Monday, May 10, 2010

Final project



I am probably most proud of this project out of all of the ones i have done this semester, because it was on a topic i am passionate about, and i think it's cool that it is so personal with our own voice and choices in music, images, topic etc.

Using soundslides was a great learning experience, that i have actually already used for another project instead of powerpoint. (my teacher was really impressed). I really did not have many challenges with the program itself because it is so straight forward and does not have too many options, just basically all the right options.

The first challenge i face was my dialogue. At first i faded in an MGMT track for about a minute, talked for about 40 seconds, then faded the MGMT track back in for about a minute. After comparing my presentation with the other students, thinking i was done, i realized i needed more of my own voice in the presentation, and that it needed to be more personal, so i went back and re-did my dialogue, and re-recorded and pieced together the song and voice track. (I also learned after that i could only use 30 seconds of a song bite at a time or its copyright infringement!)

I kept some of the same images, but used more personal images to tell the story that matched my dialogue. I was really happy with the music i chose because it goes deeper than what it really is. It gets you exited-- the way that fashion makes me feel. And i thought that deep factor of the music was really personal to my presentation.

I enjoyed using the ins and outs of audacity. I think if you really use it to its full potential, it can be an amazing tool to pair with presentations, whether powerpoint or soundslides.

Now, for the biggest challenge.. i am event scared editing my blog post.. UPLOADING THE STUPID THING! I googled how to upload soundslides a million times after trying to use webng. Firefox was confusing and frusterating, i just couldn't deal with it any longer. After trying multiple things, i decided to take a break, sit back, and calmly go back to webng. After playing around with it for over an hour, reading the directions a million times, zipping and unzipping and zipping and unzipping, it FINALLY created the link that WORKED!

I was really exited that i was able to upload it to my blog finally. Their were some technical difficulties, and sometimes the presentations cuts off half of the images, but i am assuming thats a technical glitch that i can not control within webng.

Overall, i enjoyed this final project and am very proud of it!

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

3rd card



It was cool to see how my final bb cards came out. I used quark for the sports illustrated front, and star back, and in design for the star front. I wanted to make the cards look almost exact to the ones that i had in hand, but ran into a few challenged that i am aware of next time i use these programs.

When measuring the cards, they measurements actually came out wrong because i didn't "view actual size" so i was not able to be exact. When i printed them i noticed then not all bb cards are the same measurements, so the cards to not match up perfectly. However, i did think i did a pretty good job making them look almost identical regardless of the measurements when i printed them out.

Another challenge i ran into was the fonts. On a lot of macs in the maclab, quark only offers a small selection of fonts, however, i think the bb card designers did use pretty common fonts because i think i was able to match most of them pretty well.

Something i learned was that you need to change the spacing in between the letters, or the words, and also that you can change or "skew" the font so it is taller or fatter than usual.

I think something i did a good job with on these cards were the colors and the overall shapes and designs. I was lost at first, but after many hours of messing around with the programs, i was able to find my own unique way of using the shape and box tools to create the exact look of the cards

If i had more time to do this project, i would definetly go back and re- measure everything and probably do the cards over again, but that was just not possible this time.

However, i was pretty happy with my final outcome and have become more confident in my indesign, and especially quark skills!

magazine card 1

2nd magazine card

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Webpage

brochure inside





For our brochure we did Roger Williams University Sports. We wanted to make it simple, but use lots of photos to show the roger williams atheletic experience.

On the inside, I designated each panel to either Womans sports, Mens sports, and the last panel i split up between Coed and Club sports. I did photo collages at the top of each panel of students participating in the given categories. I decided to do a light blue gradient because it looks nice but doesn't take the eye off of concentrating on the info and pictures in the brochure.

We used Gills San for the headline and Caslon for the info in the brochure because they were given to us on a list of "top fonts" that worked together. After tested about 10 of the font combindations, we liked this one best.

I don't think this brochure looks extremely professional or business like, but i think it works for the topic. We wanted it to look good for incoming students or students thinking about coming to Roger Williams in the future and playing a sport.

If i had more time, we probably would have coordinated the front and back a little bit more, but since we were working seperatly on the sides, we did not really have time.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

concert poster





My user/reader is very broad because the bands fans range from around the ages of 14+. So basically, anyone who is interested in music and nightlife or entertainment and is in the las vegas area.

My audience is most likely interested in music, and in order for them to attend this concert they need to know all of the appropriate information. I included the name of the tour, the bands name, the date, place, address, time of doors opening, and time the show starts. I wanted to include where to purchase tickets but i didn't know if i should/should not put links to websites to purchase tickets on the poster.

