Oklahoma, Part Two

I finished the poster for Bill's party! I was pretty excited about it. :) Unfortuantely, the colors don't reflect truly here, the purple is more of a true purple and less of a plum and the blue is lighter, but it still looks okay digitally (better in print). I found a cool kind of bluegrass-inspired font and learned how to manipulate it a little to fall around the bottom of the state. So, that's one decoration done, now to focus on the rest. :)

It's been a fun side project. It gave me a lot of practice and helped me fine-tune my skills. Now, I'll just need to find more projects to help me grow and learn. And it's helped me keep my mind distracted from some things that are less than pleasant and this was really fun for me to do.

Happy (early) birthday Bill! Thanks for giving me the chance to practice some skills and plan a party!

Black History Month Project, Part One

My first "real" school project is in honor of Black History Month. It is an open topic but should send a message about why we should concern ourselves with studying black history, why it matters to us, etc. I've always appreciated black history; I remember my 4th grade project about black history, we had to research a famous African-American, past or present, and if s/he was alive, we wrote letters to them. I'm still waiting for my letter from Whitney Houston, but it's been 16 years, so I can probably let that one go.

In all seriousness, I've always found it interesting: maybe because I love history or because I love people or a combination of both. I remember growing up and studying this and being totally surprised at how things used to be, I guess I'm just naive because my mom taught my sister and I to respect and appreciate people for who they are regardless of their race and I thought everyone did that. Sometimes it's good to be naive.

When I first started thinking about my project, the words and feelings that came to my head were of progress, moving forward, endurance, overcoming, etc. I liked the idea of reflecting on all that's been accomplished and drawing strength from that to go forward. Then as I talked to Stephen, he helped me fine tune a little to get my idea to be more powerful, to send a message that made people think or remember, something along those lines. Then he told me that in some places, black history isn't being taught or not taught in its fullness and that made me concerned because there's so much to know and learn from it and I started thinking that if we don't talk about it, our children won't know about it and could be ignorant to some really important things.

Then, my ideas shifted into more of an innovative attitude, I started researching some inventions or innovations that came from black Americans that affect each of us; things like the gas mask, stoplight, open heart surgery, etc. In researching I also found out the fire escape, fire extinguisher, the thing that keeps train cars separated (the Jenny Coupler), the carbon filament for light bulbs, and many other things were invented by black Americans. Cool, huh? From there, I got the idea of "to know is to live" since a lot of the research I found was that they invented a lot of life-sustaining things that we take for granted or go unnoticed, and I started to sketch some ideas.

The left side of the page is my list of notes on inventions/innovations I found from my research. The right side includes my sketches. The top are my original ideas. The bottom are my refined ones, they show one advancement, the name of the person associated with it, and a caption to go with each one ("saving our soldiers," "saving our children,", etc.). I wanted my designs to have an emotional appeal to them.

Once I had a concept, I had to start researching designers or design periods and draw from them to create my idea, since I was going for an emotional reaction, Stephen pointed me in a direction towards people like Neville Brody, Saul Bass, and others of that period who went more for emotional messaging. I had to find some of their works from which to draw inspiration.

This is a piece by Neville Brody. I like that it's simple but has elements of contrast to it. I decided that to make my design the most effective, I'd want it to have a strong contrast between the image and the words. I looked at other works by Brody, many of which I liked, but decided that this best fit what was in my head. In addition to the contrast, I like that while this is a clean design, if you look closely, it's a little rough around the edges. I thought it would be a good effect to make the gas mask (the sketch I chose to pursue) a little rougher so it looks well used. I also liked the use of the monochromatic color palette.

Then I sketched out my idea. As part of the project, we had to hand draw (or trace) everything including the font. I chose a font I liked ("Dirtyhouse" by Neville Brody because it's a little rough around the edges and fits nicely with the design), traced it and copied it onto the image. I traced the gas mask too, I'm not that good of a freehand drawer.

You'll notice in Brody's work above that he put a type of textured background in his work, I was encouraged by Stephen to do the same. I decide to use semi-open circles. I like circles, if it's not too weird to have a favorite geometric shape, mine is the circle. The cool thing about circles here is that they can look like smoke, gas, or explosives if shaded and designed correctly and I thought it was a powerful image to have a gas mask with smoke surrounding it. The type is a little rough but it works with the rest of the piece, especially since I want the gas mask a little rough around the edges. I made the inventor's name a simple, clean sans serif font to provide some contrast within the typography too.

And because I'm an over-achiever, I started to work on my color board early. I tried to re-create the monochromatic theme and appearance. The words in the corners indicate the Pantone color so I could find it for easy reference later (but I've changed it a little bit now).

Like I said, this is a rough draft and I've already changed it a little, but I think this will turn out to be a cool project. The more I work on it and the more I learn, the better I think it will look. Rough form that it is, it's a start and it's all about learning the skills and I have to start somewhere.

I'll update as the project continues. The next couple of weeks will mostly be devoted to working on the project.

On another note, I am really enjoying the program. I feel satisfied and happy when I leave class. In class I feel like I'm good at something: like I have potential, that my ideas matter, are heard, and are appreciated. It also provides a good distraction from the hard things I've been facing in life recently. This was definitely the right decision for me and I look forward to learning more as I continue.

