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Final reflection

This is my last blog post, at least as a student. I know that this is mainly for my process and systems class right now but it's still a fact regardless. I had such an amazing and incredibly stressful last semester here, but I don't think that I'd have it any other way. I knew going in on the first day for these classes that these would be "The final bosses" of design school, and boy were they! I've had the fun experience of staying up until 4 to finish a project the night before because my brain's time management is oh so clever, but I've also had the best reward of a room of smiles and polite applause once I show what engrossed me into this idea. This class in particular, while stressful in how little time we had to do some projects, was incredibly rewarding and even eye-opening in a way, letting us just play with design however we wanted. It's been great to just see what all I can do. I can't wait to do it all again, but even better next time. I may not have the perfect portfolio of projects with me right now, but that's not how it's going to stay! It was a pleasure getting to work alongside such creative, clever, and talented minds through all my years here, and especially in this class. Getting to know everyone's unique style and interests was a treat. Of course, leading the pack we also had our professor, one of the most amazing, encouraging voices to ever have accompany you. I'm excited but a little scared to see where this all takes me, but I'm excited I got to share this journey with everyone!

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Unfortunately this week I'm not talking about my project progress, however I do get to talk about the next chapter in the book we're reading. This chapter was actually really helpful and related to what we're working on in our current project! It's weird how that worked out, as if that chapter was assigned now for a reason or something. This chapter was mainly about visual branding and design and how to go about doing it, from the basics of art and design to how to pick our your colors and typefaces, this chapter has it all! It was also a treat to have the author of the book as a special guest at our class this week. It was really nice to get to meet her! I also really appreciated that each chapter has an interview or two included, as we get to hear a new perspective on things each time from other people in the field. It's nice to have somewhat gotten this out on time for once, lately I've been feeling like I've really been falling behind and missing the mark, but I really want to change that. I'll see you again next week or so!

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This week we submitted our proposals for what we want to do for our final, and I submitted that I want to expand my cafe idea, make things like merch, menus, a refined logo, and maybe even a trivia game themed around cats and using my AR idea. My first submission of this idea was written very late at night as I completely misjudged how much we needed to do for this, and my proposal came out very incomprehensible. Anyway, we also started a new book, so let me tell you about chapters 1 and 2. I found it to be pretty interesting so far, the opening stories in each chapter have a good hook to get you interested in the topic at hand, they explain their idea through the chapter, and then they end with an interview. One thing i noticed was that there are a ton of acronyms throughout, I think the first chapter introduced at least 3 and then the second chapter added one more and reviewed some of the original ones as well. It's a lot to keep track of but hopefully I'll get them down and be able to apply them to my own projects.

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Inquiry 4 was an adaptation of my monster cat merch line into a semi-branded Cafe idea. I thought it would be cool to have an idea of a cafe that has drinks, each bearing a qr code of a random set of cats that you can project through your phone onto your table or anywhere. People really seemed to like this idea so I want to expand it into my final project.

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Inquiry 3 was an anxiety poster project I created, based on the aesthetics and ideas from things like Persona 3 Reload's menus. I worry that one of my posters borrows too heavily from them, but I thought the idea gelled so strongly with the idea of drowning in anxiety that I thought it would be a strong composition if pulled off correctly. Ironically, as with everything, the poster I thought of the quickest and the last turned out to be everyone's favorite.

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For this inquiry, I got to experiment for my second time in AR. The program was a little different than I thought it was going to be, I think if I gave myself more time on it then it would've turned out a bit better, but overall I think it was a good proof of concept. Now I only need to figure out where in the world I need to go next for my third inquiry. The only real lead I have for what I could do is that I've been really studying the graphic design style of a game called Persona 5. I've been trying to make stuff influenced by its style, but I have never gotten a good opportunity to. And really, if I can't think of a concept that works well with the style, I guess I still don't.

For the media response this week, I thought it was really cool to hear the perspective of a well known graphic designer, I looked up her work while I was listening to the podcast, and I have definitely seen it before, or at least know of that newer style of illustration she does. Hearing lots of different perspectives is really valuable and can help you become a more well rounded designer, (or person!)