I decided to be creative with this poster in order to pull in the audience. I thought doing playing card images would be a good idea and substiting the number or letter with the letters P H I S H. The cards matched the theme of being in Las Vegas at the casino. I chose to use gold red and black because cards are red and black, and gold looked good with those colors, as well as going along with the las vegas 'bright lights' theme.

Monday, March 29, 2010

Beatles Powerpoint



• What were you trying to accomplish with your design decisions?

I wanted to create an exiting powerpoint that went with the feeling of the beatles music. I wanted to have a bright color pallet, but at the same time nothing too crazy, because thats how the beatles music was.


• What challenges and problems did you encountered and how did you solved them?

On the facts slide, dimming the previous fact was not working at first. I don't know if it was a problem with powerpoint software, or if i had a setting on the wrong thing. After working at it for a bit and getting frusterated, i started from scratch and that seemed to work! I also got lots of feedback from the class on fonts and font colors which helped on my final draft. I had never used audacity, so that became frusterating but after playing around for a while i got it down pat!

• What was new for you?

Basically everything was new for me! I have used powerpoint before, but hadn't used it for anything intrecate. I had never used the dimming effect, the opacity setting, or any mp3's in powerpoint.

• What did you enjoy most about the project?

The end product was a great feeling of success. Its nice to have music in the background. It made the slides a lot more exisiting. I enjoyed just learned about new aspects of powerpoint so now i can use it in other classes and impress everyone:).

• What are you most proud of in relation to this assignment?

I am proud of the end result. I am glad i got the slides to go along perfectly with my fade in and fade out of my mp3. It's nice that i learned how to use audacity basically on my own and dealt with my challenged without asking anyone else for help.

• What could you have done had you had more time?

If i had more time, i probably just would have gone over the slides to see what i could have changed to make it even better. Maybe i would have changed some of the colors to go along better, and looked deeper into fonts.

Monday, March 8, 2010

Thursday, February 18, 2010

contact sheet



In the first row, we had to change the resolution on the picture each time. In order to do this, I went to photoshop and opened up the picture, then went to image size, where you can then change the resolution. Each time, I also changed the height to 1 inch in the image size box so it would not exeed the chart box size. I noticed the higher the resolution, the clearer the picture got.

Next row was format/mode. To do this, I went to the image tab, then mode. There you can select wether you want the picture to be grayscale, RGB color, etc. For duo tone, i noticed that you must convert to Grayscale before changing the colors on duotone. I noticed when I changed the color to CMYK, the colors were extremely vibrant.

The 3rd row was orientation. To change to portrait, I went to image size once again and changed the width to .75, then cropped the photo and it automatically stops at that size. For a square, I did the same thing but set the size to 1 by 1. The third photo I did not have to adjust because my photo was already in landscape format.

In the 4th row, we were told to frame the photo. For this, I clicked on the crop tool and changed the size on the top of the school to 1 inch height. I then cropped and the photo would come closer and closer each time i continued to crop.

In the 5th row, I did the same thing, but we were told to make a photo look abstract in the last copy. The goal was to make it unable to see what the last image was.

Finally, In purpose, i selected a photo and went to the filter dropdown. There, i selected crosshatch, then crystalize, then filmgrain. There were many other filters and once you choose one, there are even more choices of filters. This project taught me a lot of useful tools on photoshop.




Thursday, February 11, 2010

final



I chose this quote by Jimmy Hendrix because I believe it stands for how the majority of society runs today. Not only the overpowerment of the government, but the way people live their lives. If people concentrate more on love then on power, the world could be run a lot smoother and people probably wouldn't be so uptight all the time and craving power to make themselves feel better.

When The: Arial: I wanted a straightforward font for the words that weren't very important and had no image to make from the words
Power of Love: I used Lucida Handwriting in a large font to get the point across that Love is powerful and i felt this font potrayed how beautiful love can be.
overcomes: i used a font that i thought would look good with the arch, which was Candara.
the love of: again, i used Arial for the same reason as before.
Power: i used the font Impact, which speaks for itself. It stands out, and has an impact on the readers eyes and image.
The world will: salvito pro
know:Arial
peace: ashley script: i think the font shows how one feels when there is peace: simple and calm.

I arranged the words so that the saying flowed in the readers eyes and so the but reader does not have to look for the words or have to try and put together the words like a puzzle.I then arranged the words, while still organized, but uniquely arranged, to fit inside the heart without much white space.

The biggest problem i encountered was making a large white heart. At first i was going to import an image from google, but it was not working, so I used the font Zapt Dingbats which had a heart symbol and I made it large. It was easiest way to change the size of the image and the color.

I am proudest that after looking around the classes images, i was one of the few that was able to organize my words into an image.

If I had more time to work on this project, i would have worked more with the colors. I would have tried out more colors with the heart and the background to see what worked best, and try to get the font colors to match better without being the same color.