Josué Pacheco Lentz
This was my first assignment for my Graphic Design 2 class. Basically, what I had to do was take ten famous logos and make a "parody" with my name on it. The challenge of this assignment was that the parody had to match the original very closely. I also couldn't pick just any logo, the logos had to have similar letters than my name so the parody would still have the same aesthetics. For example, my name is Josué so I couldn't pick the McDonald's logo because my name doesn't have an "M" and is very short compared to the word "McDonald's". This project's research took me a lot of time and thinking because many logos' text I though of din't match up with my name. After some extensive research and reflecting I finally got my ten logos that I would then work on. For this project I used Illustrator and svgs so the final product would be the highest quality possible. This was my first time working with svg files. After I had all my logos, sketches and got the techniques down, the rest was pretty straightforward. However I had to pay very close attention to everything I did because for this project detail was everything. Since I was working with very recognizable logos any detail I din't have or changed on my parody version was going to be very noticeable and would throw the entire look off. For both logos to match I had to look at every line, color, shape and thickness so it would match up.
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My final assignment in this graphic design class was to do a throwback poster with a contemporary message. What that basically means is that I have to do a poster in a retro style but with a new subject. I've always found the psychedelic style poster from the 60s and 70s very beautiful so I tried to mimic that style for my project. Picking the subject was a little more tricky but it was fairly straightforward. Since most of the psychedelic style posters were about music artists, for my poster I chose to do it on a pop-punk band formed in 2012 called Neck Deep. Since I've never done anything in this style I had to do a lot of research. I researched techniques that would help me achieve this retro look. I also looked at a lot of different examples both from that time period and new posters with the retro look to try and see how I can make mine. I paid close attention to the example's layout, text/typefaces, colors and images. I was aiming to do something that would match the style but with an original layout that would stand out from the others. After sketching some layout ideas, I started working on the image I was going to use. Since this is a poster and I wanted the image to be big and readable I chose to only put the band's front-man, Ben Barlow, as opposed to the entire crew. I started editing the image in Adobe Photoshop to make it look like the cutout style that the posters have. After the cutout style was placed I started to edit the hue and saturation so the image would fit the color scheme of the poster. This is when I started to play around with the different possible color schemes a sketched during the planning step. I decide to do the purple/green theme because they fit the style. The next step I did was the background. I did the shapes in the background with the pen tool. I made the shapes simpler as the got bigger to give it a nice look that is not too complicated. Once the background was done the next step was the text. I looked at different fonts in that style and chose a simpler one because I was going to edit the text, so the font din't had to be perfect as is. In Photoshop I converted the text to a smart object and with the warp tool moved the text to fit the background shapes. I warped the text one letter at a time so the shape would be as accurate with the background as possible since I'm fairly new to using the warp tool. After the text was done, I put the orange border to give it a nice contrast and make the poster as a whole brighter. Finally I gave the poster some texture so it would old and retro and I placed the finishing touches to the colors with an adjustment layer. For this project I had to design, print and assemble a cereal box. I've never tackled a project like this were the final product is an actual object, and I was very interested to see what I could come up with. I started my project doing research and brainstorming ideas for the theme of the cereal box. After the planning phase was done I moved my work to Illustrator. I set up the measurements I needed so it would print accurately later on. First I designed the front and back cover. I wanted to do a simple and clean design for my cereal box. After that I duplicated the nutrition facts label in Illustrator using lines and text. I duplicated the label using vectors in Illustrator so it would look as real and as high quality as possible. The next thing I did was place the barcode and the color bar which was mandatory in order for this project to look like and actual product. After all the necessary labels were in place I put the finishing touches in my design and went over the entire layout to make sure everything was correct (measurements, folding tabs, etc.) and nothing would go wrong later in the printing and assembling process. After I reviewed my final design, I printed my work and spray mounted it on card stock. The next step was to cut out the design. Carefully, I cut out the entire design with the layout necessary to make it into a box later on. This took the most time because I wanted to make sure that all the cuts