Final Reflection

This semester has been rough! Yep I could really just stop there. I seem to run into every problem humanly possible when going through each stage of production, whether it be printing issues or my inability to measure correctly, it's always something. I didn't hit any of the deadlines during the second half of the semester which is unlike me, but it's all I could muster up.

I really enjoyed some of the projects, but frequently found myself getting hung up on some small detail that would hold up the whole process. I enjoyed aspects of the packaging projects and I really liked the book project. Those are two projects that I was really pretty happy with how they turned out. Surprisingly enough I was also pretty pleased with how my brochure turned out. Generally I don't enjoy assignments that involve laying out masses of type because, honestly I just find them to be incredibly overwhelming until they are contained and then by the time they are contained it's time to turn them in and that all they are, contained, not designed, and that's sad. Of the poster redos that we did, I really like my Tetons and Herpetology posters.

I think this semester has been really good for recognizing what I need to change in the future so that's I don't die before Capstone; I'm really hoping to avoid that. This semester was also packed though, so in the coming semester I should be able to take much lighter loads and be able to focus more on my major as apposed to a million other things all at once.

I'm so excited for summer!!!

Brochure

Soooooo..... SURPRISE! I'm running behind on getting the ball rolling on this brochure but it's in the works now! I was originally going to to fishing/ hunting / conservation/ wildlife in NEMO but the Missouri Department of Conservation's website is just a mess of pdf's and didn't have all that much content on it. I was kind of excited about doing it because I was going to photography my grandparents' land and my dad in full hunting gear and his four wheeler and stuff but I didn't have the desire to essentially write 3000 words of copy about hunting :( I've not moved to the CCF, Campus Christian Fellowship organization. I looked at their website, and when completely milked dry it has around 3500 words. I'm very active in CCF, so 3500 words paired with personal experience should get me to the magic 5000 much easier. I'm not trying to be a weenie and shy away from my first idea because it's hard, I'm being realistic.

 So I got it done! Whoo hoo!!! I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. It started out as a hot mess that didn't really know what direction it wanted to go; I kink of had a lot of different things going on in it all at once, but once one idea was finally gone with, it really started to take shape. I chose colors out of CCF's current logo and then also applied a light cream to the whole background just to take the edge off the stark whiteness.
I completely hated finding all the copy for this piece, and I'm not usually much of a fan of these projects in general because I'm not very good at them, but once I finally got enough words in there, it really wasn't all that bad. I find large bodies of text to be very overwhelming so starting these kinds of newsletters or brochures takes me freaking forever!
Considering how long it took me to get the all the copy in, I went a bit over budget. I spend a great deal of my time, like I said, getting all the text in their, and then also, just figuring out what direction I wanted to take the piece. Overall I spent about 42 hours on the project from start to finish.

Lynda.com

I've been working through my Lynda tutorials and while I do find them helpful in some regards, I also find them to be giant time suckers. Some of the stuff that is covered is so elementary that it's pretty freakin excruciating to sit through . . . I know how to open a new document and make a text box! I'll keep plowing through them though!

Well now that Lynda.com is over, I suppose that means it is reflection time, I might have already typed this post once, fallen asleep on my computer and accidentally had my hand held down on the "c" key which then wrote over all of the text I already had....ooops!
There were some aspects of the Lynda.com training that I found to be quite useful, and others not so much. I worked through all of the typography unit and I thought it was pretty useful and applicable. What I found most useful was all the keyboard shortcuts that the videos shared. I use a lot of them all the time now! I took notes over some parts, but I wish I would have taken more detailed notes over the videos in general so that I could have a reference to look back on now. I tried going through some of the Photoshop and  Illustrator videos but for the most part I found them to be painfully boooorrrriiinnnggg! Yes, I already know how to open a new file, and yes, I know how to crop a picture. I feel like some of these videos could be utilized at the beginning of the semester for first year viscommies, but beyond that many of them are too basic. Most people who are wanting to get a degree in graphic design already know the basics of most adobe software.
I think it would be more useful if there was a way that we could have access to the site when we needed to look up a particular thing, like how to make lightning in Ps or how to trouble shoot in Id.
I definitely think that with some adjustments and tweaking that the Lynda site could be utilized in lower level curriculum in semesters to come.
Oh and I didn't end up finishing all of the courses. I skimmed through most of them to some extent and like I said I finished the one on typography. But when it came to prioritizing time for other homework and the not so high level of usefulness of the videos, they got put on the back burner.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz!

