My First Project: Done!

About a month after I started, I finished my first project! Exciting, right?! You'll notice that the final project is different from my initial sketches and design. As cheesy as this sounds, the original idea just didn't "speak" to me when I started to work with it in the computer. I liked the thoughts and concepts, but something was lacking, so I just scrapped it and started over, a bold move for my first project when I had a deadline, but sometimes you just have to do what you have to do. So I redesigned it and I like it a lot better.

Stephen, my fabulous teacher, helped me with the layout (I'm still struggling with that a little) and guided me in the right direction to give the design that extra push in the right direction. I'm grateful for his help! He offered me some really good feedback, too; again, I'm grateful.

I ended up making a series of posters for the project, each a little different, but consistent and I like it. I learned a lot of skills and since I did the same type of thing, I was able to reinforce some skill sets. To appease your excitement, below are the series in my project:

It was an interesting process. To make the objects look more well-used, I found images online and blew them up large on the copier and played around to make them lighter or darker until I found the right contrast; I wanted there to be some contrast in the piece, especially since it's a monochromatic template. After finding the right version, I crumbled up the paper (literally) and scraped the peaks of the paper off with an exacto knife so it looked more used. Then, I re-copied it, scanned it into photoshop, made a mask for it (which was easy since it was black and white originally), and imorted it into InDesign.

The typography came from rapid prototype. I kept doing versions of it until I found one I liked. I started using the grungy "Dirtyhouse" font, but as I played with it, I realized that I didn't like it as much as I thought I would, so I used a font called "Whitney," which has a lot of different weights to it, so it gave me flexibility and consistency all at once, and it's clean and sharp to give the message that extra boost. For the logo in the bottom right hand corner, I used the same font, but hand wrote the "s affects" and scanned it into illustrator, did a live trace, and made it into the logo you see here.

After making our designs, we had to apply them in different ways by using Photshop. We put them on billboards or other signage and on t-shirts. I chose this billboard picture because it had two posters and since my design was a series, I thought it was a good way to showcase more elements of it. Stephen taught me how to make the effects look realistic, instead of like a bad photoshop job like it would have been had I been left to my own devices.

We all had to make t-shirts. For the t-shirts, we used the pen tool (which I love, much to many people's surprise) and I re-colored it to match the theme of my posters.

And that's my first project, what do you think? I still have a long way to go, but at least I'm one step closer now than I was before. One of the main lessons I learned from this project is that sometimes you have to be brave and start over if it's just not working for you. Thankfully, I still retained some elements of my original concept, but kept re-working them because it was never quite right, but I'm grateful to have perservered and had Stephen help me so I could get a far better deisgn and concept out of it.

We've also been assigned our second project (more details to come), which I am excited about, but not really sure where to begin with it. I will be soliciting more feedback with this one, so let me know what you think!