Art 216 Class Overview

I am sitting in class right now, writing my final entry. The class this year has been great. I have really build some relationships that will further enhance my graphic design capabilities. All of the students in our class know how to give helpful advice, and criticize my work for my own benefit. The class helped me gain a better understanding for Illustrator, and its capabilities. This year I have used the skills I have learned, from only one semester, to create a few t-shirt designs,a flyer, a CD cover, and also a professional brochure for my dads company. I hope to add the many projects we have done in class, as well as outside of class, to my future portfolio. I believe I will have a very impressive portfolio by the end of my time here. Professor Speyers does a great job with helping all of the students with figuring out many different situations on various projects. The small class environment is really great, because it allows for a friendly environment verses a huge environment. A huge class is hard to be personal and honest with each other. I look forward to what this class bring in the future as it prepares me for my future career.

Winning Designs

The final project for our art design contest required me to submit 3 designs to the website 99designs.com. My designs where all created with 1 semesters worth of designs experience and only knowledge of 1 program so far. I'm sure most of the other designers in the contests all have multiple years of experience, and it showed! Many of the other designers all had simple ideas that where very unique. I felt that my designs showed some good ideas, but incorporating a unique feel to a design made the results very difficult. Coming up with an idea that nobody else has is something that defines a designer from others. In the future i am going to look at other designers ideas, and try and come up with something different, rather than coming up with a similar design.

Double Checking

Is very important in design work, especially work with text, that you double check all the grammar and spelling. You should re-read the article of text several times, have somebody else read it, and then you should read it again. Recently I made a brochure for my dad. We had both read over several times, had my mother read over it, then had another person in the company read over it. We thought everything was spotless...until my dad had over a couple hundred copies printed. We found 3 minor spelling errors in the brochure. That is not what you want to find out AFTER the fact that you have paid a lot of money to print the designs. Next time maybe reading over it is not enough. Checking each word is vital. Luckily this project was for my dad, and not a picky client. Being professional is very important in the graphic design industry, as it makes you stand out from others. From now on I am going to try my best to have EVERY word spelled correctly on a final design!

99 Designs

Recently professor Speyers assigned us a project to do some free lance work with 99designs.com. This website is a great opportunity to get some extra money, and also build up your portfolio. Their are many great things about the website, but their are also some disadvantages. One of the cool things about it, is the fact that you can make some really good money if you are good at creating designs. It is also not very hard to juggle a couple of projects at one time, and keep track of them on the website. Another good thing about the website is being able to view designers' works who are much more experienced than yourself. I have seen multiple designs that put mine to shame, and I take note of their expertise. It is such a learning experience. One thing I found I didn't like about the website is the competition. Their are so many designs entered into each project. It makes it extremely hard to be chosen when the client has so many great options. Another issue with the website is when a client does not give enough feedback. Also, it may seem that you have wasted alot of time when your design is not chosen to win. So much effort, and no reward is often what will happen. All in all, it is a great learning opportunity to experience.

Free lance

Here is one of the designs I created for a client on the website 99designs.com...Professor Speyers assigned us a project to enter in some free lance design projects. We have to enter in three of them, and post our entry with the winning design on the same page. I was amazed at how many design opportunities where available. I was also amazed at the amount of money that was involved. I can even imagine a person doing design projects for this website for a job and actually making enough to live off of. The only problem would be consistently winning the projects, because from time to time it can be hard to connect with a cient's needs. I have already been eliminated from a project that I had thought I did quite well on. It just goes to show, that sometimes what the designer and the client think very differently.

Learning About Logos

I am a bit late on my last entry. I have failed to keep up to date with this blog as I have been very busy lately! As far as design class goes, we have learned a lot of information in the past few weeks about Logos. Professor Speyers gave us a presentation on Logos and how simplicity can be very influential. If you look at most logos, they do not have 3d artwork, or really cool graphics on them. They capture the theme of a company and represent it with simply figures and characteristics. The best example that Professor Speyers showed the class of simplicity but still sophisticated was the FedEx logo. I had never realized something about the logo until he pointed it out. Between the E and the X is an arrow, representing the express and how things are moving forwards. The simple arrow is a genius idea. Of course I could have drawn this logo very easily, but coming up with idea is very innovative. Being a graphic designer is much more than processing what a client wants all the time, its coming up with your own creative ideas. This field of work allows so much flexibility and allows you to express your ideas through multiple projects. Learning how simply a logo can be really allowed me to sit back and understand a logo requires much more thought that I had expected. Word mapping is a great technique Professor Speyers showed us to help brainstorm ideas. I look forward to projects that allow us to make logos.

