Semester Reflection

Final Reflection

My first semester of Graphic Design as a junior was filled lots of creative projects and learning on a technical and collaborative level.  Here is my Bechance where you can find all of the finished projects I discuss!

Name Typography

Our first project of the year was all about exploring how to make typography look and feel like a mood, a season, or a thing.  The first step was to brainstorm a list of words or traits that describe our interests or personality.  Then, we sketched three different concepts for each word that went outside the box in making our name feel like an aspect of our personality.  After spending about a week on the sketches, a lot of the time going into research and work put in outside of class, we pushed our ideas onto the computer via Illustrator.  This was the first time I learned how hard it can be to recreate a hand drawing on the computer.  I learned a lot of technical skills while doing this, like using the Wacom and creating to outlines to manipulate type.  I learned a lot of important things about the fine print of graphic design, such as to always match a stroke to blend with a type and that sometimes you have to go big to make a design work.  Probably the hardest skill I learned while doing this project was how to cut and mount.  I made many mistakes the first time, but hopefully it will teach me to make sure to put my projects on straight on the matte board.  Overall, it was a good first project to get  to know myself as a graphic designer and acquire skills that I'll use the rest of high school.

Rebranding Project

This 8 week long project really showed me what graphic design is all about.  Our task was to find a company that had poor branding, recreate their logo, and design a label to put on a bottle.  I chose to rebrand a branch of Nestea called Real Leaf green tea.  One of the biggest challenges I faced was the fact that this product is discontinued and was only manufactured in another country.  Even though I found pictures of the bottles, it was really hard to redefine the product when I couldn't find any information on it to begin with.  At the same time, this also allowed me to be more creative in what I did with their brand as I wasn't starting with much.  There were many different stages to this project that went into the final product. We first started by sketching logos, which took a long time as it required research into the brand, logos of similar products, and into any buzzwords of the brand or product.   Then we chose our favorite 6 sketches and pushed them to the computer.  After the critique of these black & white only logos, which provided me with lots of good feedback auto hierarchy and contrast, what proved to be one of the biggest challenges begun.  We had to choose one of our six concepts to continue with and add color to it.  The concept I originally chose ended up being very difficult to add color to, and it let me to pursue a more practical option.  I ended up using a lot of creativity to make my second concept work, as I added more elements to it to give it more depth and help it pop when more subtle colors were added to it.  Once the color version of the logo was finalized, it was time to create the label that would eventually go on our bottles.  For my bottles, I used small Starbucks glass bottles, because I liked the shape and size of them.  I originally had a standard rectangular label that went all the way around my bottle, but feedback was given to me that led me to change it into a creative cutout shape that highlighted the unique shape of my logo.  This project ended up being my favorite one so far, as it taught me about creative problem solving and I really enjoyed the logo design process. I am also really satisfied with how my final product turned out!

Menu Redesign

We've only just started on this project, but it has already really pushed me outside of my comfort zone.  We were assigned to choose a restaurant and design a new menu and a table tent for them using their existing logo and color scheme.  I chose Ra Sushi Bar, and I am currently working on designing the layout of their menu.  We first had to research creative styles and layouts of menu and sketch different ideas we had and then choose 2 concepts to push to the computer.  The hardest part of this project has been working in Indesign, as we didn't get much practice in it in past years of graphic design.  My goals for the rest of this project are to gain a lot more technical skills in Indesign and use my creativity to create two unique and innovative menu concepts!

Outside Projects

This semester, I took on the project of designing a shirt to sell to the Junior Class in order to raise money for Prom.  It taught me a lot about working for a client and that sometimes you have to remake designs multiple times in order for a project to be successful.  I am also starting on a logo design for a business!

Time Management

This is definitely an area of weakness for me that I am constantly working on to improve.  I come in before and after school to work on projects when I may have missed class or just need a few extra hours to catch up.  Overall, I feel like I am doing well on staying productive during class time and not talking to other people when I should be working.  I could definitely still use improvement on my time management outside of class so that I am not having to work on things for other classes during graphic design.  When it comes to free time in this class, though, I'll often use it to clean up my behance and perfect my artboards so that everything is neat and aesthetically pleasing.  I will also work on my sketches and other projects outside of class to be sure that I meet all my deadlines.  

Strengths & Weaknesses

My strengths in graphic design are my creativity and my patience.  I can think of out of the box ideas and put in the time to perfect them and make sure to add in all of the little details.  I still need to improve on my technical skills and time management, but these are things that I work on every day in this class.  Technical skills come from experience, and I am getting help from my classmates to make sure I acquire all the skills necessary to succeed in this class. 

