GRA Collage

This was my very first project for Graphic Design, and I had a great time doing it. The focus of this class was to create a Graphic Design company for ourselves, and create an image that practiced with PhotoShop. The title of my business was named Bitzy Blonde Design, and the concept of it was vintage and neon colors combined. That's why there's a bright flower added, including a color added to the lightbulb. This was created from blending and layering different images that would create a feel for the company that I had created. This project was so much fun to complete because I was able to learn all the different tools and interesting things you could do with an image. My favorite part of the image is the low-opacity textured background that you can slightly see, where it looks like rays of sunlight.

COM-232 Menu

For my COM-232 class, I had a great time with these projects throughout the term. We had to create a menu for one of two restaurant choices, and I chose the high-end Chinese cuisine called TOWN restaurant. This restaurant also came up in a later course as well for my first website design class. I based my menu items off of actual food from P.F. Chang's and went with red as the main color choice because the color red represents fortune, happiness, and success in China. In this course, I was able to take some of the skills that I learned in PhotoShop and apply it to the projects. It was little things such as opacity on images and layering different things to create textures. The choice of font was due to the required options that TOWN provided in the creative brief, but I felt that it worked well with my images. This is only one page of the menu, but it was four pictures in total (Apps, Noodles, Entrees, and Desserts). This was also my first time dealing with font styles that are automatic, and not required to pre-select italics, bold, etc. All in all, I learned a lot about using other Adobe software in this course.

GRA-310 Website

This was my very first website that I ever created. In comparison to my Advanced Web Design class, this website was very bare bones and didn't contain that much information. I wrote the entire thing by scratch throughout the weeks of the term because we would add something new as time went on. This allowed me to learn how to tweak the website and learn basic rules. This class utilized the same restaurant choices as COM-232, so I felt confident with adding my menu items in and using the same color concept. I enjoyed being able to do this as almost a continuation of my previous class because I had such a good time building my menu and brochure for TOWN.

GRA-340 Magazine Ad

For my GRA-340 course, we did quite a few different projects. This was an interesting one that I really struggled with initially. The requirement was to take text from one of a few different options, and create a magazine page that would capture the vibe of the text while staying within various expectations for font choice, alignment, layout, etc. I choice an article excerpt about space because I found it to be the most interesting. I learned how to do text wrapping in this course, and I feel like this added a lot to the image with how I broke out the specific quotes to create an emphasis on. I was very happy with the end result, though this is just one page of the two page magazine spread, and I loved all the little effects that I added. The background was meant to be simple and not distracting, and I felt that everything matched my typewriter styled font as well. I had to create two magazine designs and this was just one, but the other one was styled more like outer space. It had a background image of a galaxy scene with different boxes to show the font easily. This design was the more classic and professional of the two, and I could definitely see this posted in the middle of a scientific magazine of some sort.

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GRA-340 Word Cloud

I had never done a word cloud before, but this was such an interesting project. I had a really tough time at first with trying to warp the text and ended up having to look up a few videos on creating word clouds in PhotoShop. The project was making a word cloud about your favorite vacation destination, so I chose Hawaii. I chose words that were the embodiment of Hawaii in my opinion. Some examples were obvious ones such as Aloha and macademia nuts. I also chose a few more such as hiking and surf which just reminded me of things that you could do while on vacation there. The only regret I have with this project is making the color red so that it was easy for me to see the lettering. I didn't realize until I was completely done that you had to choose the color before you did all the warping. Once warped, I was unable to change the color to blue, which was going to be my preferred color. All in all, however, I was still happy with how it came out.

COM-232 Menu Brochure

This image is a little difficult to understand just by looking at it, but it's actually a trifold brochure that I created for COM-232 for the same TOWN restaurant. I took the menu items and chose a few "favorites" to display on the brochure. This actually has a second side as well that shows contact info and the restuarant name, but I was happier with the inside portion. My favorite part about this design is how I created the images in the corners, and how they're rounded and cut off to create an asymmetrical style. I created this in InDesign so I was easily able to line up all the lines to differenciate between menu items as well. This was an interesting project though, just because I was able to learn more about alignment, including when creating the trifold effect for both sides. I would love to print it out one day to see how it looks in real life.

GRA-340 Celebrity Word Cloud

For GRA-340, we had a final project of a word cloud and we had to choose a celebrity to create it of. I chose Johnny Depp for my celebrity, and used his movie titles as the filling. This is my absolute favorite project I've done for school so far, and I loved how it looked terrible until the very end when I made the font black and gave a white background. I made the image inverted, so it didn't look right until I was done. That was an amazing feeling, to see it finally come together. I chose a Victorian-styled font because I felt that it really captured Johnny Depp as an actor and even a person. It was originally all white font, but my instructor wanted to see a little change to the coloring. Therefore, I went with a gradient of very dark grey at the bottom leading up to white at the top. I was very proud of this work, and I think it will continue to be my favorite because of how much time it took, and because of how I feel that it looks just like him.

COM-232 Calendar

In this term, we had to create a calendar that was reminiscent of a famous graphic designer. The calendar had to also show all of our scheduled projects for the whole term, so it had to be accurate as well. I chose Armin Hofmann for this project, and felt that my calendar really captured his work and what he had created. I used a black and white color concept, with some random splashes of red like he used to. I also chose to use some random circular shapes with cutouts like he had in previous work. I added a few small effects to it as well, such as darkening the font on calendar events that were in the month before or after. This was actually my very first design in InDesign, and I really enjoyed using it. I had previously only used PhotoShop so this was an interestin way to learn the new program.