Final Exam Project

For my final exam I was given the task of taking a piece of art and making it into graphic design.  The way I decided to go about this was by using photo-manipulation.  I thought that I would take several pictures (the art) and put them together into a poster, while using many effects, to make a piece of graphic design which would convay a message to those who see it.

But first I had to get an idea.  I began by searching Photomanipulation Tutorials in Google.  I wanted to convay a school realated message, so that made it a little more difficult.  After a lot of searching, I found the following tutorial and it hit me on what I could do: Magical Book and Playground Scene.  I then thought about a library and how very few kids do their summer reading, so I thought this would be a good project to do. 

Above is my final product (it didn't come the same when I brought it into Blogger-it is blurry), I changed a few things from the orginal tutorial, but I like how it turned out, it could have been better in some areas had I had more time.  I also used some tools and effects that I had never used or had not used in a while.  For example, I had not used the burn or dodge tools in a while and I used them to create shadows and light spots on the objects in the picture.  I also used the skew tool to create shadows, too (that tool I have oftenly used before).  I also learned a new skill: lens flare.  I learned how to create a lens flare and found it very interesting and cool. However, I didn't like how it looked in my project so I ended up removing it.  All that was left was to finalize my message.  I thought of growing your imagination and other ideas along those lines.  In the end I decided on: Let your imagination run wild, read a book. Hopefully when a person reads this poster they get the feeling to read the book rather than a summary of it.  This would also be a good poster to hang in a library.

Design Show Posters

For my next project I did two posters that could have been printed and desplayed at the design show.  I wasn't able to finsish them in time as I was working to meet the deadline for my Elite Logo's project (see previous post).  However, even though they couldn't make it in the design show, I still decided to do them because I thought it would be a good experience to have. 

The first one that I did was for the Elite Logos.  In this design I have showed the final and some of the alternate versions of the logo.  I also described the process of working with my coach to produce a final result that we are both proud of.  Some of these logos will appear on next falls t-shirts and sweatshirts replacing the old logos that the club has had for over 10 years. 

The final poster that I did was to show the science adademy poster that I designed for Thomas Rominski's science fair.  Once again, I explained the requirements and process that I went through working with Thomas.  We worked very well together and his poster came together very nicely.  In the end, Thomas entered a fair and placed third winning $50. 

Elite Logo Update

After talking with my coach and a few assistant coaches I was given a few revisions to make on the logos.  They were very impressed with the work that I did. 

Some of the changes that I made are pictured below:

In the logo above I changed out the old water and replaced it with the "Elite Wave." 

 These two logos above are the new circle logos.  Both my coach and I really like these logos and will probably become one of two main team logos.  We prefer the one on the right more because it gives the feeling that the swimmer is swimming on the wave.

The logos above are the updated Elite logo.  I don't like how these turned out at all, but I did them to see how they would turn out.  In the logos I took out the blue water that I made and replaced it with the "Elite Wave."   The old version of this logo will be used over these versions. 

The final logo pictured above is completely new.  One of the assistant coaches thought it would look cool and asked me to try and create it.  Personally I really like how it turned out.

In conclusion, I am very pleased with how most of the logos.  My coach is in the process now of making designs for the shirts and sweatshirts using my logos on them.  They will be ready for the fall season which begins in September.

Science Academy Poster - Updated

At the start of the project when I heard what we would have to do I spent some time looking up infographics on the internet.  I got some great ideas on how I wanted to layout and design the poster for Tommy.  I then sketched out a few ideas.  I got some ideas so when I found out my partner and his project, at once I thought of a cool way to use a theme.  Then once I got this theme, I did 2 more sketches with a road for a border (both of which are on the left).  I thought it would be an interesting way to include the bike theme into what is normally a plan poster and I think it turned out well.  Below you will see two examples of my brainstorming ideas on the computer (for the entire project I was using Adobe Illustrator).  I did these two designs just to try and get my ideas on the computer-nothing final.  The one on the left is the first one and I didn't like how it turned out.  I then did the one on the right.  The green boxes represent where the text and information will go.  To the right of that is my color scheme that I want to use for the poster.  I got the color scheme off a website called Kuler.