Total Hours 28.4

Ok, well it's a little hard to see here as a tiny little blog post pic but this is one of the first stages of my book cover design for the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I still have a lot of work to do on it but I like where it is headed so far!


This book project has been a royal pain! I have ideas for it but can't seem to execute any of them in a way that looks anything like what I had in mind, GRRRRRRRR. I've switched the bow and stripe component up a number of times and I think I've finally found one that if nothing else, is significantly better than the above pic. Also I've created an emerald city that I added to the back.

 Here's the Emerald city in its first stage.

 And here is the book cover. I applied glitter to the Emerald City graphic so that it would feel more cohesive with the glitter shoe.

The book cover is done, the CD case is almost done, and it's almost the end of the school year!

Oh ya and the CD is done too!

Hey Rusty, I actually have been doing stuff! Here are the iPad, the iPhone, and the iBook
artwork.

Packaging

So here we go, the second half of the semester is here. We are kicking it off with a little packaging design! I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to pull it all off by the deadline but we shall see.

The name of my beverage is Jac Attack- Jac Attack Juice Packs; A little corny I know, but just wait and see, it's a cute idea and as long as it all turns out like I plan it will be really cool! The products are juice boxes, marketed of course towards a very young-preschoolish- audience and the graphics are little, friendly monsters. I plan to have a group of six monsters that will appear on the juice boxes as characters- sort of like McDonalds use to have the hamburger bandit and all of the other ones that I can't remember the names of.

Here are some of the first sketches and initial mock ups of the characters.

The gang's all here! I have completed the characters that will be appearing on each of my juice boxes and posted the color pallet I'm working with. I want the colors to be really kid friendly and kind of basic. Additionally, all of my colors needed to work with a corresponding juice flavor and this combo worked out. I really really liked the color of my spikey little guy on the end in the first draft but he just wasn't playing nice with the others so he had to be changed to a color that better suited the other characters. Along with getting the rest of the characters done, I made a couple other little modifications to some of the originals.

Here are a couple of screen shots of my packaging. My juice boxes are fatter than common ones like Hi C for primarily 2 reasons: I think fatter juice boxes are cuter than tall skinny ones, and when my idea for my container came along, logistically the fatter ones just fit better. As you can probs tell, my container or six pack carrier will resemble a tin lunch box. Each of the six juice boxes will fit into the lunch box and be easy to carry! These 2 pics are of course just the templates; they took so long for me to figure out the dimensions...blah and that darn lunch box is going to cost me; it's so long that I'm going to have to buy some freakin huge paper to print that puppy on :/

I've kind of been working on little parts here and there, the characters then the templates, the templates then some of the labeling, and now the logo. All of my little monsters have similar very simple geometric structures with their main focus, apart from their colors, being their eyes. So as a was seemingly fruitlessly sketching ideas for my logo a giant eye sort of popped into my brain and that's where I'm at right now with it.

And here, sadly, displays all the further I've gotten on actually combining my elements and applying my pieces to the actual products. Needless to say I'm running behind schedule...poop.

I'm stuck . . . I think I might have bitten off more than I can chew and I don't know where to go from here. I think some major simplification needs to happen even though I don't really want it to :(

Here's the progress that was made tonight on the lunch box 6 pack carrying case! It still needs a lot of work and I'm thinking I probably won't hit the deadline, given that I have a French test, an Exploring Religions test, a chem lab, and a litho edition to print all before Friday, oh I also have extra rehearsals this week too (I just needed to wine for a minute, it's out of my system now),  but it is coming along.

I had a great epiphany in class today! DELETE ALL THE STROKES! My monster look infinitely cuter now :)

This is my carrying case at 50%... so ya it's going to be a little huge but that's ok. It will hold 6 juice boxes (the fatter kind because they are cuter) of 2 different flavors. All six available flavors will be listed somewhere on the box but I'm thinking of including AHHHHpple and Booberry.

Booberry

Here are the first stages of one of the juice boxes. I scrapped the first one and am starting over. The carrier is coming along pretty nicely; I'm not sure if I will be hitting the deadline but I'm still trucking along...

AHHHHple

Well what do we have here, well whadaya know it's another juice box design. I know there's not really any text on them yet but it will find it's way there at some point or another.

Revised and approved carrier!

