Week 9.2 "Amalga Poster"

This design is based on my earlier projects called, Amalgamated Industries. For this assignment we were given images of widgets that they distribute to other industries and were instructed to develop a simple poster design. I constructed the image in Photoshop; originally the image’s background was black with a gradient of gray. To change the background to white, I first turned the image into a smart object and by selecting the background with the magic wand tool I could isolate the background from the widget. By doing this anything I do to the image would only effect the background and not the widget itself. I then erased the background with the eraser tool so I only have the image of the widget in the document.

I then finished the project by bring the image into Illustrator and because of Illustrator’s vector system I could resize the image without losing in pixels or distortions of the image keeping the image clear and crisp. The texts were added last by positioning the text with a significant amount of space it will complement the white space and help the composition’s flow.  

Week 9.1 "Oliveight Items"

Hey, what’s going on everyone? Today I’m here to showcase two designs that represent the two companies I’ve been working.

This first design is of the Olive Eight Hotels merchandise. For this project we were instructed to develop concepts for merchandise that our given hotel may provide. I chose t-shirts, a hat, and a pair of water-skis. I chose some practical items like the hat and t-shirts to represent the typical merchandise a hotel may sell, as for the water-skis I wonted to represent some of the events that the hotel may hold and since they are located in a port city like Seattle water-skiing would best fit the settings.

As for the concept the logo and color skim are the same as the logos with a saturation difference to help the composition be less harsh on the eyes compared to the darker green in the logo. The items are all traced with the pen tool from a template and designed afterwards. Unlike the previous logo design I gave an extra design element to give the design a more edger and visual appealing to appear to target the younger audience. With the brush tool I used the chalk brush preset with a low opacity for the highlights. I believe that by applying lighter highlights to the darker elements and darker highlights to lighter elements I could get the design to pop or standout.

I chose this logo design to represent these products, because it takes up less space and is memorable when seen. The figure on the side is a scale reference to compare the sizes of the items.

Week 8.2 "Olive 8"

This logo is based on a hotel called, “Olive 8 Hotel.” I designed the logo to include two graphical olives to represent the “8” and a more less obvious olive to represent the “O” in Olive. This design is in a logo sheet format to help organize the different pieces. Just like the last logo design I designed it was done in Illustrator and is based on designs I’ve sketched on trace paper.

Some of the problems I had with this design were getting the “O” in Olive to appear more readable to the eye. Originally the “O” was designed to be an olive like the “8,” but it became lost in the design and it read as “Live 8” instead of “Olive 8."

Week 8.1 "Amalga Logo"

Hey everyone, this week I show case two sets of logo projects that I’ve been working on.

This logo is based off of a made up company we were given in class called, Amalgamated Industries Incorporated. The instructions were very simple we were told to develop a working logo piece that would be used for multiple media sources. We were given total freedom in the logos concepts.

I first started sketching on my tracing pad developing many different ways the company name could be formed using only text. Out of all the design I sketched I chose one and recreated it using Illustrator.

The logo is made up of the three letters of the company’s name, “a.i.i.”. The letters are all in lower case form and are stacked onto each other on separate layers giving it an interesting design. A trick I used to get the “a” to appear to be in sections was to use a clipping mask on another “a” and place them next to each other to form a sectioned “a.”  

The piece required a two-color format, a four-color format, and a black and white color format. By using Illustrator’s pantone color palette I chose three colors that would best represent the logo to finish it off.

One of the difficulties I had with this project was to keep all the letters aligned in each design, so by using the alignment tools in Illustrator I could easily get the design aligned the way I wonted.

Week 7.2 "Altar"

This piece is called, “Altar.” The main objective of this project was to formularies ourselves with the duplication tool and to experiment with the different paint effects. For this composition I made a central focus with the sphere at the center. By giving the spheres a reflective surface to give off the different viewpoints each sphere would have of the central piece it made the composition more interesting. The pillars in the composition were used to give the composition an appearance of an altar or some mythical place.

Difficulties I had with this composition were getting the spheres to become centered to each pillar. By using the centering tools in Maya the process became easier.

Week 7.1 "R.E.D."

Hey, everyone today is the start of week 7 and for this week I’ll exhibit some of my projects I’ve done using the Maya Program at school.

This piece is called, “R.E.D.” The objective of this project was to formularies ourselves with the controls that required positioning and to gain a sense of feel with the Maya program. Another objective of this project was to display a given color in text form within the composition that would appear appealing to the eye.  I chose the color red and I simply displayed the texts, R. E. D. throughout the composition. I experimented with reflections to give the piece a more interesting look.

The difficulties I had with this project was getting used to Maya’s controls. At first it was hard to position the objects within the composition, but with practice this process became easier over time.

Week 6.2 "Fruit Label"

This design is called, “Fruit Label.” For this assignment I was given a product and was told to design labels for that product using label templates given in class. I struggled with this assignment a lot; I really didn’t understand the construction of a typical label so through research I found out that labels are usually very basic, bold and understandable.

So in my design I used the basic shapes as borders and I gave them basic color to fill the empty space. My subject was called, “Canyon Farms.” They sell fruit drinks so on each label I designed specific fruits. In my composition each label is interchangeable and don’t represent one fruit design but any fruit design that is applied to that specific label. Throughout the design I kept each one simple just using colored shapes, gradient backgrounds and bold text.

Tips: Usually when you want to represent anything edible you would use real photos of the subject. I chose not to in my design I wanted to be deferent and to experiment with this idea.