Competition

Recently Professor Speyers assigned us a logo competition with the possibility to win a contest for 500 dollars. I think its great that we can have these opportunities to compete with other people and for us to gain experience in turning in designs to the contests. The only bad thing is the intimidation factor. Knowing that most people submitting designs for this competition already probably have years of experience in design can be intimidating. I might have creative ideas, but putting them onto the page may be harder to do than imaginable. Hopefully over time i will learn the many tools i need to and how to use them all to express my artistic ideas. I have a feeling that their will be many competitions and that many let-downs are possible simply due to the fact that their are so many different ideas for the same concept.

Free lance

Professor Speyers told us the other day that hopefully most of us will be able to find and do free lance work by the end of this semester. I think this would be a great way to get your name out their, and to add some artwork to your portfolio. I have been trying to do my best on each of the projects, because I know if they look good, they can be used for the portfolio. I have already had several designs used for different things like t shirt designs or logos for events, but im curious to know if they are worth of being put in a portfolio. I hope that we start putting together a portfolio soon. The sooner we do so, then the sooner we can add our designs to it. I hope to do some free lane work over the summer while I have some free time. I would love to earn some extra cash if possible, but I am many steps away from learning how to charge for a design.

Sketchbook

Recently I saw that many students have been using their sketchbook to come up with ideas for projects. I suppose for some people drawing on paper is easier and allows more control over what you want to design. I think it is vitally important that you can draw things in a sketchbook, and still be able to design them on a computer. Having really nice scanners in our lab is going to be very useful to the class. By putting an image that you draw on the computer, you can directly trace the picture just as it was drawn. The difficult part of that will be trying to get the feel for the texture in the traced artwork. A pencil or lead can have multiple types of strokes that must be mimicked to get that realistic copy of the image. Being able to put drawings on the compute can also be beneficial in combing a recent project and blending it with a drawing. Its going to be sweet.

Logos

Recently the class was assigned to make a logo for a company called Mr. Sparkle. This project is very realistic in the fact that the logo could very well be used for the company. I have found that the hard thing with making a logo is that you do not know exactly what the client wants while you are making a logo. From what I hear, many logo ideas will be scratched or edited multiple times. I took the approach of making multiple copies of the logo and making minor adaptions on them to give the company more options. I figured it would increase my chances of being chosen if he likes any one choices of the options I provided. I very well know that my design could not be chosen because of the many talented students in my class. I look forward to making more logos for different companies.

Tshirt Logos

Recently my parents took over the youth group at my church down the road, Old Fort Baptist church, and several design opportunities have come up. It is not a very consistent field, but the youth group does have various activities where they have a main event or a name for the trip. My parents asked me to design several cool slides for a power point presentation, and recently asked me to design a t-shirt for DNOW (Disciple Now). I tried a few designs on my own with a simple concept in mind, but they were picky and wanted something else for the ideal image. When my parents gave me pictures of other inspiration for the whole event, it really helped me capture the feeling of the design as well as the idea behind it. Inspiration can come from a simple picture, music or even other things such as the speakers at the event. Although I did not get paid, my design was used for the official t-shirt for the event!

Chilling

Right now i'm sitting in the dorm room with nothing to do really. I have had a long weekend at work and I have finally found some time to get on the computer and do some homework! Unfortunately the homework I have to do for Graphic design is to update a blog, which I haven't stayed on top of very well. I mean I believe the whole point of a blog is to keep people informed on a topic, and I suppose I have not done the best job at that. So in the next 2 nights you are going to read quite a few posts on random aspects of what I have learned, what I hope to learn, and any other things that come to my mind. Procrastination is not something I do normally, but I also don't normally do a blog entry during the week. So I have somewhat of an excuse. After watching Julie and Julia the last thing I wanted to do was to have a blog entry every week. The blog entry method for her was not successful in her social life, but apparently it brought her much success! I look forward to the success that this blog could potentially bring forth!

