Caught In The Whirlwind
Posts tagged graphic design
Keeping Busy
May 27th
I figured I’d come out of hibernation to post up a couple of projects that I’ve been working on this month.
First up is a couple of things I did for my friend Wassy’s website. She wanted a place to showcase the children’s book she did up for a course she took this semester, as well as a place to show her digital portfolio (NOTE: Not safe for work viewing. There’s some nude figure drawing studies in there) for view. Just a note on those though, if you want the full experience, don’t use Internet Explorer. There’s still a few bugs to work out with the animations and things generally work better on Firefox/Chrome/Safari/anything else.
Secondly, is this month’s entry into the City of Heroes forum art competition. The theme was the 7 deadly sins. I wanted to do something heavy on the manipulation of typography this month because it’s something I haven’t done much of. After much deliberation and false starts, I hit upon the idea of doing some kind of old style propaganda poster type thing, which eventually morphed into my final entry, a recruitment poster for the in-game villain organization of Arachnos:
I did the actual typography and design in Adobe Illustrator, popped it into Photoshop to add the distressing, the peeled corner and the wall texture.
I’m really pleased with how it ended up looking. Probably one of my favorite things I’ve done.
And finally, another City of Heroes-ish project for my friend Bayani who’s working up a couple of actual comic type books for his original character…well…Bayani. He needed to make a couple of pages to hold biographical and power information for the two characters highlighted in the book which I finished last night (Click on this to get the full page view from my DeviantArt page). This is a 2 page spread, by the way. The page layout is mine, content provided by him.
Looooong Time.
Apr 20th
Ok, It’s been absolutely forever since I posted anything up here. Like I mentioned before, I’m trying to keep the small random stuff more on Twitter/Facebook than trying to write about everything that’s happening in my life. But some stuff has happened that deserves a longer form entry.
First off, an opportunity has come up to work on a real live design project. We’ve got a local, smallish brewery in town, FX Matt, maker of the semi-known line of craft beers, Saranac. They run this event every summer called Saranac Thursday’s where they host bands in the parking lot of the brewery and, obviously, provide beer. They’re looking for a logo and they offered it up as a competition to the students at MVCC of which I am one. Over the past month I’ve been going through the process of creating a logo, from thumbnail sketches all the way now to working it up for real and it’s been a very fun and educational process.
I’m sorta sitting in on the class of the instructor that’s been responsible for the project and working through it with them. It’s been a great opportunity and I’ve learned a lot.
Today specifically, we were talking after class and we got to talking. I know I’ve been told this by other people but he mentioned that I had a good design sense and that he hoped I could continue going to classes to refine it. Which, to me, really made my day. Like I said, I know others have mentioned it, but hearing an instructor that’s been doing this sort of thing for a while say it makes it seem more…real.
I really, really hope I can figure out a way to keep going with this. I want to do it more than I’ve wanted to do anything else. It just feels…right. Which is frustrating when I come off of a fun, challenging and engaging morning and into work doing the same ol’ same ol’ as usual. Blargh.
In other news, the week has finally arrived. I’m headed off to Philadelphia on Saturday to go see Transatlantic perform live. I’ve been waiting for today since I first discovered the band and now it’s finally arriving. I’m EXTREMELY excited to have the chance to see this show. I had the setlist spoiled for me, unfortunately , but at least now I know that the show is going to be epicly awesome.
I’m sure I’ll be back with a full review on monday. And later next week I’ll post up my Saranac Thursday Logos once they get all finished.
An Update On Happenings
Mar 5th
Just an update-y sort of post today.
First off, school. The latest project in my Digital Imaging course was to recolor a black and white photograph and make it look like it was always color. I went over to my grandmother’s to look at some of our old family photos and she showed me the wedding picture of my great great great grandparents (maybe another great on there…not sure exactly). It was definitely old, but it was in really good shape, so I ended up doing that. Finished it this week in class, although I think it could have turned out better if I had more time to tweak it (only got two class periods to work on it and he doesn’t want us working on stuff outside of class). Turned out all right though. I’ll post it up here when I get my flash drive back.
