Final

     Over the past week I have been taking finals. My graphic design final was very fun and it came out great. For the final we had to take art and make it into a design. When I first heard this I had no idea what that mean, but as time went I understood what I was supposed to do. I decided to keep it simple while still making it look nice and different to get the message across. I decided to send a message of saving the planet using an animal that will soon be extinct if we don't save our planet... the polar bear.

     I made the image the size of my desktop 1920x1080 so I could use it as my background image because I think this looks really nice.

My Recent Graphic Design Endeavors

Over the past two months I have been working on two very important projects, one for school, and one for my father. I'll start off with the project I did for my father. I had heard my Dad complaining about how his business card was very boring and did not stand out from other business cards. I took this as an opportunity to help out my Dad and do a project at the same time. This project was really fun because I could basically do whatever I wanted with it as long as it stood out from all the other business cards. The first thing that came to my mind was this business card I had seen on the internet, that took a Google search page but was filled in with the company's information. Obviously I did not want to copy this card so I came up with my own rendition for it.
First, I will show you the card that inspired me.

     That card is what inspired me, but I chose to make a business card for a person, instead of a company and I took it to the next level. First, I went on google and did a random search so I had an outline of the card. Then I went into illustrator and set up some rulers so I knew where to start the text and what size it had to be. That was definitely the hardest part, finding the proper font size, correct colors, and the correct font seemed to take ages. After I knew everything I needed I went into photoshop and erased everything except the border lines. Once that was done I went into illustrator and went over every border line so they would not be pixelated and then took them out in photoshop. I also got a high-res version of the Google logo so that wouldn't be pixelated. After all this was done all that was left to do was some fine tuning like lining up all the text and getting everything in the right spot. Finally, here is the business card I came up with (I took out all my Dad's information and filled it in with fake info).

    
     The next project I did was for my schools art & design show. For this project I took my top 5 favorite projects I did throughout the year and put them onto one big board. This project was really fun for me, but it was hard to choose just five projects to put on it. So I had to have some family and friends help me choose the fifth project because for me it was a draw between two. After I chose the projects I was going to use laying it out so everything fit was the next hard part. For each picture I had to right a paragraph on why I chose to do that project, how I got the idea, how I did it, and what I would do differently, so that took up a lot space. But after getting it all laid out it looked great. Once again, I took out my name and put in a fake name.

What I've Been Up To

Since I last blogged I have finished three projects, one just for fun, another was a Pearl Jam 25th anniversary album cover, and the most recent one has been a recycling poster.

     I'll start off by just showing you the project I did for fun. I did this project to practice my skills using some tools I have not used before and try out some new techniques. This project took me two and a half classes to complete, and I used a few tutorials so I could better use the tools that I had yet to try out. I think it came out great and some other people I asked said it looked awesome.

     The Pearl Jam album was a little bit harder for me. When I look at album covers I can never really see anything that has to do with the image and the title of the song. I came up with a few idea's but I did not really like any of them because they did not look good after I sketched them out. I finally just decided to do something a little bit different which I had never seen before. My idea was to take all of their albums, and lay them one on top of the other changing the gradient each time so you could see the 'Pearl Jam' from every album all over my cover.

  






     This is the other cover idea that I was really into as well. For this cover I took each album am put it all onto one. I like this one a little bit more, because it looks much more organized than the other. I also feel like the brown on the other one takes away from it a lot.

     The most recent project I did actually has a reason behind it unlike the others. This one is a recycling poster for a program at my school called 'PGC'. PGC is a program at my school where the Freshmen coming to Morristown High School get a group of two or three seniors. Each homeroom gets a different group of seniors. This helps them get used to the High School and once a week during lunch they get together. When they get together they play some sort of game that helps them bond and talks about some problems they have which you then talk to them about. For this project we got a list of motto's that we could use and I chose the motto 'Recycle or Die' from that list. Right when I heard that motto I got an idea for what I was going to do and it turned out better than I had thought it would have.





     Please tell me what you think of these and what I could do to improve on these.
Thanks.