Summary

My favorite part of this semester was exploring my creativity and learning a lot about all graphic design has to offer.  Next semester, I will learn from my mistakes of not mounting my projects correctly, not knowing enough skills in Illustrator or Indesign, and poor time management and I will make it my best semester yet.  My goal is to feel fully comfortable on the software we use and have good enough time management that I have time in class to work on more outside projects.  Overall, I had a lot of fun this semester and I can't wait for the rest of my time in graphic design.

Name Typography

For this project we had the task of using typography to display 12 attributes of ourselves.  First we brainstormed as many words we could think of about our hobbies, interests, and personalities.  Then, we thought about things that made us think and feel those words.  Our last step before going to the computer was to sketch three different concepts for each word.  The challenge was to display the word using typography with only minimal graphics. 

I learned a lot about Adobe Illustrator in the process of transferring my ideas onto the computer. I also experimented with using the Wacom, which allows you to draw directly into Illustrator.  I also learned a lot about collaboration and that it is super important to ask people from around the room to come look at your work as you go. This is necessary in order to get a fresh eye on something you might have been working on for a while and get another person's opinion.  I also learned how to cut and mount, which is definitely something that takes a lot of practice to do right.  If I could do the project over, I would definitely get more people's opinions while I was working.  I would also try to stay simple and use less graphics, as I felt like my work got really busy in some places.  In my next project I will take the technical skills I learned in both Illustrator and cutting and mounting with me, but I will also take advantage of the resources around me and ask them for help.  Overall, I had fun on my first project of the year and hope to stretch my creativity and develop new skills for the rest of the year!

Responsive Photo Composition Site

Here is my Photo Composition Site!  Using HTML and CSS, I made it respond to the size of the screen it's being displayed on so it is optimized for whatever device you use to view it. While making this site, I ran into some problems when having to resize the images in photoshop, making sure the responsive code affected all the pages, and making sure the header image resizes.  This is my final site!

Responsive Design

Here is a site that uses responsive web design!  It automatically adjusts to the optimal viewing point based on the size of the browser.  It is important because people use the internet on such a wide variety of devices, and this is a much easier way to make sure everyone sees the best version of your website.  A media query is a tag that makes a chunk of code only apply under certain conditions, and breakpoints are the spots at which the conditions change.

This is the largest size of the website.  The high quality image fills the whole screen, and the badge in the middle is pretty large.  It looks great on a high resolution screen!

This is the next breakpoint that is probably optimized for tablets.  The picture continues to fill the whole screen, but the badge gets slightly smaller.

This is the mobile size for the website.  They split the screen between the image and the information to make it easier to view and limit the need for scrolling on a mobile device.

My Website Mockup

Here is my website mockup I made for Touch of Fun!  I don't know much about what the client wants yet, but I used the different elements from her Facebook page and my own graphics to create this site on Illustrator.  Below is the real website I modeled my mockup after.  I kept their idea of the grid layout of photos, but changed the sidebar into a header and substituted the boxes for bold titles. When I make this a website on Dreamweaver, I'll make the subheadings on each image links to their pages.

Past, Present, and Future

    

In this project, I used Photoshop and Dreamweaver to create a website about my Past, Present, and Future.  I used the slice tool to create separate animations of each heading, which animate when you hover over them.  I learned a lot about problem solving and how to troubleshoot on Dreamweaver during this project, as it had a lot of components to it when transferring the elements between programs.  I'll use the skills I learned on both programs on this for future web projects!

Web Design Illustrator Projects

For this project I used both Illustrator and Photoshop.  I used the pen tool to make cool lines and a texture brush to make the spray paint background.

I used Illustrator to give my name a blueprint effect, using lines, paintbrushes, and a texture fill.

I made my icon people in Illustrator using the gradient mesh tool, pathfinder, and varied opacity levels to give them more depth.

My Topic Website

The purpose of this project was to create a website based on a topic of our choosing.  I chose potatoes, because I thought it would be fun to learn more about a food I enjoy and be able to tell others some cool things about them.  I began this project be doing some research on the history of potatoes, some of their health benefits, and some interesting ways to cook with them. Then, I made the CSS of my site to match the colors of the image of potatoes I used as my background.  Next I gathered all of the images I used on my website and edited them in photoshop.

I had some issues along the way with transferring the CSS from my base site without having them linked together, but I fixed it by making sure that I made a copy of the style sheet and it had a different title.  Overall, I learned a lot about Dreamweaver and became more comfortable with its different functions.  I will use the skills I learned in this project to make other websites using HTML and CSS even faster and better!

Click here to check out my potato website!