Oklahoma, Part One

My class has been going really well! It's so nice to go to class, feel good there, and feel like I'm a competent individual; it's been a hard week at work and in life, so a little reassurance that I have talent at something is encouraging!

I'm hard at work on my Black History Month project (updates in a later post), but I also have a fun little side project. One of my close friends, Bill, is turning 30 this month, and we are of course welcoming him into his 30s in style with a big shindig! Yours truly is planning the party (and enjoying it a lot; I may be more excited about the party than he is)! Bill is from Oklahoma and loves Bluegrass, so in honor of him, we're having a Bluegrass/state fair theme party. Here is where I confess that I've never actually been to a state fair, fun fair or carnival most definitely, but never an actual state fair. Rather than letting that deter me, I have been doing a lot of Internet research to make sure my colors, decorations, and food go with a state fair, and I made sure to look into the Oklahoma state fair (I'm a little too detail-oriented sometimes). In googling the Oklahoma State Fair, I found a sign for it that I liked and felt I could incorporate into the party, but there was a problem: it says 2010 and this is 2011 (see below). I talked to my mom (also a very creative person) and we figured that I could change it using Photoshop or something.


Luckily, I'm in graphic design school and have access to Photoshop and other cool programs. The next day I had class, I took the picture in and showed it to my teacher Stephen and he told me that I could change it using Adobe Illustrator, the program we just learned. This was a win-win because not only could I change the sign to reflect the correct date, it gave me excellent practice on the computer and I learned some new tricks in the process. We had some lab days to work on our projects and I'm lucky to be a little ahead so I could work on both my school project and this, so I took a couple of hours each day I had class this week to work on it.

I figured the best/coolest way to describe the process was to show it, so I included pictures of it from beginning to end (mostly).

Step 1: Enlarging and Tracing. We enlarged the image so it was large enough to trace (another flashback to elementary school). It was a little pixelated so it made for interesting tracing, but that's okay. After the tracing, we made a copy and I went over it in pen to clean up the lines a little, change the year, and darken them so that I would have an easier time when I put it into the computer.

Step 2: Scanning the outline into the computer. We scanned the outline into the computer so I could use it in Illustrator.

Step 3: Creating the background. I actually did this as the last step, but for visual purposes it looks better to put it here. Because the shadows on the letters don't cover the paper, there are blank spaces for the background, but it can't be white as that's the color of the shadows, and the original background is this beige kind of color.

Step 4: Creating the shadows. Since the letters will go over the shadows, they didn't need to exactly follow the letters, just enough to create the right shadow/3D effect. That explains why they look ugly here, but doing it this way saved me so much time.

Step 5: Tracing the letters. Finally, I traced the letters and the state and tried to match the colors, except for the "a." I don't like that in the original it was the same color as the border because it all blended together, so I re-colored it to give it the extra pop.

Step 6: Put it all together and voila! I put all the layers back together and had a finished project. This is a before and after, you'll notice a few small changes from the original to mine: some colors, cleaner lines, and of course the 2011.

So, why call this part one? I figured that if I did this much and if I was going to make it large enough for a poster anyway, that I might as well add a finishing touch to it and put "Bill's Bluegrass Birthday" (yes, I named the party) on it to make it an entrance poster. What do you think? I think it turned out pretty good for my first real project in Illustrator. I really enjoyed using Illustrator for this, I think it may be a new favorite program, there's so much cool stuff to do with it. Stephen said that I have a talent for it and that it turned out well, I thought that was nice of him to say.

The rest of it (part 2) will be fun because I get to play around with typography. :) I haven't figured out exactly what type of typography I want to use, so it will be a surprise for all of us; hopefully it turns out well.

The party's in two weeks, so I'll be sure to post part two soon.

Flashback to the First Grade

Our first in class exercises involved construction paper and handwriting, reminds you of the first grade a little bit, doesn't it? You may be thinking, "You're paying a lot of money to play with construction paper, really?" Technically, that's true. The first few weeks of the program involve teaching us to recognize how we think/create and get ideas flowing. The construction paper teaches us design concepts (some of which are listed below) and the handwriting exercise teaches us about typography.

I've also started working on my first real design project that is supposed to be in honor of Black History Month. I've got some ideas running through my head, but I need to do some research on past design styles so I can plan it out better. I'll keep you updated as I progress. In the meantime, here are the exercises for your viewing pleasure. :)

Exercise 1: Symmetry

Create one symmetrical composition that is composed of three lines, two circles, and two rectangles.

Since I only had black and white construction paper to use, I put the composition on a blue background so they could be seen easier.

Exercise 2: Asymmetry

Create one asymmetrical composition that is composed of three lines, two circles, and two rectangles.

Exercise 3: Positive/Negative Space
Create one composition that uses the negative space as an active design component. Use a subject pair to communicate--birth/death, love/hate, etc.

I decided to use light and dark as my pair.

Exercise 4: Handwriting, Typography, and the 27th Letter
We got this printout with a serif and a sans serif font and we had to draw the letters of our name by hand, like they did before computers; that's why it was an exercise in handwriting. The second part of the exercise was to create a "27th letter" that followed the serif and sans serif format.

Here's the handout

This is what my letters looked like.

My 27th letter combined the k, g, and p. I included the "p" aspect because it started to look too much like a rabbit before.