Along those same lines, I decided it’s probably going to be a little bit before I manage to take some of the more theory oriented design courses, so I’ve got myself a textbook on design theory that I’m starting to get into. Not quite as good as taking a course, but the book is good and I’m learning a lot of interesting stuff (well, interesting to me anyway).
Moving away from learning and school stuff, I’ll be meeting up with my sister Saturday afternoon to hang out a bit and watch the Syracuse game. Looking forward to it, after the realization that we only really see each other on holidays anymore.
Lookin’ For Love (February FArt Entry)
Feb 20th
Just a quick posting here. I’ve spent the last couple days working hard on finishing my entry in the February FArt competition. The theme this month was romance, and I decided to do a poster for a super hero dating service. This has some City of Heroes in-jokes in the text so it might not be as interesting to somebody who hasn’t played the game, but I figured I’d toss it up here anyway.
This one gave me all sorts of trouble. First poster I’ve ever done up and it’s kinda graphic intensive which brings into play my lack of drawing skills. I was about ready to just give up earlier this week but Thursday evening I had a bit of a breakthrough and managed to make it into something I think I actually like. Quite the turnaround.
Man On A Horse
Feb 12th
Urgh. Today is shaping up to be…awful. I got caught in the hall right as I was walking in and told something bad happened to our web app that needed fixing. But the e-mail saying what was wrong was total gibberish to me (except for the phrase “the customers are demanding answers!!!!”). So that’s getting sorted out and I’m taking the lull in the morning to post here…
Over the past couple weeks I’ve been working on a project for my lone class this semester, as I’ve mentioned previously. It’s coming along pretty well, I think. It’s a composite image of two chess pieces playing a game of chess with little people as the pieces on the board. On Monday I was able to finally grab a good park bench type shot to act as the scene, so that was the last big hurdle.
During class Tuesday the professor mentioned how it would be cool if I could have a guy on a horse (to act as one of the knights) but he didn’t know if it would be possible to get the shot or not. Well, I happen to know a guy with a horse (my uncle) and they were able to provide some nice pictures to use which should really add to the quality of the piece. I’m kinda regretting not taking more pictures at the Renaissance Festival the last couple years I’ve went because they’d be extremely useful right about now.
I’m also going over to my grandmothers house this weekend hopefully to look through some of her black and white pictures for something that could have color added to it (as is our next assignment for the class).
I’m also starting to go all out on my 2010 City of Heroes FArt competition entry for this month. The theme is romance and I’ll be doing an advertising poster for a super hero oriented dating service. I’m trying to work out the copy on the poster right now (jotting down ideas as I think of them while I work). Oh, I just realized I never posted my entry for last month here! What If? The Rogue Isles Olympics. (Make sure you click the image to see the full sized view) You’re probably not going to get a the in-jokes unless you play City of Heroes, but I’m really happy with how that particular design turned out (still).
NY Comic Con Bound?
Jan 20th
Yeah, I know it’s been another couple days since I’ve posted…but the biggest news is that my friends and I are making plans to attend the New York Comic Con in New York City at the end of this year. Which is good, because I need to use that time to save up enough money to go…which is going to be difficult. A couple of people we know from playing City of Heroes are going and we’re planning on meeting up with them and checking out the con. Quite excited to be going into New York City finally, considering we’re only about 4 hours away.
Engaging in “saving pennies mode”.
Most of my free time at the moment has been suddenly taking up by actually entering into the City of Heroes FArt competition that I mentioned earlier. I somehow actually came up with a pretty good idea for a mock web page for this month’s theme, but the deadline is Friday so I need to work my butt off to make it happen. So far, so good, but I’m getting stuck on some of the more artsy type stuff again. That always seems to be my hangup. I know what I want it to look like in my head but it’s not coming out correctly when I try to put it down. All I need to do is turn in something to be qualified for next month’s theme, but I want to make something good too. We’ll see how well it cooperates over the next couple days.
Also, I think I’m going to be starting up the 50 in 365 thing again, now that I’ve got my Kindle. I’ve had it for less than a month and I’ve already downed roughly 5 books. I think it’d be cool to keep a journal of what I’m reading (and give me an excuse to keep posting). We’ll see.
Woah. Has It Been That Long?
