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.