Drawing 4 - Inspiring type

Moving on from the object drawing we now started to look into typography workshops. This session involved inspiring ourselves to create different styles of type , eventually leading into creating our own alphabet. The session began by picking different illustrations and photographs to base our type on. The image i picked was an illustration of a man with psychedelic hair. I chose this as i felt there was a lot of potential for development , the hair provided flow and could be morphed into various shapes and forms.

We were given the letters ANESG to work with as they provided variation. i used the strands of hair to build up each letter , i made sure they flowed well and retained the style of the original illustration. I then began to adapt the hair to the illustration and started to use typography as the hair of the figure. I feel that one thing i would improve with this piece is colour , the colour adds to the psychedelic feel of the illustration , providing the vibrant characteristics. My type lacks this but could be easily adjusted. My type feels relatively messy in these stages as typography is a new thing that i have done before and never gone into it with this much detail.

In this stage my typography was only an experiment , i favour sans serif fonts as i feel they look cleaner however in later stages one of the things i hope to explore is serif fonts , mainly because i think they are more skilful to produce.

Photoshop 1 - Basics

Photoshop is one of my strong points within graphic design as i have self taught myself and been using the software since high school. Unfortunately on the day this session was held i was ill therefore i have had to catch up and produce the work in my own time. Photoshop is the software used mainly for working with high resolution images. Unlike Illustrator , photoshop works in Bitmap therefore scaling an image will result in lower quality resolution. I feel that photoshop tools are easier to locate and get the hang of , although most of these tools are present in illustrator they work slightly differently or are hidden in many of drop down menus.

Our first task was exploring the different colour modes of pictures. This was done through the Image > Mode > Adjustments then selecting an option. We first changed an image of our choice to greyscale.

After changing the colour to grayscale the menu opened up the duotone option. This setting allowed two-four colours to pass through the image , acting like a filter. This would add a slight tint to the image making it more interesting than just black and white. Other effects we looked at was Hue and saturation which would change the colours of a whole picture , for example you could make a lemon turn purple without ruining the image. Levels and curves also came in useful for editing photographs as you can alter how intense certain colours were in the image. 

Our next task was to create a non destructive self portrait. We achieved this by using different layers to merge a picture of ourselves with objects or landscapes. I started out by picking a suitable image of myself to merge with another image. I then duplicated the image and placed a forrest scene picture between the two pictures , this was the image i was going to blend with my self portrait. To blend the image i used a rubber with 0% hardness so i could feature away at my portrait that would slowly expose the trees into my face. 

Finished Piece

After Effects 4 - Typography Facts

Previous animation sessions have focused specifically on character design , for this task we had to pick our favourite type face and create a short informational piece about the typeface. The typeface i chose to research was 'Roboto' , i chose to use this font as i used it in my first project and instantly fell in love with it , my favourite aspect of the font is that it is available in so many different weights and styles.

Roboto is a sans serif font that was created specifically by google for the android operating system. This font style has been used in thousands of mobile devices and android products. Google describes the font as "Modern , yet Approachable" and "Emotional".

My aim for this piece was to create an animation that flowed into each key scene smoothly , i felt that this was essential to my animation as simplistic type isn't very interesting to look at on its own. this session allowed me to combine my knowledge of animating shapes with keyframes and animating type to create a more advanced piece of work.When choosing colours i stuck to black and white for the main sequence , however when mentioning 'google' i used the specific colours of each letter to add characteristics to the text. 

Originally i had difficulty trying to make the colours flash up separately for the word Google so i settled on bringing all the colours in all at once. Although i seemed help asking how to do this it proved to be too complex for the amount of time i had to complete the piece.

Towards the end of the animation i used the same shade of green that the android branding uses for their 'Android' character, i felt that adding this character would give the animation some more personality , making it more interesting for the audience and providing a direct link to android.

Illustrator 1 and The Creative Cloud - Basics

This session was an Introduction to the Creative Cloud as a whole , We started off by creating an account on the creative cloud , in my case i already had one. This was to show the power of the cloud and how it could link all devices together. We devoted our attention mainly to the Adobe smartphone apps , such as Adobe Capture; Adobe capture is an app that image traces photographs and sends them directly to the cloud for you to use in photoshop or illustrator , this is useful as you can see what images will look like as a vector while on the go. This app proved useful to capture inspiration. Another useful feature of the app was that you could photograph and object and it would allow you to import it as a brush stroke , making different types of patterns when using brush tools in photoshop or illustrator. Another useful tool that adobe capture provides is the ability to photograph a subject and sample a selection of swatches from the photograph. This is very useful when creating colour schemes that need to relate to the subject or giving a piece a specific feel. This application can also help inspire the colour range and channel your mind into looking into different schemes.