Then I started to recieve some of his information.  I then began to enter his information into text boxes and played around with the layout some more.  I have had some problems with the spacing between the text words and the border of the rectangle around the text box.  However, I have fixed that, despite it being very annoying, but it looks much better than it did before.

I currently have the first two columns filled with the text that I want there (background, hypothesis, methods, etc.)  Today, Tommy e-mailed me his results so upon completion of this post I will begin adding his results, conclusions, graphs, etc. in the other two columns.  There will be pictures added to the columns once I finish the text part.  I plan on finishing within the next week.  Then I will have a bunch of people from Tommy to Mr. Boothby to Mrs. Colfax take a look at the poster to get feedback on how to improve it.  Then I will make the changes and have it printed and given to Tommy for his upcoming science fairs.  Below is what I have done so far, and there will be a follow up post at the completion of the project with the final version.

Below is the first final computer generated version. 

                 

This was then e-mailed to both Tommy and Mrs. Colfax and both of them had revisions (both of their revision sheets are below-Tommy's is on the left and Mrs. Colfax's is on the right).

Once receiving each of their revisions I then went to work on making the required changes.  Tommy and I met on a few occasions to discuss the progress of the poster and make some other changes.  Below show progressions of how the poster evolved.  

Then I checked back in with Tommy and Mrs. Colfax and made some last second changes.  Tommy and I met one last time and I was given the ok to print.  I then printed the final version pictured below and delivered it to the Science Academy.  Tommy will be entering fairs within the next few weeks.

Science Academy Poster

My next project was a poster for Tommy Rominski, a science academy student at Morristown High School.  For the year, Tommy has been working on a project involving a bike power by solar panels to be energy efficient (see picture of bike on the right) and needs a poster for the science fairs he will be entering (thats where my job comes in).  I have been working on designing a poster for Tommy with his information, pictures and other information on it. Mainly we have shared information through e-mail.  He has sent me powerpoints and word documents and I have kept him up to date on how my end is going.

At the start of the project when I heard what we would have to do I spent some time looking up infographics on the internet.  I got some great ideas on how I wanted to layout and design the poster for Tommy.  I then sketched out a few ideas.  I got some ideas so when I found out my partner and his project, at once I thought of a cool way to use a theme.  Then once I got this theme, I did 2 more sketches with a road for a border (both of which are on the left).  I thought it would be an interesting way to include the bike theme into what is normally a plan poster and I think it turned out well.  Below you will see two examples of my brainstorming ideas on the computer (for the entire project I was using Adobe Illustrator).  I did these two designs just to try and get my ideas on the computer-nothing final.  The one on the left is the first one and I didn't like how it turned out.  I then did the one on the right.  The green boxes represent where the text and information will go.  To the right of that is my color scheme that I want to use for the poster.  I got the color scheme off a website called Kuler.

Then I started to recieve some of his information.  I then began to enter his information into text boxes and played around with the layout some more.  I have had some problems with the spacing between the text words and the border of the rectangle around the text box.  However, I have fixed that, despite it being very annoying, but it looks much better than it did before.

I currently have the first two columns filled with the text that I want there (background, hypothesis, methods, etc.)  Today, Tommy e-mailed me his results so upon completion of this post I will begin adding his results, conclusions, graphs, etc. in the other two columns.  There will be pictures added to the columns once I finish the text part.  I plan on finishing within the next week.  Then I will have a bunch of people from Tommy to Mr. Boothby to Mrs. Colfax take a look at the poster to get feedback on how to improve it.  Then I will make the changes and have it printed and given to Tommy for his upcoming science fairs.  Below is what I have done so far, and there will be a follow up post at the completion of the project with the final version.

Project #2-Elite Logo

For my second project I created a series of logos for the Elite Swim Club, my club swim team, that might be used on our team shirts in the years to come.  At the outset of the project I e-mailed my head coach who is also the president of the team.  He sent me back some feedback on what he was looking for (some of them are: he wanted the colors to remain the same, and he wanted me to incorporate the meaning of the word Elite into the logo) and the current and past logos that he had been using.  I then began to sketch out my ideas (pictured below).  

I then ran them by him along with one of the assistant coaches and they gave me some direction on what they were looking for as well as the go ahead to begin the project.  I then began to start on my computer generated versions.  I planned on designing 3 logos with a few versions on the computer using Adobe Illustrator.

