Design Weekend March 28th

This past weekend we had a guest speaker named Jimmy Gownley, who is an accomplished comic book creator along with having experience in graphic design and motion graphics. He gave a very motivational speech to us on Saturday. He told us a lot of things that I've already heard from other speakers who share the same kind of 'luck' so to speak. Some of it is luck, others are having strong networking connections, while other times it's just constant perseverence and applying for anything to everything you can find that is in your field. It was very inspirational, and it kind of made me a little bit refreshed and eye opening to the fact that I can do this. There are things I may not be perfectly good at, but I can still create something that no one else has that can  be highly successful. It all depends on who to contact, who to keep in touch with, and just again- networking. I feel like I need to start working toward a portfolio. I have things in general, I have a variety of things mixing between animations, graphics, design, and so on. I guess diversity is okay, but I am uncertain if I really should have much diversity in my portfolio- if it's not top quality compared to what my peers both designers and non designers see versus the big guys.

I'm thinking about next semester to have a critique of my work- because I had had one last semester but it wasn't very eye opening at all and not too much advice was given to me in terms of what I had and what I could do to utilize it well. Half of that though may be because I signed up for the wrong person.

Experimental Project Progress 1

Working on the experimental type, I have had two approaches to it. The first approach was to envision what animals I could use to my advantage in order to create the alphabet. I knew that I would have a little bit of flexibility, since they are animals morphed and shaped into the letter itself. The only problem that I had was how exactly to create them? At first I dove into using the "fontographer" block as a reference mark for how big I should make each letter and where all the landmarks were in terms of footers, line height and so on.

Realizing that it was making my life harder, I decided to go ahead and find an already made font and make several layers of the entire alphabet within that block. From there I would trace over the letter with my own animal creation. 

Here is what I have so far. I'm starting to go back and really outline and bring out shapes and forms with thickened lines. It's starting to lean toward a little bit of tribal-esque, but I'm trying to correct that as best I can. I have some alternations I want to push ahead with- that being to maybe have it be colored / keep it tribal like / motif style / keep the animal form as best as possible so people don't get confused to what it is. I think for right now it's a good beginning, because each letter can easily be seen as to what they are. 

Edit Update 3/31/15:

This is where I am currently at now! 

I've been trying to keep myself along with the theme of aztec / mayan motifs, but a little bit of tribal has seemed to come into play- which isn't a bad thing! I feel some letters are stronger than others, and I want to keep trying to have a diversity of bold lines and thicknesses, compared to the photos I've provided previously. I've also tried to make sure that the animals and the differences between black and white correspond with what they actually look like and represent. 

I'm also still debating about color- but for right now I'm content with the letters and how they are so I can be prepared to dedicate myself to After Affects.

Processing Workshop 3/27

Today was the Processing Workshop.

This workshop was very informative, and it feels like working with Processing is something to be looked into for the summer. Being someone who has little knowledge about code along with starting to learn introductory JavaScript, this is definitely a faster pace. I would love to research more about this on my own time and play around with the program itself.

Lab 8 with HTML / CSS

Here is the Code and the image :

Lesson 7 with HTML / CSS

I feel like I kind of did this wrong, but I noticed a significant difference in spacing between project 7 and project 6.

Here is project 7's code and image:

The Final Poster SxSW

My original idea versus my final idea after class critique:

I was originally told that to make the poster better it would  be best to get rid of the lines on the side as well as scale down and bring together my EMA since the spacing was a bit off between the E and the M. I also decided to try and brighten up my poster's opacity. 

My original poster's opacity on the computer was at about 20% while i upgraded the opacity to about 35%. After printing it out, I didn't realize that it wasn't as vibrant still compared to the digital outlook, but it's a lot more seen at a far away distance compared to before:

Taking pictures doesn't really let you see much due to the semi gloss paper, but there is a huge difference between both- both digitally and printed.

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Edit:

Post poster project critique:

We were asked to go around and ask people about our posters. While I did not have my poster, I was given great feedback in terms of if the people would see the band and also if they knew what South by Southwest was as well as what kind of band EMA would be.

i've made a post on Facebook, for curiousity sake on getting even more feedback from people that are not graphic design majors and such.