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Long time no see!

I'll be posting media and process reflections from my class this semester here.

This week we turned in inquiry #1, which is a short project we had a week to work on. The general idea for this one was to make or find a toy in a hardware store that costs less than $5, and then design something for it for the first deadline. For this inquiry I decided to do a package design, as this class is all about experimenting and I had never made a physical mockup before, I went with doing that! It was a lot harder than I expected initially, I had seen some accounts on instagram take packaging and then surgically remove and reassemble all the parts, and I tried to do that, but most of the outer part of the label came off with the plastic shell. Honestly even just finding a package that was big enough to fit the toy while not being molded to the shape of another one was difficult. I'm really proud of how it came out though, it looks almost professional! One of my original ideas was going to be also doing a retro ad for the toy, but the only lead I had on that idea was just an animation I wanted to do. I had no idea how to stretch that out into a whole commercial, I may try and do that idea for something else in the future however.

We also have been asked to reflect on some media this week, the first one being a podcast about a political movement that was rocked by a petition at the back of a CD package. I think that was a really cool idea they used to get their message out there, and I'm glad that it worked. It was a well put together podcast as well, but I don't know if I'm interested in continuing to listen to other episodes. Thank you for helping me try something that I wouldn't have otherwise!

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Had a bit of an off week honestly, all my fault, of course, but that doesn’t make me feel better. Because of other tests, projects, assignments, and poor time management I stayed up until 2 at night working on the first two of these grey readings, a project I did last year or so, in the same class, but only found out that this was the same class this week. I thought that we just had some project overlap because I had just taken 246, so the subject matter was similar to what I had already done because of that. All the other art classes at the time were full or didn’t fit my schedule and I hadn’t taken Typography I yet I thought, but that’s just because the name was changed. Not only did I find out that I have been taking the same class I already took but that I’m kinda bad at it, mainly because of the more hands-on nature of the projects so far. They’re good projects, I’m just not the best craftsman if I’m being honest. Thankfully even if I do stay in this class it won’t delay my graduation or get me off track according to my advisor, which is cool at least. Anyway the reading this week was basically what we went over in class Thursday, learning about anatomy and classification of type and other fun stuff like that. The book chose more interesting words to use as examples than I’ve seen before, really keeping to the anatomy theme, it was a little unsettling somehow, but I appreciate the bit. It’s always fun to learn what all the little bits and bobs on letters are called, as well as to learn about hyphens, n dashes, and m dashes, as well as how important they are to know to get right, one day getting them wrong could cost you a job opportunity! Going into next week I can either choose to redo an assignment from last year, try a new assignment in illustrator, a program I feel significantly comfy in, or see where changing sections would get me, hopefully without me getting too far behind with how active my other classes have been so far. Having 2 exams, a project, a presentation, and an essay due within two days was a nice experience. Thankfully the essay was only due the second day. I do really like my classes, I don’t want to come off as complaining, everything just was piled up on me this week and it got to me a little. I’m happy in all my classes and should be fine either way if I switch or stay in this class. Sorry for my little ramble, I hope you’re having a great day/night dear reader.

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So, I’ll be honest, I completely forgot to take a photo of my finished square poster. And I already used all my behind the scenes photos last week, so I only really have this one photo for progress. This new project has a really tight turn around period, so I have to work fast on it, although I feel a bit like I won’t have much time to work anyway, as my other four classes all decided to have a big project or test due this upcoming week as well. I’m sure I’ll be able to finish the project by tuesday, but it feels weird leaving the last class before the project is due with only some sketches. Maybe i could just find my squares from a year or so ago, although they’d probably be dusty and that would give them away. My knife work back then wasn’t very good anyway, so it’s probably just for the best that if I do find them, just to use them as inspiration by this point. This week we read about all the ways to change the text spacing, kerning, tracking, the works. Kerning being the specific spacing between a set of two letters and tracking being the spacing between all of them generally. Don’t worry I didn’t forget about leading, the amount of space between the baseline of one text to the baseline of it’s neighbor. I would say that that was just a recap for me, but I did have to check the book again to make sure I got the definitions right while writing this. Hopefully when I get my project back I can take a picture of it for the next blog, and I’ll take a picture of my finished squares this time too.

