Link to Online Work

https://www.behance.net/millerdj94

Hope everyone has a great holiday!

Project 7 (Brief)

Listening to Projects 7 brief today I am both overwhelmed and excited. I feel like the project is going to be a lot of work. Not so much importing the images and the files into the final portfolio book that project 7 will be, but the explanation that will be involved. I would am no the strongest writer, and I am starting to realize more and more that it seems that the graphic design field not only requires strong design skills, but strong writing skills. I think this will be the greatest challenge for me as a progress through this project. For know I think my plan of attack is to gather all of the images that I will like to use and place them inside the provided template. Then slowly make it my own.

Project 6

Overall project 6 was relatively easy and straight forward. Pick a picture and create a poster that wasn't based off of a grid system. One of the major struggles I think I had for this assignment was picking out a picture that I wanted to use. I chose four images that I liked the best and did my preliminary sketches on print outs of them.

Once I finished up with my sketches I had narrowed it down to the top to images. I liked the picture with the railing because I thought it had lots of movement that could have been taken advantage of, however in the end I went with the image on the left for a variety of different reasons. One of them being the way the image was taken. I really enjoyed the lighting and just the way the framing was done. Also another plus to the image was it was taken in almost perfect one point perspective. Once I had discovered this I began to outline a basis for a poster design. 

Being able to see the different lines of perspective gave me the idea to form shapes of colors with different transparencies. This is what I ended up going for in the end. 

Below are the different versions of type I laid over the shapes that I had filled in using photoshop. 

Version 1

Version 2

Below is my final poster design. There are a few tweaks that were made from the first version to the final version below. The most drastic tweak that I made was probably the font. I decided that I needed something a little different that Futura so I searched for something that I liked better and wound up using Arial Narrow. I felt like this font fit the aesthetic that I was to obtain. The next biggest would have to be formatting. Originally I was was going to try and make the text fill in the colored triangles that were created, but it didn't feel right when I tried that in version 1. I eventually came to the conclusion that since the photo has so much one point perspective that it seemed natural that the title should fall on or at least near the finishing point. Since I did this I feel that the readers I is immediately drawn to the title because of the natural lines that are within the image. The final main change that I made would be the general layout of all the sub text. I feel by aligning some of the sub text right below the title works well, and the subtext at the bottom worked very well. I felt even the placement of the photographer credit was in a good spot in the bottom right. However I wasn't sure who the photographer was, so I wrote some text in. Over all I am really please with the final product of this poster, and I am looking forward to finishing out the year strong!

Final Version

Project 5 (Final)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yztXO6NmcU8

Project 5 was very time consuming. I think one of the reasons that took so long was because I had to learn more software that I have never used/heard of before. Going into this I thought this was going to be easier than what it turned to be out. I was finding that flash is not very user friendly. I found my self spending minutes just trying to get something to move on my timeline or just trying to get it to react the way I wanted it to. Another big problem with mine specifically was my audio. My audio originally wasn't very time specific. For example the ticking of the clock was not ticking on the second, which was odd in itself, but then I had to edit the audio to make it happen every second. Once I got the audio done and I was able to get the hang of flash I was well on my way to creating this cool animation. On the development I didn't really have one final, then did something else for a different result. I just did lots of different little types of animations in my library and then build my final project around it. Over all I'm happy with the turn out, and I would like to do another animation someday, just maybe not in flash. 

Project 5 (Brief)

I have to say after the demo in Flash I was slightly.... Very overwhelmed. It was a lot to take in. Flash has a very similar feel to photoshop and indesign and just other adobe programs in general, but right away I could tell that there will be a little bit of a learning curve in picking this software up and running with it. Also just like any other program it will take a while to master. I think my biggest problem that I will be facing with this assignment is defining what symbol I will use, and what the animation will be. Once I have an idea of the direction I would like to take my animation I think I will be able to get a firm grasp on this assignment, my goal for this project is to flesh out the storyboarding enough so I won't be switching my animation like the last project. There won't be enough wiggle room to do that with this particular project.

Project 4 (Final)

The end of project 4 was both depressing and very satisfying. I say this because I am a little depressed that it is over because I was enjoying the process to create the book that can be seen above. I then say satisfying because I was very pleased with the quality of the book when it was finished. The overall feel and the sharpness of the images were exactly what I wanted. I will say the images are a little off, but it was hard to align them properly and I tried to take the precautions to avoid that problem. Unfortunately I was not able to align them perfectly, but I think it was pretty good considering this was the first flip book that I have ever created that was of this quality. The overall assignment was very time consuming, plus the 3 or 4 times I decided to change my images. However even through it was time consuming, the end result was well worth the time spent. I feel like this project wen very well.