Magzine Ad

Just a little switcheroo that Rusty suggested. Approvable? I think yes!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKpsDEuBah8&feature=youtu.be

So I definitely went over budget on this one.
Comes in around 50 hours

Midterm Portfolio

Type Poster

For this poster assignment I ended up completely scrapping my first design and I ended up with this one. I really like the peachy orange color that I happened upon. I like the figure ground ambiguity that starts to happen in a few areas. The video that accompanies this poster is pretty basic and straight forward and sort of mimics the jumble of letters that appears in the poster.

Jazz

The jazz poster was fun while it lasted. My first tagline was a wave of rhythm which worked with the first composition of the notes but not really with the umbrella, so it then transformed into raining rhythm. Once I changed the the tagline, the shape that the notes created also changed and I really like where it went from there. I also started out with the blue notes as a back drop shadow but then just dropped off the black notes all together and left the blue ones in place. The blue notes brought a lot more color to the piece and put more focus on the word "jazz" which is the point of the poster, so I think it worked out pretty well. I didn't spend a lengthy amount of time on the newspaper add, but I really like how it turned out. The black umbrella is really bold and I like the way the music notes are sprinkled about.






Happy

http://jow505.wix.com/happiness

As silly and simple as this newspaper article is, it really is one of my favorite pieces. I don't know if I'm just really digging the pink or maybe its the circles, I love circles, or it might just be my headline. I know the :)ness is brinking on being corny or cliche, but I don't care because I think it really brought a lightness to the composition that works well with the subject matter of the text.

Summer Block Course/National Parks/Tetons

Gaaa! I was so excited when I finally got this one printed; first of all my printer ran low on ink in the middle and put a great big nasty band through the piece and that was pretty sad and also it was really dark for some reason, but the third time is the charm and then it looked so freaking sweet! There are a lot of reasons I likes this assignment 1. I actually thought of multiple solid concepts which allowed me to choose the one I wanted to run with as apposed to working with the only thing I have, which happens all to frequently. 2. Once I came up with my concept, I had a fairly clear picture of what I wanted it to look like and I actually pretty much carried it out. and 3. It didn't have a crap ton of text to contend with. and 4. I use a whole bunch of blue! I love blue! The website is pretty swell as well.
http://jow505.wix.com/tetons1 
And oh golly when I finally discovered wix, it was like the heavens opened up and smiled on me. Dreamweaver is the devil! It doesn't like me, and I'm going to have to say that the feeling is mutual.

Herpetology

I thought this was another really fun project to work on. Again, I had a concept that I felt like I could do cool stuff with and the it came together really quickly. I didn't have to make any revisions on this! It really made my day. Also, I don't generally use green, just because I'm not a huge fan of the color in general, but I thought it was fitting for a reptilian theme so I used it; I must say the color has really grown on me. i really liked being able to work with the bright green throughout the multiple aspects of the assignment too. The website is really high contrast and the animation has the same background as the poster which, personally I think is a pretty sweet one- I love textures.

http://jow505.wix.com/herpetology-club

Zombie

http://jow505.wix.com/zombiescholaracademy

Here it is... the complete zombie pack. This poster was fun but needed a lot of revisions, which kind of started to suck the life out of it, which I guess is fine since its for zombies. I tried to put lots of blood on the newspaper add for you Rusty since you kept harping on me to add more throughout the whole process. I spent a lot of time on the hand illustrations for this poster and totally blew budget but I think they look really good on the poster, and once I got some contrast going and my logo not flip flopped and all janky, the poster really came together. I almost chose this to be one of the pieces I printed, but it ultimately was a toss up in many categories for which one was the best, so what knocked this one out of the running was that it had quite a bit going on in it, and I thought for something that would be hanging in a hallway with lots of other poster, that simpler might be better.

 Let's Eat Ramen!

I was pretty pleases with how this piece turned out. I really enjoyed making all of the little cutesy icons and the headline "Use Your Noodle" even thought they took FOREVER! I think the sort of faux ribbon that "Use Your Noodle" is nestled in looks pretty culinaryish, as if it were a blue ribbon dish or something...I don't know that's just what crossed my mind in looking at it as I right the post about it, I'm running on about an hour and a half of sleep so what can you do?

Bum dat da da! The Big Kahunah, last project of the semester.

For this project I chose to redo the "Truth About Catholicism" flyer. I was a little sad with just a dinky candle clip art and black text on white paper... snoozer! In choosing this piece to redesign, I knew that I could only make it better, so that was a comforting thought as midterm drew nearer and I didn't have much of it done. I chose to use the popular "Truth is..." tagline to unveil common misconceptions about Catholicism and it complimented the series title of "The Truth About Catholicism". I picked three images that I thought were pretty commonly associated with the catholic faith in general and comparatively to other faiths/ denominations. I chose to work with a stained glass window, a rosary, and an adorned cross. None of these are found too commonly in protestant faiths so I thought they would convey the Catholic theme well.