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Ok, so this time I double checked the syllabus and found the actual reading pages in fine print underneath the project timeline, so I screenshotted it so I won’t have to download the syllabus a third time. This week’s reading is on modular grids and the golden section (which is either another name for or just very similar to the golden ratio) This makes sense as we are working on a very grid-based project, with one of the main focuses being perfect execution of cutting and gridding for the final product. Honestly I am very relieved that I took this class this year and not earlier because I didn’t have a full understanding of how to use my xacto blade before. I obviously knew how to use it to cut, but I used too much force, and I tried to use the cutting mat’s squares to try and cut things, which I realize now lead to wildly varied results. Thankfully I have a better grasp on how to go about cutting all these, and I feel like I did a pretty good job. When my professor looked over all my squares she only had a problem with one of them, meaning that I did the other 8 well, or at least I cut them close enough to the guidelines. One thing I realized after making the cutout contrast squares was that they were off center (after putting down one I decided to make the others like that) but to make it seem more coherent I had to then cut out the rest of the portraits with the same proportions, including the reference material as well, which has some text in it now and a little square from another article, but I’m sure it’s fine ...probably. The main thing I have to do now is copy my line drawing square (because the current one is smudging a lot more than I expected) and then I have to redo my experimental print square with the original reference material, it’ll probably make it look less haunting, but that’s most likely a good thing. It took a bit to get the abstract photo I wanted, I used a glow in the dark glass ball thing I got from one of those “as seen on tv” ads about some kind of magic ball illusion type thing, and I thought it looked very similar to a character this actor played, so it worked out really well!

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After looking around on which pages to read for the book today, I was unable to find which section I should read, then I looked at the book (which smelled slightly citrussy for some reason) and realized that it’s not necessarily split into chapters really. Sure there are sections, but there’s only four or five, and I don’t know if that would last a year. Anyway, I read some of the first parts of the book about type and how we got different fonts as well as what people argued the right fonts should look like. I thought it was really interesting how some font scholars argued that the letters should reflect the ideal human body, and even put an A over a diagram of a man. Others decided to try other, crazier fonts called monster fonts, although they looked more like tshirts or other shirts than anything compared to the human body if I’m honest. This week we started our first big project, which I believe is called the 9 square project. The idea is we have to use a copier to scan a famous face from a magazine, then recreate the face like, 8-9 different ways. So as you can see I’ve cut out the main face I wanted after deciding between Olivia Newton-John, John Boyega, and Jake Gyllenhaal (I chose the latter because I knew more about him, and because I could cut his face out easier than John Boyega’s.) I’ve also done my negative trace of the image, which looks more... haunting than I remember... I may have to redo that at some point. Hopefully the sharpie smell didn’t seep into my entire folder permanently. 

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First week of class! 8/19/22

Onto my next graphic design class! This one seems to be just as exciting as the others, especially now because I’m officially in the graphic design program here finally. While some projects seem to be a little similar to my last class, that just means I get another chance to do a better job this time! ...Right after I set another weekly reminder to post these on Thursday nights and not Fridays. I tend to do things later at night and forgot for a second that these were due in the mornings. 