Art project

Recently the class finished the color replication project. The project's mail goal was to choose a picture and exactly duplicate the imagine, mainly focusing on the values. The project was mainly focused on learning the gradient tool. The gradient tool was very useful when shading areas and trying to make smooth transitions. It is a very useful tool, and can be manipulated in multiple ways. You can determine the length of the gradient, you can change the opacity and transparency, you can also adjust the color, and so many other options. The main downside I found in the gradient tool appeared to be the fact that you can not curve a gradient directly. You can make multiple layers of the same gradient and make it appear curved, but you cant actually curve the gradient. I am excited to learn some more tools that will make curving a gradient much easier. For my project I traced a car, which has ALOT of curves. I also learned the importance of spacing out the work. I'm not proud to say I stayed up all night finishing my project, simply because I putt it off to the last minute. BUT I did get it done on time with prestigious results.

Ilustrator

Last week we were assigned to trace an object, and use the eyedrop tool to exactly mimic the colors of the original photo. This project will be much more difficult than the previous project of only tracing. Colors add a whole other dimension to the artwork as it also helps show the shading on the object. I Chose to do a Mercedes Benz Silver car. I'm usually pretty big in to cars but I completely forgot the model of the car already! I believe that having the car silver will make the color selection a bit easir as it will be on a black and white scale verses a colorful scale. I look forward to the final product, and hopefully I can produce a spitting image of the original. Professor Speyers mentioned that many of his past students used this project in their portfolio...I hope to use mine and many other future projects. By putting my full efforts into these in-class projects, maybe I can have an accumulative portfolio by the end of this year! I hope to get an internship with any design company as of now, in hopes to learn more about my future profession. The sooner I get into the environment, the sooner I can learn! Alongside this project I am working on, I have messed with Illustrator and drew this idea for a tattoo which I have posted a picture of!I

Finished result

Yesterday was the due date for the trace project. After many hours of drawing tedious line work, drawing, erasing and redoing little things, the final result feels soooo great! To have completed the task at hand lifts a burden off my shoulders, and readies me for the next one. So i decided to finish this blog at a later time, but with a busy school life and work life things just don't get finished sometimes! I really don't mind this blog thing much thought, its like getting all your inner thoughts out to an audience you cant interact with! Quite an interesting situation! Well its late, and im going to mess with some designs before I go to sleep!

Monday Morning!

This post is supposed to be for last week, but i am posting a bit late! Over the weekend I worked on a project for Visual communications. I recently bought a Tablet by Bamboo which is designed to be very useful with the drawing tools in the Adobe programs. The tablet helps with work flow and allows me to go through a project quickly. It allows my right hand to focus on drawing, and my left hand to focus on clicking shortcuts. Besides from class, I have had an offer to create a t-shirt design. Being my first, I come to realize that every single design I create is not going to be perfect. I sent one design to the person, and of course they want something a bit different. Professor Speyers has mentioned it several times that clients are going to want a lot of options. It is time consuming to produce multiple themes for a design, but it gives a client options. This just proves how it is important to have a versatile mind, and how a productive work flow is necessary to produce results! The attached picture for the "Walk for Wanda" is my first design for the client. The client wanted to express walking, mountains, and the ocean all in one! Here is what I came up with although it is not the final result!

Late Night

So I am totally late on this post, we are supposed to do 2 posts a week and like every college student does, I have procrastinated until the last part of the week for my updated blog post! I realize that I have to be more on top of things, as a future boss in the graphic design industry will want an employee who is always punctual. As far as the class goes, it has been a very interesting learning process. Our first project was assigned to trace a detailed object three times, with each progression gradually becoming enlarged and more vivid. Adobe Illustrator is the program we are using, and it has been pretty much an experimental learning process. Of course the professor is there to help, but most of the learning is done on my own. I actually own the software on my computer, so i have the luxury of learning in my spare time. Eventually this will help me when I have acquired the skills and I can begin free-lance work. I am looking forward to how much there is to learn about with simply drawing lines, and how the simple things will add up to the multiple skills necessary to become an innovative graphic designer!

This is my first blog. I will be honest, I feel like a girl keeping a diary. The movie Julie and Julia really made me not want to do a blog ever, because of the effects it had on Julie and her whole relationship at home, but that is besides the point. I believe this blog can be very useful to myself, as well as my classmates and even a public reader! I am going to give tips of what I have learned in Photoshop CS4 and I will also ask questions that I may need help with! I am really looking forward to what this program has to offer for me this year.