Here's the first in the poster series. This is the composition that I first had in my head when I was trying to decide which campus poster I was going to redo. The basic structure of a cross lends itself well to composing and I am really happy with this piece.

This little booger took quite a while since I made each one of the beads individually, but it was worth it. I love the gradation of colors and my "ah ha" moment of the grungey box, but not dirty box. Also, throughout this series, I am really enjoying the script font; it's so stinking hard to find a good script font! I knew in my head what I wanted to do, but finding a script font to make it happen was tricky and time consuming.

And here is the third poster for this series. I tried to make a sort of psudo stained glass window and I think it worked out fairly well. I love the blue and the brown in this piece which was totally a happy accident when i was farting around with it in Photoshop. It wasn't doing anything I wanted it to and then finally it decided to be a good little file and make something pretty!

 For the magazine adds, they are pretty similar to the posters, obviously just in a smaller scale and a few things moved here or there.

For a while I really struggled with figuring out how I wanted to do the magazine ads but once the juices finally got flowing they cranked out pretty fast. Also I would like to point out that I know that they are no bleed ads and they are set up correctly, you just can't see the white space around them given that this is a white background.

In how I approached the series aspect of this assignment I wanted there to be images/graphics that worked well together as well as backgrounds that had similar feels to them but in different colors, and I wanted the type to be relatively the same.

Here's the mobile add!

Time Crunch!

Here's the break down of budgeted time versus what I spent on each project. I ended up right on the money with about 120 hours of total work for this class so far; when I calculated tonight what I had recorded the number was 119.4 hours.

MAE: Budgeted 6 Spent 7.8
Type: Budgeted 6 Spent 8.95
Jazz: Budgeted 12 Spent14.9
Hwy63 Budgeted 8 Spent 13.5
Happy Budgeted 2 Spent 5.45
Tetons Budgeted 6 Spent 5.5
Herp Budgeted 8 Spent 5.35
Zombie Budgeted 12 Spent 18.55
Ramen Budgeted 7 Spent 9.35
Stress Budgeted 8 Spent 8.8
Catholicism Budgeted 28 Spent 20.2

It appears that in general I usually go over budget so I need to pick up the pace in a few departments but then I don't spend as much time on others so it balances out pretty well.

I've learned a lot in this course already! I feel like you actually want us to get better and are really helpful and useful in making that happen. I'm always thankful for demo days because they usually seem like pretty simple things, but I rarely already know how to do them. This class is certainly stressful and demanding but I do like the assignments in their openness in concept and time schedule.  I know that the leniency in time frame makes it easy to get behind, as I most definitely did this semester, but it is really great in fitting in other school commitments and such. I'm not exactly sure how I got so far behind but I did and I'm going to try and stay on top of things better in this second half of the semester to come.

Have a great spring break!

Oh and you mentioned that you wanted us to comment on what we had gotten approved; I got all components of each assignment approved! It was a close one- thanks again for hanging around to approve my stuff! I think I commented throughout my blog post that each thing got approved but just in case I missed one....I GOT EVERYTHING APPROVED...there we go.



Lynda.com
Hey Rusty, so I now have internet connection again and I got your email about posting about lynda.com- I was in the boonies in OK all of break. I've started my lynda course and so far I really like it. The videos move at a good pace as not to speed by in a blur that is incomprehensible but also not so slow that I fall asleep. Many of the videos I have watched so far have seemed pretty basic but had some little gems in them as well, meaning I know most of what they are talking about but then they will throw in a short cut of something I already know how to do, which is a great time saver. I feel like overall these videos will ultimately be great refreshers of any previously learned stuff, excellent tutorials on any big things that aren't covered in classes- though I don't really know what that would be- and awesome insights into little tips and tricks that no one really knows about until they are stumbled upon or covered in a course like this. The only thing I think I would change would be to be able to start the course either over a break such as summer or Christmas or right at the beginning of the semester when all of the other courses start and not a month into the semester. The reason being that it's just kind of awkward and hard to squeeze another, be it little, thing in once you already have a framework classes and time allotment for those classes laid out. I'm sure this was primarily because we are the first group to test drive this course and getting things started is always rather cantankerous and slow, so I don't really see it being an issue in the future.