The first logo is a little simpler than the other 2.  It is the word Elite and in front of it is a wave with a swimmer moving from left to right.  That is important because my coach is always using the word Elite as a highly trained group of individuals that are moving forward toward accomplishing great things.  That is why in each logo the word Elite is in italic and in this case the swimmer is moving to the right.  To create the swimmer, I used a simple swimmer tutorial that I found online and tried to improve it in a few ways.

I then created another version of this logo.  This time instead I used a different swimmer, but I couldn't find any tutorials on line so I had to turn to a new plan.  Instead I found a website, swimgraphics.com, that has many pages of all swimming clip art.  I brought one of those images into illustrator where I used the live trace tool and expanded it-creating a vector image.  I was then able to edit the color, size, placement, and more of the image until I like how it looked.  I wanted to go for more of a silhouette that was harder to pick out.

The third version had just the word elite and the wave with no swimmer.  All the versions are below.

The second logo is a traditional circle logo.  Before designing this logo I looked up some examples of circular logos that I liked (two of them are pictured below).

For this logo there there is just one version.  This logo has the wave and swimmer that I designed from the first logo but now we have a few circles around them.  Behind that I put the wave object from the old logo just to see what it would look like (I can always remove it after I meet with my coach).  The final product is below.

Example of shield logo that I liked

The third and final logo was a shield design.   When I searched logos on line, there were a bunch of shields displayed, so that gave me the idea.  Plus when looking at teams logos on the pool deck, you see a lot of circles or plain words, but no shields, so I thought it would be a good idea to try a shield logo.  I first had to create the shield which I did through this tutorial.  On this logo I really wanted the word Elite to be big and stand out with swim club and the date of establishment small under it.  I then added the swimmer.  Once again I elected to use the live trace tool, but this time with a different image.  In this case I didn't like the water with the swimmer, so I deleted the water from his and added the water from another image.  This took some time because you had to add and remove bits and pieces until it looked like he was swimming in it.  I am not to sure how I feel about the white background, but I can always go back to that later on.

I plan to sit down with my coach over break and discuss with him the logos that I have designed over the break.  Then I plan to ask a few of the assistant coaches as well as my teammates for feedback.  Once I come back from break I will make the changes and bring back the revisions that I have made.

As of right now I am very pleased with how the logos turned out.  My favorite has to be the first one.  It is simple but I like the meaning behind the swimmer that doesn't stand out as much and the font being in italics showing progression.

Project #1-Game Day Magazine

For my first project I wanted to create a magazine cover, similar to Sports Illustrated or game day magazine that would be handed out prior to the game.  Except I would be using pictures of MHS athleates as the focus.  I did some research about magazine covers and some good qualities that they have, and I want to try and include them into my project.  I also found some tutorials that would be interesting to include in my project.  This project doesn't have any real specifications because it is not being printed for anybody it is more of a warm up project.  However, I did make it a traditional magazine cover size: 8.5x11 inches.  When first brainstorming I wanted it to look like the picture to the right.

Below are two of my sketches that I designed for the magazine.  I was only able to develop these sketches after attending a couple games to get pictures that I could use.  

My title is "Colonial Turf," which ties in the school mascot and the fact that it is the first year of the turf field.  I ended up taking 350+ pictures from the games I attended.  I then had to go through the pictures and find the best ones.  There were a few I really liked, so they were the ones that are on the sketches and on my computer versions.

Image once done with Photoshop

I then began to work on the computer and work in photoshop to start.  I edited and cropped the pictures, as well as created my film strips from a tutorial.  From this I actually decided to combine some qualities from both my sketches into my one computer version.  I tried to include parts of a tutorial for a sports poster, but I didn't like how it turned out so I took it out and made changes accordingly to the pictures.  I also followed a bar code tutorial to make the barcode in the bottom right hand corner.

Once finishing in photoshop, I saved my image and brought it into illustrator.  In illustrator, I added the text to my project, and it was basically done from there.  I didn't get any feedback from an outside source, but I did make revisions throughout from what I saw and like or didn't like about my project.  

In the end, I was pleased with how my project turned out-the final product is you see below.