were straight and clean. When the project was ready to be folded, with a ruler and a pen I creased the lines were the folds are supposed to go. After the box was folded I sealed the side and bottom tabs with hot glue. This was the final step and after the glue cooled and the tabs were sealed I had my very own cereal box. In my Graphic Design class we were assigned to make a pictogram music poster. The project is based on Viktor Hertz' music posters. Basically the idea is to make a poster about a musical artist with various pictograms, each of them representing a song. The first thing I did when starting this projects was pick the artist and made a list of their songs that I could make simple pictograms inspired by them. For my poster I picked one my favorite band, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Making the song list wasn't very hard for me because they have a big library to chose from. The original list ranged from 25-30 songs. After the list was done, the next thing to do was sketch Ideas for the song pictograms. For sketching ideas I referred back to Viktor Hertz' posters and analyzed how he used symbols to represent the song. This part of the planning took the most time since I had to come up with clever and simple designs for each song. For each song I made 2-4 sketches. When it was time to transfer my work from paper to Illustrator the main resource I used for svgs and basic symbols/pictograms was the Noun Project. The pictograms I got from the noun project were edited and changed to fit the sketch I had for a particular song. I spent a lot of time on each of these pictograms given that this was the focus of the project. The last step to finish up the project was the text and layout. For the text and layout is when I looked back at Viktor Hertz' posters given that the assignment was to recreate his style. I did online research to find the font he used for the text. I ended up finding a very similar font and used that one. The layout and margins were the bulk of this part. After the layout was finished I revised the work and got feedback from my peers and gave the finishing touches before submitting the project. I used Adobe Illustrator CS6 for all the vector work, text and layout of the poster. For my final project of the second marking period, I was assigned to create anything I wanted in Adobe Photoshop using advanced techniques and tools within the software. I chose to create a piece out of many unrelated images to each other. I did my research by looking for high quality images that I could use in my piece. After I gathered the images I started sketching some ideas for the project with the images I chose.
After I had an idea of what the project might look like, I fired up Photoshop and created the document. I went through all the images and using the pen tool, I outlines the subject of the images copied and pasted them to my main document so I would only have the parts of the images I wanted to use (this took a long time given the complexity of the outline of some of the images). Next was to arrange the images and the layers in the proper way so everything would look right. For some of the images in the foreground (like the tree and the stop sign) I had to make shadows by making a copy of the shape, filling it with black, lowering the opacity and stretching it and moving it so it would look like its shadow. I added the shadows so the images would look right and not stick out in a bad way. To wrap up the images and make them blend a little more, I changed the some of the colors and applied a filter in order for the image to have a consistent color scheme. Whenever I felt stuck on my current project I worked on a "mini project". These "mini projects" were some images that I would write a movie quote over it and made it look like something I would see on a website or someplace else. My second assignment in my Graphic Design 2 class at Morristown High School was to design a cover for the school's program of studies catalog. For the cover, we had to use collage techniques to achieve our final design. The school photos were provided to me by the teacher. The photos were professionally taken by school photographers. The first step I took when working on this project was to sketch many (about 7-10) text layouts. It was really hard to find a text layout that I really liked, some of the ones I sketched were okay, but I din't feel confident that any of them were actually that good. Another major aspect I had to consider when designing the text layout is that it also has to flow well with the pictures I had to collage later. After I chose a layout I was fairly confident in I went to Photoshop and placed the pictures and created my first draft. With this first draft, I was having trouble doing a picture layout that looked nice and fit the text design. After I failed to come up with a draft I really liked, I went back to Illustrator and started working on an entirely different text layout. After playing around with the text and colors for a while, I finally came up with a text design I was very confident in and really liked. I took the new text layout and moved it to inDesign where I began to work on the picture layout. The pictures were placed and had a solid layout, the rest was just making sure the pictures were properly aligned and none of them had been cropped or altered in any unusual way. |
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Graphic Design student Archives
May 2017
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