Jan 14th
Well, I’ve finally worked up the ambition to post something! I’ve been busy with various things and sidetracked by situations for the past couple weeks and generally haven’t felt much like writing here. But I don’t want to abandon this place entirely, so I figure I should fill in the gap with a general summary.
My last post was on Christmas so let me start there. Aside from Wassy’s awesome Frost art gift (which I love and is now being displayed in the living room), my parents gifted me an Amazon Kindle 2. So far I’ve finished reading the Lord of The Rings trilogy (Started with the paper book and switched to eBook a couple of chapters into The Two Towers), Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow for the Sword and Laser book club, and I’ve started working my way through the Xanth books again. The kindle is not without it’s issues, but I’m enjoying it a lot. My biggest gripe is the screen contrast could be a bit better.
Lets see here. Oh! My dad now has an XBox 360 and We both have copies of Madden NFL 10 so that we can resume playing our weekly football games. We played once a couple weeks ago to test to see how the online franchise mode would work and it seems like we can deal with it’s little quirks, but we haven’t had a chance to play again yet, due to me being busy friday night’s for a while and the actuall NFL playoffs starting up. Hopefully we can get a game going next week.
Other than that I’ve been mostly hanging out and relaxing a bit. A little too much actually, as I’ve let my experimentations in graphic design stuff kinda fall to the wayside over the past couple weeks. But I’m getting back into the swing of things now. Over my vacation at the end of 2009, I worked up a page for the City of Heroes Forum Art Competition that Wassy is in charge of this year. Nothing special, but I think it turned out pretty good. I was experimenting with using a grid system when setting it up which was a bit…odd for me at first, but I think I managed to get the hang of it.
I also came up with an idea for my personal site which could work, but required that I draw up a penguin logo that was kinda blocky, like an old sprite from a video game. I’m fairly happy with the result (See to the right) and I’ll be headed full steam ahead on the rest of the design in hopes that I can complete it before I decide I hate it again. I’m also working on and off with my mom’s store type website but I’m stuck on that…again. Not certain if what I have going on feels right for the content. I really want to get something finished for her though.
As far as school goes, I’m in for another class this semester. This time it’s a course focusing on Photoshop. After this one I’ll be down mostly to classes which I have to take during the day (all the core design classes) so I’m not sure what’s going to happen. I suppose I’ll have to try to modify my work schedule but I’m really not sure how receptive management will be to that as we get busier. I’ll probably post more about that particular issue later as I have a lot more to say about it.
In other news, we have a new toy around the apartment. Wassy recently picked up a Nikon D60 camera which she’s allowed me to play around with. I’ve been trying to take some better pictures of my Fish, along with other things if I can think up a good picture I’d like to take. I’d love to get into photography but the equipment is just so freaking expensive…
Anyway, here’s the best picture I took of my newest fish:
Not bad at all I’d say. It came out a little too blue and I couldn’t quite get all the blue out without making the rest look funky, so that’s the best I can do. In conclusion, I want one of these cameras. I need to think up some more arty type photos to try out.
Weekend Before Christmas
Dec 21st
Time to report on my doings over the weekend.
My Christmas shopping is now completed. I took Friday off from work and this ended up being a good decision since I needed to venture out to the stores to finish off my shopping stuff. But it is now completed and ready for our family gathering on Thursday (we do present stuff on Christmas Eve now since my sister is busy pretty much all day christmas)
Friday evening was quite a fun experience in City of Heroes. I joined up with Wassy and some of the folks that inhabit the Fan Art section of the City of Heroes forums for an evening of hanging out and chatting. It was really fun. Great conversation with everybody and I hope I get the chance to do that again at some point in the future. I was a bit apprehensive about fitting in since I’m more an outsider to that particular group of people but it was a really fun experience.
Speaking of art, Wassy has been working on the Christmas themed Frost piece for me over the past couple days. I’ve been trying to be good about not looking because I want to be surprised, but she gave me a peek yesterday and her current progress is extremely promising. I can’t want to see the final version. My levels of anticipation for this gift are high. I’m looking forward to it as much, if not even more than spending time with my family this week. I really, really appreciate it when she takes time out of her (now incredibly busy) schedule to do something for me.