The Milky Way

So, I recently decided to do a remake of a realistic looking galaxy and I think it actually came out very well. As for researching I just looked up photos of galaxy's and all sorts of different things in space and just tried to make it resemble these things just as much. When I showed it to my some friends and family, there only advice was to put some 'dust' in there, which I found to be quite easy. All I had to do was choose a brush and just put some scattering in there with it and walla, I had some 'space dust'. The galaxy looks very complex, but its really just using very few, simple tools, and making the right angles, so it basically just takes a lot of mediocre things and puts them together to make something epic. This really changed my mentality towards graphic design so much different. There were times when I would see a project someone did in photoshop that looked amazing and just think to myself "Well I shouldn't even try this, there's no way mine would look anywhere near as good," or "There's no way I could ever make something look so good." I'm now very willing to try all sorts of projects no matter what the difficulty because I can tell two things:
One - It's not as hard as it looks.
Two - If I really try, it can be done.
P.S.- If you want the photo is 1920x1080 so you can make it your desktop background.

My next project kind of contradicts what photoshop is supposed to be used for in my opinion, I'm going to do a de-touchup on a famous star(s). I'm going to try to find a star that is kind of a household name, right now I'm looking at using Seth Green or Seth Rogen. This project will probably end up just being a compilation of tutorials and probably a few things I know/will figure out to do on my own. I think the most challenging part of this will be morphing other things onto his face so it doesn't look so out of place and instead just flows with the picture. Wish me luck!

If Ninjas Ruled

So I was on a website called www.Worth1000.com which is a website that basically gives you graphic design project ideas and then you submit them and then three virtual trophy's are give out. So the title of this contest is "If Ninja's Ruled" and you do just that. Basically, you take a photo of a ninja and incorporate him into something you would see on a normal basis, except with ninja's instead. I plan on doing maybe a magazine cover with ninjas hidden all over it or a school ruled by ninjas.

Website

I have recently been working on several projects for a website I'm making in Web Design. Currently I am finishing up the basic code on the website and am going to decorate it later. Some of the things I've been working on are some smiley faces, a menu bar and an actual website template. For the smiley faced I just went and looked at the classic Yahoo smiley and based it off that. Right now it looks like I may not use the menu bar because the website I'm making has one. I plan on making the website more geared towards kids that like video games because that's the topic I picked. It did not take much research to figure out the basic design of the website. I basically just went to some websites I visit frequently such as yahoo, google, facebook, lockerz, gamebattles and found a few gaming forums just to see what all the others were doing. I really want to incorporate what all the 'big time' websites are doing because all of them are known for being very easy to navigate and want my website to be the same way. I plan on incorporating many more of these websites aspects further down the road. For example Yahoo has a little widget with pictures that shows you all the latest newsworthy topics around the world, lockerz has a 'hallway' where they keep you up to date with everything going on with the website. I want to make this website really user friendly so it appeals to more people and it does not annoy you like some of the big websites out there. This might turn into a full year project as the website will get done over the year. I have also worked on a few projects I just felt like doing for fun such as two movie posters one for 'Avatar' and one for 'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen'.                                                                                                  

Getting Back in the Hang of it.

So since school started I have just been doing a few small projects in order to get back in the hang of photoshop and re-familiarizing myself with the tools. The two small projects I have done involved morphing and just taking out certain colors. The main thing I was working on was making a custom snowboard just for me which turned out to be really fun and successful. I started out with a snowboard template and then just went from there, I got the image from a render pack that I found on the internet that included about another eight images. It took about five classes to get it the way I wanted and this was the project that familiarized with many of the tools I had forgotten about. A few were some of the texture effects and getting in the hang of using some of the basic tools like drop shadows, overlays, textures and lens flares. I already knew how to use them, this was just refreshing my memory so I'd be more comfortable with these tools. The hardest part was probably messing with the lighting and getting the right opacity for the image. I think the final board came out great and would love getting a board like this made. In the future I plan of just making a collage board, so it would just be filled with things that define me. Please comment and give some tips that could maybe make this board even better than it already is.