Creating a visual metaphor that not only represented myself, but also my chosen career was a struggle for me. My initial logo is a strong reflection of who I am, but not necessarily what I want to do. Since the assignment was to create a metaphor based on what we want to do in life, I decided to design my logo as a travel writer.
Prior to arriving on travel writer, I also created logos for other careers I could possibly do. I created one for a ballerina, one that ties in finding insights to my name, and one that shows my initial as the missing link in a chain. All of these either seemed too obvious, or too complex to be easily understood.
I decided on a compass for the basic design and changed one of the points to be a fountain pen head. Initially I had it pointing north with a typed “n” above it. This seemed to be a little too obvious. I eliminated the “n” and turned the compass so it was not pointing directly north.
In the different pieces of the identity system, I changed the placement of the directional arrow. On the envelope, it points to my name. On the business card it points in a direction that balances the image without being too symmetrical. On the stationary I incorporated my name into the compass so it becomes part of the logo rather than something awkwardly hanging off the side.
I decided to keep it black and white because it is simple, clean, and elegant. I considered using earth tones, however, on screen it looked childish. The use of white space is more powerful and allows the pen metaphor to be more clearly seen.
I think this new logo is a much stronger visual metaphor than my cursive initials. It is subtle, simple, and reflects a profession.
Here is a very cool video my friend showed me. It is visually very pleasing and the music in it is AWESOME. Check it out
I love this look at how sports affects a nation. The rugged design of the map gives the picture a feeling that sports came before anything else in America, graphically affirming America as the national pastime.
Janelle Bridson
Magazine Revision
For my magazine I made the necessary changes that Professor Harper pointed out. I made sure to package the document so that all the images and fonts would be available on the server.
On the cover spread Professor Harper noted that the color printed out too dark. I lightened the color by changing the opacity from 100 percent to 80 percent. The images look significantly lighter and the fonts stand out more effectively.
For the first spread, I erased the shadow/glow on the font. I also rearranged the type so that it wasn’t too close to the bottom.
On the second spread I used the text-wrap tool to bring the text closer to the drop-cap. I also re-adjusted the size of my second image so that it was the width of the column. I followed all of Professor Harper’s suggestions, so hopefully my magazine has improved.
This picture stresses bringing text to life with a graphical rendition of the written word. It shows that great work in literature is something you can see, not just something you can read.
Wow. This is awesome. Doritos has really made something special here producing a 360 degree online commercial.
Check it out and tell me what you think.
Doritos Presents Dr. Green “Coming to Get Me” (CLICK ON IMAGE)
Link at: http://www.youtube.com/doritosuk
I decided to completely revamp my magazine and do an entirely new topic because I really disliked my original project. I felt that doing my magazine on a topic I actually care about helped me design better. I chose to do my redo on Plein Air painting so I chose a lot of outdoorsy pictures and colors. I made sure that my pictures were high resolution this time and stuck to the grid. I was also more consistent with my design. I used much shorter pull quotes and put more effort into my sidebar. I made sure there were no widows and I used a 3 column layout in order to make my paragraphs smaller and easier to read.
This is exactly the effect I was going for with my magazine spread. It is clean. The image is clear. the words I easy to read. There are not a lot of competing images. This is a much better example than the one I had previously posted and closer to the one I created.
The donation page was one of the hardest pages to make in my opinion. All those boxes on how and how much to donate can make a page feel over crowded. This is a non profit site that i thought did a good job with their donation page. It is simple, easy to understand, yet gives you so much information on the different ways to donate. I tried to model my web design donation page off of this one.
