Going into this project I only had one goal: to learn how to code a website and memorize what the different tags and commands mean. Overall, I think that I accomplished this goal and that I was able to code a website that effectively summarizes my work over the course of the semester. I now have many of the tags memorized and understand how to use them to create the effects I want while coding.
When it comes to the design of my website, I can’t really say much about my design choices since I mostly followed the videos. I picked a portrait of myself at marching band because I thought it showed a bit of my personality and some of the other things I do besides class work. For the colors of my website, I mostly pulled colors from my portrait image, altering each one slightly by making them lighter in order to make the whole color scheme more readable. I also decided to do design a header element in Illustrator to help make a statement and made it the dark burgundy red from my color scheme. I’ll admit I’m not fully satisfied with this component though, because it did create some extra empty space that makes it rather unbalanced, so this is something I would try and alter in the future. Finally, I decided to widen the layout so there wasn’t so much extra blank space on the sides.
Over the course of developing my website I didn’t have many issues, as I utilized the instructional videos for this project. My biggest issue came from trying to add or change things in the code that weren’t included in the instructional videos. Sometimes, the changes were easy as I just needed to use a command that we had already learned or used somewhere else. In other cases, such as keeping my header image from repeating, I had to look up online how to code the effect I wanted. Luckily though, the internet had most of the answers I needed and I was able to figure out how to make my website the way I wanted to.
In the future, when coding I want to spend some more time learning how to use sections, divs, ids, and classes, because that was something that I had trouble understanding while developing my magazine. Even though I was able to get the effects I wanted because I watched the videos I didn’t truly understand the concepts I was using. Due to this, I want to spend some more time utilizing those commands and effects in the future when I code so I can better understand what they do for a website.
Going into this assignment my main goal was to learn how to better use Illustrator. While I am familiar with the program and have used it for small projects, I have never created something on this scale before. Due to this I wanted to learn more about the different tools that Illustrator has and utilize them to create my design. I especially wanted to fine tune my pen tool skills. As a whole I think that I met those goals within this project. Throughout the unit and my project, I found that I was able to significantly improve my Illustrator skills, including making smooth bezier curves without any unwanted, sharp points. I also found myself becoming far more familiar with the tools in illustrator, utilizing symbol sprayer, color guide, and gaussian blur effects, throughout my design, bringing it to life.
For my poster project I decided to make a poster for an event that recently ended at my local zoo. It was called Zoo Luminate and our entire zoo was decorated with Chinese lanterns in the shape of zoo animals. The lanterns were all really pretty and I instantly thought that this would be a great event to make a poster for. I decided to focus on two different lanterns for the design; a traditional Chinese lantern and a lantern at the event that looked like a giraffe. I chose the giraffe because the giraffe lantern greets visitors at the zoo entrance; the giraffe is also one of the zoo’s main attractions. Since it was a central component to the event and to the zoo as a whole I thought it would be great to include a giraffe in the design. I decided to use the traditional lantern to visually represent the event and had it placed in the sky like it was a moon.
I think the part of my design that was the most successful was the giraffe, though I might be partial to it since it was the component of the poster that took the most time. I spent a lot of time fine tuning the details, trying to give it character while making it look accurate without being too flat. I spent a lot of time drawing each sploch on the giraffe so that they were the right shape and size and adjusting each of the radial gradients to make sure they looked right. However, the giraffe was also one of the most difficult parts of the project because during most of the work it looked too flat compared to the rest of the design. This turned out to be the hardest part; making the whole design cohesive but also alive. Early on in the project I added some gaussian blurs and backlighting on the lantern and the stars to make them look like they were glowing, which created a cool effect and helped make the elements look less flat. I duplicated the text, applied a heavy gaussian blur, and made it a darker color to add texture and color to the text to make it look less flat. These changes made the giraffe look slightly off compared to the other elements . I spent a lot of time trying different things to get it to not look so flat. I tried adding a gaussian blur to the giraffe and some backlighting, which looked good but didn’t fix the problem. I kept changing and modifying the giraffe but it still looked flat. Eventually after a couple of days of sitting with the problem I realized that the giraffe was pretty pale and that the singular color I originally had on the body of the giraffe was the issue. I added a gradient and made the giraffe darker and it just pulled it all together. Looking at the poster now, I think I overcorrected a little bit and made the giraffe too dark, but I still think it looks pretty good.