Lesson 6 with HTML / CSS

Lesson from PowerPoint:

Lesson of Choice:

I decided to choose movies taken from the IMBd website, so I chose them to be the sponsors. I tried to keep my movies in line with the example from the powerpoint, Camila. I chose to change the font style to Verdana, because I felt it relates more to movies when it comes to reviews. I didn't do too much experimentation in terms of potential colors and such, but in terms of keeping it all in line and some paddings around, I think it looks pretty uniform.

Below is my code.

Lesson 5 with HTML / CSS

Lesson 5 Power Point:

Lesson 5 Redone: 

the reason why I chose to do the things I did was because I like having consistency and your eye constantly moving. I decided to be experimental and play around with contrast of color, italics, and placement by separating the full text into two paragraphs- splitting up the five ways of aligning text. While there is a bit of a large gap between "is" and "for" as you keep going from the top you have red for "A" "Alignment" and "big A". I felt this kept uniformity and your eye moving from top to bottom. The same applies for the text.  

Below is the code

Week 8A Overview

Tuesday:

Today we went over our pre critiques of our posters. I'm feeling actually really confident with mine. There's not too many things I need to change, just really make smaller and also get rid of what doesn't need to be. I'm realizing that I tend to be somebody who likes to make things uniform and symmetrical to an extent. I need to sometimes go out of it and just do whatever. I also am starting to work on the final project for this class. It's so weird how much time is already flying by. I'm hoping to get things all done and situated. I'm planning to watch some videos on After Effects in attempts to learn it.

Thursday:

Today we went over the Powerpoint of Lesson 5: Alignment. Learning things graphically, if you are a designer working with a programmer in terms of JavaScript, you want to be able to defend your statement and reasoning while working together. For example, if you have a layout that's different from a tablet versus a phone, you want to have nice readability between the columns instead of having the reader's eye going all over the place when placement is very weird.

We went over terminology in terms of coding and how we want things to be spaced both vertically as well as the overall layout of a page.

Experimental Project Intro Research

For my project, there are two main resources and researchings I dove into. For recap purposes:

"My idea of creating an iconic, aztec-rune styled endangered species is a go! I will be creating it on Illustrator, Photoshop, sketching my ideas and then transferring them digitally. I have an entire list on endangered species both in our country along with some that are outside of our country (due to letter specifics). The idea given to me to even further this futuristic development is to bring awareness of these animals- including the ratio that they have currently as well as what it could be like without these animals based on the hours that pass equate to about 10 years or so. 2 hours equates to 20 years, and this could equal an animal not existing anymore.

The other thing is that it could be a t shirt, that is connected electronically to create an emphasis on extinction. The animal that is about to die out would just fade away and disappear on the shirt itself, leaving the other runes left to stay alive until it is their turn to die out. Both information as well as my process of the shirt and what would happen work well. I feel like making a video might be a good idea. Combining both infographic as well as possible video versions created with something maybe not After Effects related but Windows Movie Maker could help."

So for the most part, I dove into researching about endangered species along with the Mayan aztec culture. Mayan motifs and images are what I want to base my own alphabet around in the form of iconic figures (that being the endangered animals). Because of this I felt it best to at least look into a bit of Mayan culture, but what really ended up happening was scrolling through images to put my point across as to what I am doing with my letters themselves. to create this style. They chose to create hieroglyphs that symbolized animals, insects, people, etc. and also form narratives. The hieroglyphs and icons are formed using various shapes, but nothing too extremely detailed. My influence comes from both a game that held these iconic images as well as I have always found aztec and mayan art to be extremely fascinating.

Searching around, I chose animals I felt would work best along with the ideas of the letter itself. I chose animals that most people are familiar with, as well as animals that people haven't even heard of (including myself) and probably will never hear of again depending if they really do go extinct.

• angel shark / artic fox
• black footed ferret
• chimpanzee
• dama gazelle / dayak fruit bat
• elephant
• fiji snake / fire salamander
• gorilla
• hirola
• iphis monarch
• jaguar / javan rhino
• kinglet calyptura
• loggerhead turtle / leaf scaled sea-snake
• mugger crocodile
• narwhal
• orangutan
• polar bear / pangolin
• queensland rat-kangaroo /
• red panda
• sloth / shark / seal
• tree kangaroo / tiger
• utah prairie dog
• vanauatu flying fox /
• white bellied heron / wild asian buffalo
• xantus’s murrelet / xinjiang ground-jay /Xolocalca Bromeliad Salamander
• yellow shouldered blackbird
• zayante band winged grasshopper’ / zebra duiker /

SOURCES;

http://www.earthsendangered.com/list.asp#X

https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/directory?direction=desc&sort=extinction_status

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_endangered_species_in_North_America

In terms of actual endangered animals and extinction, I looked into statistics and current listings on various wild animals to obtain what I need. I also looked up what causes extinction, both due to hunting as well as climate changes. 

