Geiger and Tatge assignment 3: Pretty eyes

As Ken Explains over at his blog, his idea for this week (I’m behind, I’ll catch up more when I’ve moved back to Iowa) is based on a tutorial found at…

http://10steps.sg/tutorials/photoshop/making-a-beautiful-pair-of-fantasy-eyes/

The picture I used was found on flickr at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ohwhiskers/4119274866/ .

The sparkly eyes show up better in the full size version (which you can see by clicking on the left picture). I may revisit this to put stamps on it, but couldn’t find anything that I felt really fit. The most beneficial thing I got to practice was color correcting using adjustment layers, and tinkering around with brush settings. I think color correcting before putting on the paints and sparkles, etc., actually looked best, but then I wouldn’t know about brush effects (in particular, scattering the brush stroke) . Biggest difficulty was blending blue and white colors so that it didn’t look too sloppy.

I’ll probably revisit this post when I’m a little less tired. My sleep schedule is not what it should be.

Vocabulary Words

My first assignment in Graphic Design: type + meaning + message:

Each student was assigned two words and their definitions as provided by Graphic Design: the New Basics by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips, edited by Clare Jacobson. The assignment was handed out via a powerpoint file that had each word and definition provided, and students turned in their copy of the file with their slides and definitions filled illustrated. Working in powerpoint was fine for general layout and getting our bearings, but finite placement was problematic. With both these slides, I couldn’t get some letter’s pixels to line up perfectly  .

Hierarchy (and Emphasis)

It’s more like a puzzle than an immediately understandable explanation. The color coding helps identify which words go where. The “H” cropped off at the top is supposed to work with the “H” in the lower  right hand corner to give a cyclical feel to it, as though the hierarchy of color, meaning, and position would just continue again outside the frame. Was that successful? I wouldn’t blame you if you thought not. I was studying Jean–Pierre Melville’s film, Army of Shadows when I was working on this, and thought of the grey, red, and white ambulance in one scene, as well as the generally depressed blue and grey colors used in the film.

It turned out that the definition for hierarchy in the powerpoint mistakenly included the definition of another vocab word (can you guess what one?). I think the design works, but with a few caveats: the leading between lines is too large after the sentence ending with “anomaly,” which was an honest mistake. The change in font size between paragraphs… I can’t recall why I did that, or if it was accidental.

Proportion

In “Proportion” I liked the idea of using space, proportion, and the colon to give the reader the chance to see as many of the words inside “proportion” as possible (pr0–, port, ion, portion). I also wanted to have the o of “port” (or 2nd “o” of “portion,” if you will) become the tittle of  the “i” in “ion,” but again, Powerpoint is not made for such finessing. Perhaps a bigger problem are the white–space rivers running through the block of text providing the definition. Though I did tinker with it to get it right (and didn’t succeed), I was probably overly attached to the arrangement made by the placing of that block of text in the lower right. The colon looks a little goofy too, perhaps.

Keggeroo and Tatgeroo Challenge #1 : Halloween

College pal Keggeroo and I are trying to do weekly or bi–weekly assignments to motivate ourselves to keep practicing using the Adobe suite.
The challenge assigned last night (and due today) was a Halloween themed image. I put it off until a few hours ago, and here’s what I came up with.

If I had put more time into it, Probably would have tried to do something more pictorial or illustrative. Without iconic Halloween imagery, I tried to make it “spooky” in some other ways: finding a suitably kooky font, skewing the rectangles, and tilting the lines of text. The red is threatening but ambiguous (blood, speech, other?).

I’m wondering if someday down the road I’ll start effectively using blues, yellows, and greens. Along with that, trying to draw instead of using so much typography (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Things for me to keep in mind for the future.

Film Society Poster #2

The more “accessible” one. In retrospect, I think  the information near the top is kind of cluttered, and should have done away with some of it.

Film Society Poster #1

This wasn’t an assignment from my graphic design class taught by John Schott, but it was certainly the first thing thing I spent a lot of time on tweaking, which helped me get used to a lot of the photoshop tools.

This poster was supposed to be a bit more “artsy” to gain attention while the other one was designed to be more readable so that people would actually attend the screenings. A third poster had the movie information at a diagonal running between the grey shape on top here, and the grey shape on the bottom of poster #2. The whitespace made something like a cannon blast, but it was pushing an already busy poster’s readability.

The posters were made to advertise a World War One film series hosted on campus. I was just learning photoshop at the time and through some happy accidents and discoveries with the pen tool, I got some of the violent shapes I was after.

In terms of inspiration,  I was thinking of Criterion Collection DVDs (an endless source of inspiration) for layout and a vague memory of an abstract, but charged Santa Fe Opera poster that used white, grey, and red colors. I tried to hint that the o’s were gunshot wounds, but when I talked to the professor he said it would probably be lost on people. In general, I’ve frequently been tempted to create visual puns, codes, and metaphors in pictures. I sometimes wonder if that came from studying Dalí paintings, or if it’s just how I think.

For now…

I hope you’ll pardon the dry utilitarian writing, I haven’t found my voice on here yet, though I’m sure it’ll come in…well I don’t know when, but the fingers are crossed.

For now, this will be a space that will act as my portfolio in the short–term. And maybe some essays about film, advertising, and fashion if I get especially inspired, but I don’t want to disappoint with things that may never come to pass.

I’m only too aware of my weaknesses as a well–rounded graphic designer, and until I get a better handle on net publishing and the rest of the Adobe suite (I’m looking at you CSS, HTML, Flash and Dreamweaver), I’ll be using this site as my portfolio of things visual things worked on. Maybe I’ll end up posting things that never quite got to where I wanted, and works in progress, but I’ll hold those posts for another day.

For now, here are some of the posters I worked on in my senior year at Carleton College. I’m puting them in separate posts so that they are categorized the same as post–college works, rather than a series of individual works and a senior year cluster.