Project 2 - Samael Portrait

This was a project for Digital Illustration, in which we were to do a portrait. Now, I will be honest here;  I have absolutely no idea what to do with this. Its an illustration, but I can't think of any way to make it more of a design piece, and I would love some ideas on what I can do with it. I like the actual illustration of him the way it is, though I am open to changing the background, the type, etc.

Digital Illustration Thoreau Tshirt

The Original

The Redo

This project was from Digital Illustration, designed to be a three color t-shirt with the fourth color being the shirt's color. The object was to take a quote from Thoreau and find a way to represent it with the illustration. The quote speaks of natures rebirth from a burned forest, which reminded me of the story of the phoenix. I chose to use that as an inspiration giving the forsythia bush the slight appearance of a bird. I felt the explosiveness of the forsythia bush to match a fiery phoenix quite well. The audience would be those who are interested in Thoreau, or in unique T-shirts.

Ultimately what was decided was that what needed to be changed was the typography for readability. We stayed with a serif font because of the old time feeling of Thoreau as well as matching the shirt's qualities. It then became tricky, the only thing to change was the type's color. In the original it was black against yellow, in this design neither of the colors work well placed directly against the yellow. I decided to change the yellow shape to a stroke and change the type to yellow. This fulfilled a dual purpose, possibly easier readability and giving the logs their highlight which was removed. I do find this a bit easier to read, I think the black on yellow could have been too highly contrasting and became difficult to look at.  It might also be that the highlight on the original logs needed to be larger to give the words breathing room.

I'm interested in hearing your feedback, I need to know what might make this more readable.

Project 2 Rework: Chisel & Saw Magazine

The goal of this project was to create a magazine cover, contents page, and feature spread based on a topic of our choosing. I chose to create a woodworking magazine because my dad is a woodworker and I thought it would be interesting to do a project based on a topic that I've grown up around. I've made some modifications from the original pieces; let me know what you think.

before edits

My Thoreau T-shirt Design project from Digital Illustration GID 115, project which we had to pick a famous quote from David Thoreau and illustrate our idea based off our chosen quote. The shirt had to be a three color design. 

If anyone has any suggestions share them please

What was sent to the printer.

 

What it will look like.

This was a part of the service learning for the Media Arts and Technology department for Mount Wachusett Community College. Ultimately, the audience was the department and persons therein.

 

I gave them three ideas and they chose the one shown here. I'll say that the most important part of Service learning is staying in contact with your client, make sure they want you in the direction you're going and notify them of changes. The original draft had the panels on the light as white and the bulb was a solid circle. In my research I'd learned that this fixture was made for a certain type of bulb with "ripples. I made the change and showed it to him and he thought it appropriate. In turn, he asked me if the panels would be dark as they are in real life, I'd also seen this in my research, and I made the change for him, and it was more successful.  This Tshirt had to be ready to go in probably about a week, thus communication was important. In any case, this level of communication is useful because you do not want to be dumping time into things without their consent in what you're doing. It is completely true that one remain in the drawing/sketching phase before going to the computer. You'll want to be showing your client digital works, which I made the mistake of not doing as I had shown him drawings. I didn't have the time to be doing multiple digital files aside from the final one, but you should definitely make the effort to do so.

The project itself was a bit strange, because it was the one color, whatever was going to be printed was in black on a white background. That meant designing with that in mind, take a look at what that entailed with the images above, it was quite strange. The bulb was made with stacked black circles with a white varying stroke. 99% of the lines here are simply strokes with tapering ends, bumped up to large weights.

Above is the original draft.

Above is the updated draft.

This project was competed for digital illustration, which was to illustrate someone we felt who was important to us. At the time I had an epiphany about how to think about a wide spread internet dispute going on between heavy metal fans. The person in this picture is Todd Jones of Nails and in my research of his band, I was lead through a series of their musical influences that showed me that this bickering was unfounded.

The changes are found in the T-shirt decal, which has been completely redone, save for the shirt logo. I left the original picture with it for comparison as well as including the original draft to show the stark differences. This shirt decal had been a real irritation to not have been in full detail, and now it finally fits with the image.

Magazine rework

   This is my my magazine assignment created in Indesign and photos I brought into Photoshop. This was a fun project, I must say, I enjoyed creating my first magazine. My target audience would be any gender and bird lovers, owners and researchers whom may be looking into owning a parrot. I made many edits and took the advise of my student peers. So what does everyone think, can I make this magazine even better?