Patterns

This was the first time I had used Adobe Illustrator, ever.

For this pattern, I wanted to create a sense of movement within the shapes. By compiling a set of X's and rotating them around, I was able to create "wheels."

This pattern is my favorite out of the three, for it has a playful feel to it. I wanted to make it look like the O's were bouncing down towards the bottom as if they were dropped into this maze of L's. 

This scaly pattern was created out of S's. I used the rotate tool, as well as using outlines to slightly alter the shape of the S and create the S curve creature. 

Heraldry Logo

First I began by doing some research on heraldry.
When Michelle first introduced this project, I had no idea what heraldry was. I learned on Wikipedia that Heraldry, "is the profession, study, or art of devising, granting, and blazoning arms and ruling on questions of rank or protocol, as exercised by an officer of arms." From here, I thought about what symbols/objects/morals best represented me. I found five things that I wanted to include on my logo. They were:

- Chinese Dragon: I was born in the Chinese Zodiac year of the Dragon. I feel as though I embody many aspects of a dragon personality and the dragon symbol is very important not only to me, but my Vietnamese culture as well.

- "Find a Way or Make One": or "Aut Viam Invieniam Aut Facium" in Latin. I have this phrase tattooed on my back as a reminder to never give up regardless of the lack of opportunities or difficult circumstances. I thought this would be perfect to place on my heraldic logo.

- Heart: I wanted to include a heart on my logo to represent the passion and love I have for life and all that it offers. I chose a more realistic heart rather than a typical "valentine's" heart per say because I think whatever you love you to do, you should have a genuine interest in doing it rather than pretending that you enjoy it.

-the color Purple: I chose to include the color purple on one of my logos because it represents loyalty and unity, which are I think are two important morals to have. It is also my favorite color.

-the color Green: Green will always remind me of a youthful spirit rather than jealously, greed or envy. I think it's important to maintain a youthful spirit as you get older to remain happy and joyful.

Here are my two Heraldic Logos. 

I wouldn't like to call them my final product, because they're not exactly how I'd like them to look. 

My issue creating this logo was dealing with the Live Trace feature for the dragons, and deleting the white background on the heart. 

For my dragon, I had printed off an image and traced it by hand with a dark pen.

I scanned it into the computer and Live Traced it, and the image didn't come out as nice or clear as I had anticipated. 

I had retraced by hand, and rescanned several times. I couldn't get it to look the way I wanted it to. 

The above shown is Live Traced as nice as I could get it. I wanted to add color to the dragon as well, but didn't know how. 

The issue with the heart consisted of simply deleting the white background you can see on the green/purple version of the logo. I was trying to remember the steps of the Rubber Duck exercise that we did in class, but I couldn't remember and got very frustrated with the overall look of the heart. 

In the end, I would like my logo to be in all color with strong, clean lines to fully and accurately represent my intended idea for this logo. 

G Star - Stop Motion Animation Video

I tried uploading my Stop Motion Animation video on to Blogspot, but it didn't work. 

The Process:

It was a two hour process composing photos with my little cousin's magnet sketch toy.  I featured my awesome drawings of things that start with the letter G. Gumby, goldfish, water Gun, and Giraffes. I wanted the animation to have a playful feel to it to complement the toy as if a little kid drew the drawings themselves. 

I began by taking photographs of the Fisher Price toy I stole from my four year old cousin. (kidding, he threw it at me when I asked to borrow it. Therefore, he gave it to me.) I previously conducted a list of all things I could think of that started with the letter G and drew those things on the toy. I took about 60 photos with my Canon Digital Rebel XTi and leveled all the images using iPhoto. I picked out a few of my favorite images and opened them in photoshop. 

In photoshop, I figured out the sequence in which I wanted my images in. I knew I wanted to show the images being erased on the toy after I showed a full image of the object. 

At the end of the animation, I featured the letter G with different saturations and effects to highlight its importance to the animation. 

The final product ended up with about 26 layers and 31 frames when I exported it into Quicktime. 

I had a lot of fun creating this animation because I've never done stop motion animation before. I loved the PES animations and plan to experiment more with stop motion later on in the future. 

Composite Project

I decided to do the composite assignment inspired by collage artist David Hockney. 

I wanted to create a creepy, eery, ghostly composition. 

To begin, I had a friend take a bunch of photographs of me moving with a slow shutter speed in a dark parking lot under Safeway. 

The slow shutter speed makes the images more blurry, and also creates a more ghostly feel to the photos. I thought this would've helped when composing the final image. 

I ended with over 100 photos to work with. I began going through them piece by piece and selected areas that I was attracted to. Maybe a part of a wall in one photo, an eye in another...etc. Once I picked out various original pieces, I compiled them into a new image canvas to create a new image. You can see an example in my second photo below. 

I had made different variations of my compositions, and with each one I wanted to challenge myself to make them more dynamic. I would play around with Levels, Curves, Duotone, Grayscale and other effects to see what I would come up with. I also would crop different pieces of photos into shapes, such as stripes, circles, and squares to put on the composition. I found that the square composition (last photo in sequence below) was the most successful because it was simple, yet interesting at the same time. 

History: Container Corporation of America

Ralph Eckerstrom developed Container Corporation’s logo in the 1960s. He wanted the image if the isometric box with the 45-degree angle corners to advocate the systematic corporate identity. Eckerstrom stated that. “As a function of management, design must be an integrated part of overall company operation and directly related to the company’s business and sales activities. It must have continuity as a creative force. It must reflect total corporate character. Unless it meets these requirements, the company image it seeks will never coalesce into a unified whole, but will remain a mosaic of unrelated fragments.” In 1964, John Massey became the director of design for the Container Corporation. Systems design was broadly influenced by Massey and the International Typographic Style merged. In 1965, Container Corporation established the Center for Advanced Research in Design, a design studio that worked on advanced and experimental projects and received commissions from other organizations. 

Logo Design:Container Corporation of America

Design Process for recreating the logo

1. I collected the image for the logo and pasted onto Illustrator.

2. I created the box that was incorporated into the design.

3. I redesigned the "C" using shapes such as circles and rectangles. I used this same process to create the "A" as well.

4. After I recreated the letters, I moved them over into the square shape. At the end is my recreated logo!

Final Postcard

Here is the final design for my postcard for Saul Bass. 

Saul Bass is known for his use of type and simplistic design. I wanted to create a postcard that was simple with integrated details from various movie posters that he designed in the past. 

I began by researching movie posters, and picked out some of my favorite elements from several posters. I liked certain fonts, drawings and shapes from different posters. I noticed that Saul Bass' posters all had the same qualities in each movie poster, such as use of squares, reds/oranges, and misshaped letters. 

I printed out my favorite movie posters and traced my favorite elements. After I scanned my tracings, I edited the images in photoshop. I cut and pasted the images into a new composition of an old body with a new hand, along with SAUL BASS written across the body. This became the front of my postcard. 

For the back of the postcard, I integrated little squares into the background in tribute to Saul Bass, and used the same letters that I used in the front for his title name.