Magazine Project

For our first project of the semester, we were to design our own magazine cover in Photoshop using 300 dpi print resolution. I went through a couple design ideas before settling on a particulary picturesque image of New York City. From there the idea for the magazine name and design came to me pretty quickly.

Dreamscape Project

For our second project, our goal was to create a surreal 'dreamscape' image using a collage of various pictures, in a format large enough for an 11 x 17 high resolution print. My childhood cat named Miles had passed away recently, so I thought I would use this project to create something in his memory. The following is from the writeup that accompanied the artwork:

As anyone who grew up in the 90’s would probably recognize, this image is a recreation of Emerald Hill Zone from the game Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Released in 1992, the same year I got Miles, I named him after the supporting character who was first introduced in this game, Miles “Tails” Prower. The character was an orange and white two-tailed fox that could rotate his tails like a helicopter to fly; so I got the idea to use old pictures of my cat and manipulate them to show him running (and flying) around the game world as his namesake, with an extra tail to boot. I created the layout from various seamless textures I found on the Internet, and took some of the original graphics from the game and blended them with the textures to increase the resolution and give them more detail. The rest was done by painstakingly warping and skewing copies of the textures to create the landscape, which believe me, I sorely regret doing now, lol.

Here are the original photos of Miles along with the background image used.

Website Interface Project

For this project we took an existing website and designed a new static (non-functional) interface for it. My idea involved taking a necklace from their website and using the links of the necklace to create navigation links. I then found a couple pictures of the landscape from within the Navajo Nation and used them for the background. The header and footer images are from the same image, and the reason the navigation bar on the left uses a different image is because it originally spilled into the main body as a faded image, to add texture while seperating the elements of the website. It was decided though that this looked too cluttered, so I went with an off-white color for the backdrop instead.

Logo Project

For this assignment our professor had us design a vector logo and identity package in Illustrator for a client of hers with a new startup company. Initially I started out not being able to do much of anything in Illustrator aside from live trace and simple geometric shapes. But eventually I got the hang of the program in time to draw up a few design concepts, from which I had to choose one and form the identity package around it (stationary, envelope and business card). Our class competed for the one logo that would be used by the company, and while mine wasn't chosen, I was told I was one of four finalists.

Type Portraits Project

While this was one of the hardest projects of the class, as it turns out it would be nothing compared to what we would have to do next. The goal of this assignment was to create three portraits of ourselves using nothing but typography; one that consisted of lines (paths of text), value (where the density of the text represented light and dark values), and shape (using type to fit the shape of facial features).

For the first portrait, I used line to trace an image of myself and my mother on a family vacation in the Philippines from several years ago. The text all consists of song lyrics, most of them coming from my favorite band Radiohead.

The second portrait gave me the most problems thanks to Illustrator's inconsistent area type tool. Because I felt a bit strange uploading my face to the class blog, my professor suggested the idea of creating a unique self-portrait, after which I made this in Photoshop. This type portrait is actually somewhat personal to me; I have Asperger syndrome, and while for some people like Bill Gates it has been an asset, for me it has been socially crippling, often to the point where it felt like I didn't have a voice. That's where the idea for the portrait and the text in the center of the image came from.

For the third portrait I simply reused the image above to create the shape portrait. This one I found to be the easiest and most fun, since all I had to do was type out all the characters I could use for shapes as individual objects, and simply copy/paste a character and warp it to fit an area.

Architecture Project

Finally for our last project we had to take a photo of real world architecture and trace it as a vector image. The rule was that we could not use live trace/live paint as a shortcut. I decided to do the Space Shuttle launch pad for my project because apparently I'm a freaking masochist. The image is of the Space Shuttle Atlantis sitting on Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, just before what I believe was STS-135, the final Shuttle mission. The Space Shuttle, of course, was an icon of possibility for me and many others of my generation during the 3 decades it was operational. I thought if I was going to be ambitious with this project, what could be more appropriate than tracing the Shuttle itself? Even though I’m a bit disappointed that I fell short of completing it, I’m still very pleased with how it turned out, and I’m glad I decided to go through with it.