Extinction has been dominated by natural processes of the earth, like a change in the Earth's crust or major climate change. But predominately, it is human activity that causes extinction to occur. Over the past years, the extinction of animals has grown to numerous amounts. Birds are on the top of the list for most extinct and endangered animals with mammals ranking second.

For example, a specific bird species in the late 80s had a number of 25,000. Now, it has dropped to approximately 2,000. I'm still delving into more statistics and researching on specific species, and trying to figure out how to equate the numbers for better reasons for the whole 2 years equals 20 and so forth.

PRICING;

As for pricing I'm still uncertain, I do not know quite yet if I am going to be doing this like a large poster, or if I want to try and delve into using After Effects. I've used Windows Movie Maker before and been able to compose videos, so I feel like After Effects will be a great opportunity for me to learn and be able to use it well.

SOURCES;

http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/150962/

http://news.discovery.com/animals/endangered-species/human-caused-322-animal-extinctions-in-past-500-years-140724.htm

http://www.allaboutwildlife.com/endangered-species/endangered-species-population-numbers/3596

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/blogs/15-endangered-animals-to-watch-in-2015

Week 7A Overview

Tuesday:

Today in class we went over our sketch ideas for the band poster before working on them in class. There are some things I want to do with mine that require my skill in using Photoshop and another drawing program of mine, to create something with more color to it. I have a rough idea of what I want to do but since I don't have the right stuff with me at the moment it's hard to present visually what I have in store.

this is currently my start of an idea.

I'm not too sure about the extra decorations I purposefully added to the first thick stroked line in each of my top letters- since it was mainly because I wanted to have a relationship with my actual typeface. Granted, it is only lines, so if I could make them sharper when I have the time it may look a lot better and less stiff. 

I am also using the typeface, Maven Pro Light to compliment the hand written typeface for my band's name. I am also going to try and create another poster with the second possible handwritten design that my group liked. 

What I would like to do is the space that I have I want to add color. I want to add splatters. I feel that EMA needs something that bursts, something that is completely random. A splatter I feel would really give this poster a better push since everything right now is very basic and uniform. I'm tempted to see if I could add the splatter with actual paint compared to the digitally brush styles that I have with my drawing program to give that splatter feel. 

Update: 

This is what my in critique draft design is for my poster. I mentioned that EMA is a gothic, psychedellic, chill kind of band. In being so, I found them to be also be very abstract. The way that their music videos are portrayed have high contrast in light, as well as the use of overlaying visual art overtop of the singer or scene of events.

Update 2:

After talking with a few people with my design, an option given to me was that if my band is someone who has a gothic, psychedellic feel, the colors should be more cool than bright and outspoken. I was also told to possibly tighten my 2014s together so that they were less scattered.

it was also addressed to me later that the larger 2014s were very bright and took away from the main 2014, so I turned down the opacity to mostly 18% of the large and about 50% of the smallest so it wouldn't be too bright.

These are the two versions I have that are toned down and less contrasting and scattered. I also chose to show the 2014 fully along with a version with them coming out of the side. What I plan to do is print out these two versions. Overall I am very proud of this poster, and think it portrays the band well.

20 Sketches EMA S2SW Band

These are my chosen sketches for my chosen band. I went to their facebook page and took ideas from the various posters I found in their photos.

After talking and discussing with my group, it was decided that the top right's image with the lines in the first picture, along with the bottom left in the second picture work the strongest and best with my band. If I were to handwrite the band's name, I believe that I can use my typeface for the first letter of what else we are suppose to be writing about. The next thing to determine however, is what other kind of typeface would work along with my own if I am only using the first letter of each word? 

Since I have to have the body copy,

Bands Name

South-by-Southwest 2014

Austin, TX 

I am thinking that for my typeface, I will use "EMA", my numbers and "TX" to have that stand out for my text. If I choose then to handwrite the rest, it may work well. EMA is a band that is abstract and very loose. I'm thinking I can incorporate my digital drawing skills in terms of light and color, or possibly see what I can do paint wise to maybe create some splatters on a poster that may end up being black bg and white type.