Project 4 (After the Critique)

After considerable thinking I decided to drop the pictures that I had taken to search the endless void that is Google. I came to this decision a few days before the class critique. I was working on the project to get it ready for the critique when I decided it just wasn't working the best, and there had to be some better idea. I actually came with my new idea from one of the pictures that I had taken of the reflection pool here at Drake. I really enjoyed the way the water rippled and the forms that it created. 

I had my new direction, water. I fired up google chrome and began to search any and all pictures of water. Somewhere along my search I made the connection to to fire and the similar form that it had to water, and the then the idea of fire and water evolved into the four elements. After the critique however I'm feeling that I should just go with the water since I was having problems making connections with the earth and air elements. I had the idea during class that it might be interesting to make the water pour out of a bottle and the book could be displayed vertical instead of horizontal. We will see where my new direction leads me. 

Project 4

During the intro to project four all I could seem to think about was taking pictures my own pictures for this assignment. It seems like it would be a lot easier to take the pictures of what you need then searching through google. We will see how it goes but for now I am planning on taking all of my own pictures. 

As for the project itself it seems very straight forward and I think that I will be able to do well on it. I believe it will probably be easiest to just follow the line of the images instead of focusing on other elements like texture and color (Even though the final project is in black and white). We will just have to wait and see how the project develops. 

Project 2

Below are my final images for my project 2. Overall I am very happy with the way they turned out. The ones that gave me the most trouble were the second and the last ones. I kept having problems making some other form to go with the glasses that way they all seemed more uniform, and as far as the last one goes I was having issues making sure that it was actually symmetrical. I think they came along very nicely.  

Project 3 (In class Project)

Today's in class project could be not only be described as "Trippy", but I think a few of us got a headache by working on this one. Overall it was a fun project to try and see how many different ways you could connect the positive and negative shape to make different patterns. It almost seemed like there were endless possibilities, but I'm sure you could run out of options fairly soon if you kept experimenting. After I did 14 of them I was feeling a little dizzy so I decided that that was a good place to stop. I'm happy with them, and I enjoy that there are still lots of other options that I didn't even come close to.

Project 2 (After Critique 1)

Today we critiqued project 2 in a group. I've decide from that critique to pick the three shapes logos that I created (Pictures of logos below). The project is not quite there, but I'm that much closer to the final product.

For this form made out of letters, I need to make the line bolder if it is going to look more uniform throughout the entire project. If I do not do this, this will look somewhere in the middle range of boldness compared to the other two forms below. 

For this form, or my glasses I also need to bold the lines a bit more. I also need to make form the shape of the glasses to be more square. At the moment this form is too rectangular to be cohesive with the other two shapes. I'm not sure at the moment how I'm going to make it look more "square" since I like the simplistic look of the glasses the way they are. 

This one is the simplest of the three forms to edit. I just need to tone down the line thickness about 25% to help make this shape be more cohesive with the other two forms. 

Overall I think this project should turn out very well once I find the right amount of balance between the three forms. 

Project 2

This project will be a little bit more complicated and more time consuming then the first. Sketching out 75+ sketches is a lot but it is needed to get more of a refined idea for the final three logos. I have some ideas on what I could do going forward since I have already designed a logo for my self which I will post below. I think one of the more difficult challenges going into this project will be developing some kind of image that represents me in some way. Letters are easy, but trying to design some kind of image is where it will get difficult. Looking forward to this project, so now it's time to get sketching.

This logo that I made is just using the first letter of my first and last name. I like triangles so when I designing the logo I knew I wanted it to have triangles in it. 

Going into project one I had no idea what this class would really be about, but I guess that is the case with most classes. Needless to say that I was confused as to where the first project was going when we started it. I had done previous figure ground reversal projects before in past classes, but never any involving letters. I think my previous projects actually kind of confused me when starting project one. Once I started to understand what the requirements of the project were, I began to do more proof letters faster.

I believe the hardest part about this project came next after the first 36 proofs were created. Deciding which two I wanted two use in my book. It was hard enough picking six of them to go into the group critique. It's hard as a designer not to show any bias to all your work. It is so easy for one to fall into the mindset of everything I do is "perfect". This however is simply not true. If you actually plan to learn anything from a college experience it is imperative that this does not happen. Thankfully... We have other people in the class that can help you decide which ones work the best and which ones only sort of work. Once my six were picked, and we critiqued them I was more than happy with the decision of the group.

Once the the two best images were selected I thought it was very easy to put the whole book together. I had little to no problems fallowing the instructions and stitching the book together. I will say that I struggled recalling the printing instructions, but that will be learned once again. Overall I was pleased with the final result of the project, and I was excited to see how the book looked stitched together rather then stapled. I thought it does make the book look a lot more professional than stapling it.