for some time I began to get an eye for where certain things should go and figured it out more easily. Finding the font used for the People logo was also difficult but I was able to look around online for a little and figure it out. I am most proud of the People logo, which I feel looks just like the actual logo, and the fonts I chose, which I feel look exactly like the ones found on the card. Overall I enjoyed working on this project because I was able to compare what I did to what it was supposed to be and gauge how my progress was. It also made sure I was aware of the most important tools in Indesign and why we needed to know them. This is an example of something we may have to do after graduating college and getting a job.

Final Project

For my final project I decided to choose dance as my topic. The reason I decided on this was because I was a dancer for 7 years and it became I huge part of my life. I dance competitively which meant I spent many hours every week practicing with my dance company to try and achieve perfection. So when we were asked to chose a topic that was our passion, dance was the first thing to come to mind.

Most of my photos were found on flickr with a few being found on morgue file and google. I found it pretty easy to find photos of dancers because they can be found everywhere. Choosing the placement of the photos took a long time and a lot of thought. I waited until after I had written the narration for my project to choose the order so I could correlate the photos with the narration. I spent most of my time organizing my photos while doing the project.

For the natural sound I decided to use applause because after finishing a dance all you want to hear is the applause of the audience recognizing all of your hard work. The sound clip I found right in iMovie. I decided to put the clip at the beginning of the project when the title with the curtain was showing because that is where I felt it fit best. Anywhere else I feel like it would break up the flow of the narration and the music.

I had trouble working the sound clip, the music, and the narration so that they went with the pictures and flowed well together. It took a lot of playing around to come across what I felt worked well together. It was basically all just stumbling across something that worked well.

I am most proud of how well the photos go along with the music and narration. I feel like I was truly able to tell a story using the 3 forms of media together. Although it did take a lot of work I feel the outcome was worth all of the hard work.

Prezi Presentation

“Microblogging – Tumblr” Prezi Presentation

Brochure and Website Homepage

 

When choosing a topic for my brochure I immediately thought of theme parks. My family always gets season passes to the six flags in New York and we have more brochures than you can count laying around our house. I wanted my design to be something that was easy to read and not too cluttered but had enough information to make the reader want to go to the theme park. To find information about the park I simply went to the park’s website. The hard part was deciding which information was more relevant to place in the brochure because you only have so much space to work with. Including certain facts such as it is the oldest amusement park in America and is home to a roller coaster than has been voted #1 in the country seemed very important to me. I believe these are the facts that would draw readers in. I also found it hard to organize the information on the brochure so it flowed together well. I knew I wanted to include some of the more popular rides from the park but how I arranged them was the problem. The placement I ended up with works well because it is simple but still gives the eye something to follow. The font I chose to work with ITC Benguiat Gothic Std in book, medium, and bold. It is an easy font to read but it is not to plain or simple. It’s  a fun font that fit well with the brochure. I am most proud of how I incorporated the pictures and the text together. I feel like there is not an overwhelming amount of either but just enough to draw you in and make you want to visit the park. You have enough information to want to know the basic facts about the park along with some other fun facts along with pictures the entice the reader.

Concert Poster

For my layout I chose to use the Z layout. I felt that by using this layout I was able to draw attention to the most important information while still including other details that a concert poster should have. I definitely had a much harder time figuring out quark because I was not familiar with it before we used it in this class. Finding where everything was and getting used to the setup made it more difficult for me. I enjoy Adobe Indesign or Photoshop much better compared to Quark. The favorite part of my poster is the picture of Dave Matthews that I used. It took awhile to decide how I was going to incorporate a picture of him into the poster and was thinking about using a picture for the entire background. I like the idea of just him cut out a lot better now that I see it on the poster. It makes it much easier to read the other information and looks better overall.

Powerpoint

John Mayer Powerpoint

For this assignment, we were told to first choose an artist and two songs by them so that you brought a thirty second portion of each song together as one. Then we had to create a powerpoint that ran on it’s own with the song you created playing in the background. I found a few different things to be difficult when creating my powerpoint. Timing the slides right was very difficult and took a lot of effort to do. You needed to make sure each slide was times so that you could easily read each piece of information as well as not having the slide sit there for too long. In addition, I had trouble setting up the table so that each row came in separately when I was animating it. To solve this I had to create a text box for each piece of information in the table and then group together the rows before animating so they would come in one by one.

My favorite slide I created was the slide with the album cover and track names and lengths. I think the slid was simple enough so that it was easy to read but the animation along with the album cover brought in new elements which made it more interesting. Also, I think I did a good job with cutting and editing the two different songs together so that they flowed nicely.

If I had more time I probably would have figured out a way to make the last slide, the collage, more interesting than I made it. I enjoy the pictures that I chose but I feel like I could change something or add something to make it more visually appealing than it is. I also would have worked with a different background on the table such as an image or pattern to make that slide more interesting as well.

 

Collage

This project used the font poems we had created and the first project and had us bring images and animation into them to add even more meaning to our quote. I brought in different puzzle pieces because a puzzle has to be put together. I also used an image of a heart falling apart to convey the word apart. The background was a simple image of a blue sky in a desert because I wanted it to seem as if the words were falling. Each image we had was brought into a separate layer in the photoshop document. Sometimes we would have to play with the opacity such as multiplying or darkening it to make it look better and worked with the words. It took awhile to arrange the images so that they all worked together and conveyed the message of the quote.