We then moved onto illustrator skills , i feel that illustrator definitely isn't one of my strong points in the course therefore i was excited to listen and learn about the softwares potential. I had basic knowledge about some tools such as the pen tool and other vector tools. We began by importing an image of our choice to the dartboard. I chose a photograph of myself as it was easily accessible. We then proceeded to use the image trace tool , this of which i had used before , however i learnt that they're other options when tracing such as 3 colour , 6 colour and low fidelety image trace options. all of these allowed my photo to have a unique outcome with many potential for editing.

after making my photograph become image traced we looked at other creative cloud software like 'Adobe Typeset' , this software was basically a font extension book which provided thousands of developer made typefaces that you can download to your devices via creative cloud. 

I feel that my final image turned out well as i used all the skills that i have been taught in todays session. I found this session extremely helpful as it allowed me to brush up on my illustrator skills , something of which i haven't had time to do yet. I hope to look into illustrator in further sessions and learn some more advanced techniques.

Prequel / Sequel

The lectures main focus was that nothing is 'original' , and that every piece of design has been inspired by or has certain similarities to other pieces. however this does not mean that your designs can't be original , all it means is that we need to channel our creative process in the right direction in order to achieve this. This is become apparent as when we begin the creative process we need to take inspirations from items around us that we have already seen. Technically making everything copied.

"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing." - Salvador Dali

The first subject of the lecture was internet Memes. this was a key example of prequel sequel as they are funny however they lack value due to the unoriginality of the work. this parked questions about plaugurism and how memes arent classed under copyright regulations.

this lead onto our next topic which was a 30 minute video. The video 'Everything is a remix' Specifically looked at music and how artists have sampled beats from other songs in there own musical creations.the film discusses different laws and regulations about these beats or could it be that people just share the same creative output?

"Legal remixing is fine, illegal copying is not - if your work fails to distinguish itself enough then you must attribute!"

Visualising Sound

This lecture looked at sound as a basis for visual communication. the point of this lecture was to start to introduce us to the new project brief and inspire us when starting the new project. Our project brief was:

"Each week you will be supplied a short section of music to respond to. You have a wide scope of processes and approaches to experiment with. This is a good opportunity to apply and further develop your skills and critical and creative thinking gained through the process workshops, and workshop week and previous studio brief. In addition, you are encouraged to think beyond purely digital work. There is plenty of scope for traditional processes across both print and animation. You may consider photography, illustration, video or physical 3D or 2.5D construction." 

I felt that i was going to struggle with the new brief , this was because we had such limited time to produce as many pieces. I had to keep my ideas short and fast , with not much time to refine them in further detail. my main point of focus was to not get stuck on one design and let the rest slip as the most important thing was experimentation.

We were introduced to the earliest know visual piece of sound , this was known as the hurrmian hymn 6 . this hymn dates back to 1400 B.C.E the piece was discovered in the 1960's in the ruins of a palace in Ugarit. there were 29 musical texts found at the time of its discovery. there was no chronological order of the texts therefore the numbers after the hymn were not relevant to the time they were written.

InDesign 3 - Interactive PDF

Our final Indesign tutorial showed us how to create interactive PDF's , this was an extension on generic pdf files as the interactive ones can contain internal hyperlinks , videos and buttons to create a different viewing experience. Our task was to create a PDF about music , specifically looking at Count Baise and Jazz.

I began the task by reconstructing an old percussion album cover on illustrator , we did this as we were to use it as our front cover , however the original image was far too low resolution. another reason was that changing it into vectors would allow us to link in buttons to the PDF. When creating the button i added a drop shadow that would activate when the button was hovered over so the user would identify the internal hyperlink.

This would link the reader to another slide of information , taking them through the pdf presentation in a more unique way to the conventional next button way. The slide that this led onto was about Count Baise , i didn't put any information in the text boxes , however i learnt about the placeholder text tool that would fill the box with random words to fill the page , i feel that this tool would be useful when creating a mock up for a project. 

The final step in the interactive text was to add the swing of change video to the PDF. I encountered a lot of problems with this step even though it was simple to do , i asked the tutor if there was a reason why the software would not place the video however we were unable to solve the issue. But to place a video in the indesign document you follow the same steps as you would for placing an image. when the user clicks on the video the video will activate and play. this would be useful when displaying animations we have created on a PDF for deadline hand in's.