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Course Reflection

I am writing this a little early (or a little late depending on how you view it.) I just finished finalizing everything else for my process book, so I figured this course reflection would be a good idea. What a course it was! I recreated some fonts by hand, made my own version of a poster using only an image and text, and a grid most importantly. I submitted my own design for an international park poster project, and got accepted to have my work showcased alongside the originals as well as a few fellow classmates. It excites me to no end that I got chosen to represent my class with my poster, even when I was worried about my chances when 3 of the other smoky mountains posters also did a sunset/rise mountain idea. It’s probably the highest honor I’ve gotten in my design career so far, up there with getting a shout out from the climate designers, and seeing my sticker designs on people’s cars from when I designed some school sport stickers for my high school. Those were a tough piece of work let me tell you, the anchors were all jumbled up and I had to detangle them before I could use the main vector art in my designs. Anyway, next I did a Zine based on a guilty pleasure font. I knew pretty quickly that I would want to do Press Start 2P. It’s a font I used a lot in highschool for a hacking aesthetic. It was really cool to learn the origins of the font. I feel kinda bad that I went with a retro computer look for my indesign projects twice in a row, but they felt really different and let me toy with a bunch of different things. Plus I ditched it for the last project for a more streamlined look, which I am certainly warming up to. I’ve said it before, but it always is hard for me to do a more minimalist style because I feel like I could add a lot more style to whatever I’m working on. However when there are around 80 pages to my book, I can understand taking a more minimalist approach. After figuring out how to really use paragraph styles, I was surprised how easily this book came together. I’m used to really struggling with projects like this for awhile since there is so much to do, and if I don’t have a theme or big idea for it starting off it can be a real uphill battle. Just ask me last semester how much I enjoyed making that big slide presentation.While working immediately after school most Tuesdays for the rest of the day made it harder for me to work on deadlines, I always managed to make it, even just barely.  I think my favorite project from this semester was the zine, since it gave us all a chance to show off a multitude of skills while also giving us the opportunity to show off our personalities in the process. (Plus I got to go to the best arcade ever!) I just wanted to thank my professor for another amazing semester. I knew picking the morning class was worth it so I could have them again. My professor really adds to the atmosphere of the class, and I feel makes it seem a lot less stressful than it probably would otherwise have been. They do not make you feel like you’re a bad artist/designer and really know how to pick you up and give you a new angle to look at things when you feel stuck. I hope you really enjoyed this book and this semester! See you in the next class!

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Well here we are, the final blogpost/book chapter. It feels like time has barely passed and yet it’s almost time to go and move on to the next set of classes. The final reading this week was about the design process. While it feels a little late to be learning about it now it was another interesting read. There were a lot of different ideas for how the design process should go but there was never a single completely correct model or idea for it. Everyone’s process is slightly different so it is hard to nail down exactly what the process is for everybody. I’m finishing up my book now, I will have to send it off to the book making website in just a few days. I’m still trying to figure out how to display project 5 inside of my book, as well as I decided to omit project 1 because I did not have pictures that I could find of the papers before they were graded. I finally changed the colors of the week intro pages, and I think they look pretty nice. I did run out of color combinations, so I had to start repeating them around week 10.

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The reading for chapter 10 was honestly really helpful and super neat. I’m glad they decided to add this less traditional chapter in. It’s mainly a collection of different posters and designs that overcame hard text placement challenges, and their reasoning as to why they did things that way in the end. It’s a really good resource for inspiration for any aspiring designer to figure out new angles to the designs they’re working on. I may have to keep this chapter in my back pocket as a resource for later projects I work on, since it’s just that interesting. Currently I am still working on my final book project, where we are compiling all the blog posts into a book and printing it out using a site called blurb. It’s really interesting because now this post is going to be added to the book and now the book will be talking about itself, and now it’s talking about itself talking about itself. Anyway, I’ve been asked if I want to try adding more colors than my favorite blues for every section and honestly I’m a little stuck in that regard. I definitely would like to add more colors, but I also have more sections than the 5 from last time, I believe I should have around 20ish sections by the end of things, and that’s a little more than the main colors one can rely on. I’d either have to get a set of colors to repeat upon every cycle, or I’d have to keep the book more monochromatic and make that a theme. It’s honestly a bit weird to me that this book isn’t as themed as my other indesign spreads. It’s not a bad thing by any means, and I definitely don't feel the need to make my new spreads turn into some kind of retro tech gimmick for the upteenth time. It definitely lends to a more professional feel this time I think though. I always like to start working on a project and then figuring out the theme later, then going ham on all the fun things and details I can add using that theme, but it’s good to take a break from a super detailed theme every once in awhile and to just have a professional styled book I think. One of my original ideas for making this book was to recreate the hexagon pattern and theme that I had in my portfolio from my first semester here to show how much I’ve grown as a designer, but I also do not know how much of that I would change besides adding grids, you know? I think it would be a fun nod, but keeping all those shapes equally spaced and equally overlapping was very hard if I’m being honest.