Overall, I didn’t really have any parts of this project where I felt like I made any big mistakes, which is good. I made a couple of small mistakes with layering, like making a layer over another layer when it needed to be below it. In the future I think I will also be more mindful of when I create a layer from the beginning of my design because I found myself having to create layers or move things from one layer to another while I was in the middle of editing. Besides those issues, I think for my next project I want to spend more time playing with Illustrator and experimenting with different effects and tools. While I feel like I did a good job using the different tools that were in our tutorials, I didn’t spend a lot of time exploring the other things that Illustrator offers, especially when it comes to different textural effects that it has. I think I also want to utilize the path finder tool next time since I didn’t really need to use that in this specific design.
Going into this project, I had three main goals that I wanted to reach. My first goal was to create effective layouts that had a good balance within their designs. I wanted to focus on this because I have not had to make a magazine like this before, so I wanted to use this as an opportunity to get more experience and grow in this area. My second goal was to work on speaking with type in this project, since I haven’t had a lot of opportunity to play with type and use it to express ideas in past projects. Finally, as I worked on the project, I put more of my focus on creating a cohesive design for my magazine. I realized that I was struggling with this as I continued to work on the project, so I created this goal for myself so I would focus on it more.
The first design choices I made involved the cover. Going into the magazine I knew that I wanted to focus on the “Five best albums” and the “Going Underground” stories; however, these two story topics don’t really have much in common so I spent a lot of time thinking about what cover image to use. I chose cover-17 because I thought it evoked the feelings of a punk rock musician, due to the way the man was dressed and posed. The image also was set in the Tube so I thought this cover image did a good job of combining the two articles I used. Once I chose my image I made a cutout of the hand to interact with the magazine title to create more visual interest in the image and pulled colors from the image to color the title as well.
My second design choices I made involved the typography I used for the ASF article. I spent some time messing with the typography of the ASF. I thought it would be cool to have the headline be in a square box to look like an album cover, but it was hard to get it to look right since I was using a three column layout on this page. Then I tried taking the typographic elements of the text on each album cover to make the headline. I decided that this was too busy and it took away from the images of album covers themselves, which was the focal point of the story. Instead, I decided to use the same font on the cover for all of my article headlines, to create a cohesiveness between each story. I then used this font to create large numbers next to the albums and made each number a color that came from the album to create visual interest and draw the reader’s eyes.
For “Going Underground”, I spent a lot of time deciding what images I should use for the story. Since the article was about Henry Beck and his map, as well as how Henry Beck is relatively unknown as a designer, I decided I wanted the opening image to be of Beck with “the diagram” to highlight his important role in the design of the Tube map. For the headline type, I decided to line up the word “underground” with the line of the map on the wall, and I made each letter of the word a different color from the different lines on the Tube to add a little color to the image and create an eyecatching headline. I then used the maps of the Tube within the article, placing them at the points of the story where they were specifically mentioned. I figured as a reader, I would finish reading about the map and then want to see it, especially since I am not from London. I also chose to use “Tube Gear” as my side bar, since it correlated with the content of the article better than the side bar about the posters..
When it comes to my creative process, I noticed that I have an easier time coming up with designs for individual articles or singular parts of a magazine, but I have a harder time making a cohesive design across the articles. I think this is because I usually use the articles and the images within them as inspiration for the design, colors, elements, etc. that I use. This meant that as I was working on this project a lot of the elements and colors varied from article to article, so I felt like I had a hard time creating something that felt cohesive across the whole project. As part of this I realized that a lot of the cohesiveness within the magazine comes from typographic consistency across the articles, so I am going to keep this in mind for future projects. I also had a hard time with getting my images sized correctly, especially when I was trying to adjust the resolution. I had to go back and fix some of the images multiple times because they didn’t look right or were too blurry, so this is something I want to continue to work on in the future. Finally, I also learned that when it comes to my design style, I tend to like simpler typographic choices when it comes to fonts. I liked using one font for all of the headlines within the magazine because it felt cleaner and more cohesive and I enjoyed using color, size, and the layout of the text to make each headline unique, despite using the same type.