Onwards to my other activities. I actually finished working on a web site design! After floundering around a months after finishing Wassy’s site, I was able to actually put another one through to completion, which was a website to host the City of Heroes Fan Art Forum art competition that she’s hosting next year. I need to have it done by January, so it’s a good thing I got it all set now. Eddy Swan (from the art forum, we’ve been chatting since we played the game together on friday night) helped out a bunch with a logo concept which was a big part of what the design was missing.
So now, to start working through the longest three days of work of the year before my huge vacation begins…
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
Nov 25th
4:00. The day before Thanksgiving. Sitting at my desk at work…watching the clock tick slowly by…
Yep, it’s that time again. The long wait before vacation begins. And after what I did today at work I could really use all 5 days that I took off (took off Monday just for good measure) to recover.
I had to delve into one of our old programs that’s technically unmaintained (it was never migrated over to our new development platform) but still in use to add a feature somebody requested. This program is held together by the coding equivalent of duct tape and chewing gum. In fact, when it was overheard that I would be working in this program, I was instructed to not go anywhere even remotely close to the printing code. Because, and I quote this exactly: “You’re just better off not going there…” spoken in a tone of voice suggesting some deep rooted trauma, suppressed by the ages suddenly bubbling to the surface.
So after getting the morning trying to get the program to actually run properly on my machine (setting the tone for what was to come), I set about trying to wedge a new feature into the 5 year old, horribly documented and strung together code.
Can I go home now?
I spent last night poking around photoshop and trying some things out. I ended up creating a neat looking (in my opinion anyway) outer space nebula/star field background that I’m not quite sure what to do with. I was thinking of trying to transform it into some sort of desktop wallpaper for the heck of it. Maybe put in a (bright) star and a couple planets or something. See if I can turn it into an artsy type project as a break from bashing my head against the wall with web design things.
It’ll expand my photoshop skillz at any rate, even if it ends up sucking. I’m already using some stuff I never got into before (adjustment and clipping layers, specifically. Extremely useful little features). I’ll probably spend some time over my vacation poking away at it and seeing what I can do.
A (Mostly) Working Weekend
Nov 16th
I was a very productive individual this weekend.
I got a lot done on my final project for my Digital Typography course over the past two days. I can’t recall if I mentioned it but the project involves re-creating a 2 page spread (using Adobe InDesign) from a magazine and the one I picked ended up being quite complicated:
Final Project Article
There’s something like 45 boxes of text on there and about 35 pictures (although the pictures also include things like the orange and yellow boxes and such). All of which had to be measured and recorded. The worst part was trying to identify all of the various fonts used and trying to match those to fonts that I had available. Not to mention cleaning up the graphics and getting rid of all the text (especially overlaying the ad image on the second page) I had that all finished last class and approved by the instructor, so I was able to start the process of putting all the boxes in their proper locations on the computer.
My roommates just picked up the extended ultra mega super edition of The Watchmen, so while that was on in the background I started working. 2 and a half hours later I had finally gotten all the boxes in position. I’m glad I started doing this at home instead of waiting for class as I don’t think I’d have quite enough time in class to finish it off…
The extended edition of Watchmen is really nice, by the way. The missing bits that were added back in really complete the movie and it doesn’t feel like it’s too long. I worry sometimes about directors cuts of movies when they add back in so much footage (Like the extended versions of the Lord of The Rings movies. They just felt like they were a little too long to me). But the stuff that was dropped from Watchmen was all stuff that added to the movie when it was put back in. Two thumbs up for Watchmen.
Sunday was a little more relaxed. I spent some time adjusting images, but I ended up doing a lot of reading otherwise. I had intended to play a game of Battletech as well, but I didn’t quite have all the supplies I needed to get going (missing a couple record sheets I needed) which should be rectified today.
The weekend was capped off by watching the newest episode of Dexter. And wow, what an episode it was…there were parts of it that were so intense I totally forgot it was a TV show I was watching. I don’t want to spoil anything in case somebody out there watches it delayed, but after the slow setup of Season 3, Season 4 is ranking right up there with the first season as far as how much I’m enjoying it. So many twists and turns!
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