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Chapter 9’s reading was all about moving text/motion in text. As designers it’s a good idea to know what tricks you can pull from your sleeve for when you’re going for certain tones, and applying implied movement, rhythm, and/or motion effects is certainly a good trick to keep in the back of your mind. With the new skill of using AR in our projects, we can probably add some actual motion to our text! For projects this week I had a bit of an unexpected surprise. Despite being fashionably late once again (I had left enough time to fold all my pages but I didn’t know if i should try stapling the books at home or trust that the room had a longarm stapler I could use before class started) and even with one out of my four books not being completely stapled (Yeah I had four books because I read in the project sheet we needed 16 pages total and printed 4 rather than 3) I was voted alongside another classmate to have the standouts of the group. I was very surprised! I guess staying up until 2 am to get that stop motion done was worth it, since everyone really seemed to like it! I feel slightly bad for going back on an old school tech aesthetic again, but I feel like it was a different style from an old computer, and really brought out the old arcade vibes I was hoping for, at least after the matrix and green text pages. Getting the lighting to be good for the text persona was really difficult. I really wanted a black background with a possibly multicolored lighting setup, so we went outside at night and held up a couple lightsabers to brighten up the model. All the photos turned out really dark, and this was compounded with the pixelator I used, as all the color palettes would barely pick up anything in such low light. Eventually after I found a good color palette, I even brightened up the images in photoshop to help them stand out a little more, but I still got comments about how dark and non-contrasty the pictures were. I got a good comment about how that was a really good “decision” for this font, which also surprised me. It’s really interesting getting such praise from the class over how much they liked my book and stop motion. After looking at this for weeks and thinking up video ideas for awhile, eventually settling on an easier idea to execute than your original idea (building the name of the font with Lego and either building it up/unbuilding it or looping it around or tetrising it) Which feels completely dwarfed by the other stop motion projects you’ve done in your free time… anyway, it’s just really cool to see people enjoy all your little details and touches. I even had lunch with a friend that day and showed them my book, and they were very impressed as well. It feels weird to have something I designed printed out on “professional/official” paper. It doesn’t feel real, but it’s so weird having like an actual little book I can hold and not just something I have on my computer screen. Also, let me know if those posters I gave you as library replacements are good. Admittedly I never opened the tube to check them for some reason.

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The reading this week is something that is becoming increasingly relevant to graphic designers with each passing day: text on screens. Even now, you’re reading text on screen, and I’m using a screen to type text. While I may not have chosen the font Tumblr uses for their posts, some designer would’ve had to choose the “handwriting” every one of their users would have to use for every post. I’ve only semi-recently started to notice the way that some computer text is formed on the screen, seeing the orange-blue shadows some text has when you squint at it, or just noticing how pixelated text is when you really get in close. Readability and legibility are really important, no matter the location of text, be it in the real world, the virtual, or somewhere inbetween. This is actually a good topic for this week since I had to deal with making text on screens on screens for my zine. I applied a tube tv png and a CRT screen filter for almost all of my pages, which will probably make some of the text harder to read, but hopefully not by too much. This week I had a real tough time, not necessarily with the project itself or any particular aspect of the project, but rather a fight within myself. I somehow didn’t realize that the final digital copy was due by the middle of the week, and still had a lot of things I had to finalize/fix. The TV filter, making the stop motion video, fixing the page numbers, finding ideas for the last two pages, hoping I actually credited the pictures I used from the web correctly in the colophon. Compounding that, I also had some other work I had to do for another class, which kept me busy Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday night, so I got to work on that plus the zine very late into the night, hopefully nobody noticed how tired I was that morning. It was all my fault for not recognizing the due date as well as not spending my time amazingly wisely. Hopefully future me will plan things out better next time and fix my work-life balance. I am happy with how everything turned out in the end however, and I am completely ok with the final product, at least digitally.