The second part of the project was to add animation to the collage. We had to add a slide and adjust the image or word each slide to make it look as if they were moving and animated. I found this part of the project the most difficult because it was hard to figure out the best way to bring in each word along with the images. It took a lot of time and mistakes to finally figure out how you wanted to arrange all of the layers. Making a layer for each image and word was key in this project. If you had not done this, you would not be able to move the images and words by themselves but as a whole. also you would not be able to change the filters and opacity of each image and word separately.

Double-Exposure

Contact Sheet

For our second project we found different photos on morguefile.com and used photoshop to edit them in different ways. The size of each picture was 1 inch in height. For the first row we worked with the resolution of the photo or dpi, dots per inch. The size of the image stayed the same while we adjusted how close the pixels of the image were. So for 1200 dpi you get a completely clear image and the 72 dpi image is somewhat blurry and harder to make out. You don’t necessarily see the changes between the 1200, 600, and 300 dpi images because the changes are not visible tot he naked eye. 300 dpi is the resolution used for professional prints.

The second row had us using the mode setting in photoshop which allowed us to changed the color format of the picture. The CMKY (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) and RGB (red, green, blue) options just played with the color palette used and is an option found under the image – mode tab. The black and white option is found in the same spot and just removes all color from the photo. To change your photo to a duotone you must first remove the color by making it black and white and then changing over to duo tone where you can select two colors for your image.

In the third row we worked with orientation formatting by changing our photo from a landscape to square and finally to a portrait. Orientation formatting deals with the way you crop the photo and not zooming in which can cause the photo to become blurry. To crop the photo you just clicked the crop tool on the left side of the screen and then worked with the dimensions on the tool bar at the top of the screen to create the size you wanted. To turn the landscape photo into a square we changed to the dimensions to 1in x 1in. To change the landscape into portrait we just changed the height to 1in and left the width box empty.

Framing, shown in the fourth row, consisted of finding an image with something so small in the distance you could not read it and then zooming in to make it visible. We used cropping to zoom in on the image in the distance a little more each time.

In the fifth row we used framing again to turn a piece of an image into abstract. We used cropping to zoom in on a specific part of the image that had a pattern and when taken out of the photo, you would not be able to distinguish what it was.

Finally in the sixth row we used different filters to play with the colors, pattern, and much more of the image. I used poster edges, pastels, stamp and palette knife to play with my image and the different effects the filters caused. This row was my favorite because I found it fun to discover different combinations and the ways that it effected the image.

The only trouble I had with this project was that sometimes when moving the image from photoshop to the Microsoft Word document they would not stay 1in in height so i would have to right click the image, click on image settings, and change it to 1in myself.

Font Poem

There are a few reasons I chose this quote for my font poem. It can be applied to many different problems we run into throughout our lives. While we may be upset that something isn’t going our way there is always hope that things will turn around and get better. You can’t achieve anything without coming across a few bumps in the road and this quote urges you to continue on even when you don’t think you should quite. When choosing my quote I was also thinking about the different ways I could convey the message by playing with fonts. colors,etc. and I thought this particular quote would be fun to play with.

I chose the fonts based on the way I saw each particular words meaning. For the words “sometimes” and “so that” I didn’t feel they needed to stand out and should stay white. I also chose a simple font that was easy to read called “Organica GMM Semiserif Roman.” For the both times the word “things” I wanted it to stand out a little so I chose a the font “Copperplate Gothic” with an orange color but kept the size smaller than the other words. I did the same with the word “can” except I made it yellow and chose the font “Myriad.” For the first time the word “fall” is used I chose the font “Postino Std” and used two effects, gradient and bevel and emboss to make it stand out more. Also the gradient I chose the was a light blue like the sky because it is above the second “fall”. For the second one I chose the font “Chalkduster” because I felt it stood out well among the others and for this one I warped the text to make it look as if it was falling with a gradient overlay that looked like the ground so it was falling into the ground. The word better I wanted to really stand out because it is really what the quote is about, things getting better, so I choose the brightest color. For the font I chose “Gill Sans” with and outer glow effect to make it stand out and make it look happy. The word “apart” was more simple and I just increased the letter spacing to make it look as though the word itself was coming apart. Finally for the word “together” I just used another text warp to make it look like the word was coming together and a gradient to make it look even more like it was coming together.

When choosing the placement of the words I wanted to make sure they flowed together well and the poem could easily be read. However, I didn’t want to simply line the words up and I wanted to play around with their placement a little. By using different effects on the word “fall” both times it is used I was able to make it look as though the words themselves were falling. This helped give more meaning to the words and make the poem flow together well.

At first, I had a lot of trouble trying to pick colors for the different words. I wanted to have a color scheme so that the words looked like they went together but I didn’t want them all to be too much alike. I played around with many different color schemes such as rainbow and blues and greens before deciding of the orange and yellow. I felt the bright colors helped convey the message and really popped on the black background. Also, I was able to tie the orange and yellow colors together at the end of the poem in the word “together” by using a gradient which gave even more meaning to the word.

I am most proud of the way the first “fall” looks like the sky and the second “fall” looks like the ground as if the words were actually falling from the sky. I felt these words I conveyed best out of all of them. If I had more time I would work on the font choice of the both times “things” was said because I could have chosen a better font for them.