Design Rationale - Final Project

I chose to do food for the topic of my final project because I love food. In this slideshow I wanted to create my love of food and also one particular experience with a different type of food. I chose to talk about my experience to South Korea and the different food they have there. I wanted to give the reader a sense of a story where I start off by mentioning what food is, my experience in Korea with food and then wrapping it all up with how much I love and enjoy it.

Some of the decisions I made while creating this slideshow was choosing which pictures to choose and which music I wanted in the slideshow. It was difficult choosing pictures because some of the images were too small so they looked funny in the slideshow. I did choose the song Cheeseburger in Paradise by Jimmy Buffett for the end of my slide show because I thought it was a good food song that mostly everyone knows.

I felt like I had a lot of problem this time with audacity and posting. Trying to post to WebNg and Filezilla was a pain because whenever I tried to upload my powerpoint to them it would just stop in the same spot and never finish the upload. I never accomplished any of my problems because I never got the project uploaded.

I am most proud of the whole project and how I put a bunch of things together. It took a little effort to write a script that would easily portray what I wanted to say. I then needed to find pictures that accurately went with what I was saying in the story and then a song that also fit the theme. I think in the end it turned out really well despite all the uploading problems and I am proud of the final project.

StumbleUpon powerpoint

Stumbleupon

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BiBi Cards

Quark Bibi Card














InDesign Bibi Card









I chose to duplicate this card because I thought it was challenging but not too challenging enough to do with both Quark and InDesign. I anticipated having problems with InDesign.

The fonts I chose were obvious because I was duplicating the exact fonts that were on the card. The entire Arial type family (Arial Black, Arial Narrow, Arial Bold, Arial Bold Italic, and Arial Narrow Regular) was used for both my Quark and InDesign BiBi cards. For the back of the BiBi card, the font were also a few of the Arial ones and then for the signature E L L E font, the font used was Bodoni STD.

Some of the problems I encountered when duplicating cards was using the program InDesign. I’m more experienced with Quark than InDesign so using the new program was a challenge for me and got me very frustrated. Also, trying to do the gradient on the yellow circle on both programs was very challenging. I solved this problem after getting frustrated and with the help of Sofia we finally figured it out.

I would say that I am really proud of my BiBi cards duplications because they look so real! If I had more time I wouldn’t change anything because I think my cards look accurate and perfect.

Brochure

Sofia and I chose to do the restaurant Leo’s for our brochure because we both enjoy going there. Leo’s is also a place that many of our classmates could relate to since it is popular among teenagers our age. We were hoping to achieve a final project that included the menu for the restaurant and a brief history on it while also displaying images of the restaurant in a colorful way. Also, we incorporated reviews on the restaurant so anyone reading the brochure would see how highly acclaimed the restaurant is.

We chose to keep the colors on the front of the brochure the same as the ones that the restaurant uses for their logo and menu. We also chose to use pictures of the restaurant and the inside on the front of the brochure so the reader can get a visual of what it looks like. The contact information was also put on the front of the brochure so it’s easier to access. Because Leo’s has a very big menu, we decided to have the menu take up the three panels in the inside of the brochure. We chose a history of the restaurant and a map and reviews for the back of the brochure because out of everything, those were the least important.

Some of the decisions we had to make were where we wanted items to be located on the brochure and what information we wanted to put on it. Also, what colors and fonts we would use for the words. Fonts

One of the problems that we encountered was trying to make a shape that had gradient. We couldn’t figure out how to do the gradient with a color. We ended up solving this problem by just making an oval shape and putting it behind the words “Leo’s Restaurant”.

I think overall we are both most proud of the final brochure. I think it looks really well done and we did a really good job. I think if we were given more time I wouldn’t want to change anything. Maybe we would have changed the back side of the brochure and switched how we placed the history.

Dave Matthews Band concert poster

What I was hoping to achieve from my design was a creative concert poster featuring the Dave Matthews Band. I chose this band because I know they’re really popular among this University’s student body. I wanted anyone who saw the poster to find it appealing and want to go to the concert.

There were a lot of decisions made throughout the creation of my poster. I had to decide which fonts worked best together and didn’t make the poster look too crowded. I also had to decide what pictures I would use on the poster if I was going to use any. In the end, I chose a picture of all the members of the band and using Photoshop I cut them out of the background. I chose to use a blue color for the background because I thought it looked like the most appealing color.

Nothing was really too challenging to this project but I did have trouble deciding where to place words on the poster. I have a tendency to put the words in a straight line but I know that this is not creatively appealing. The only other thing that was a pain to do was cutting out the picture of the band on Photoshop. It was a long tedious process. I solved these problems by making sure I didn’t put the words in straight lines and also by just working on the photo really hard.

I’m most proud of my overall project and how it turned out. I really like the colors and fonts I used. I think the poster came out really good and I think that most people would want to go to the concert if they saw my poster. The date and place on the poster is when the Dave Matthews Band will really be playing there and some of my friends who are going to that concert thought my poster was really neat.

If I had more time I probably would have tried out different fonts and made my poster a little bit more creative. I would have played around with the colors and maybe even used a different picture. It all depends but overall I like my final product.

Cobra Starship Powerpoint

Cobrastarship

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In my design, I was hoping to achieve a final PowerPoint presentation that was appealing to my audience but also creative in the way I presented the band Cobra Starship. I was hoping that the music I chose would help my viewer get a sense of what kind of band they were. I was also glad that by doing this project I got to expand my knowledge of PowerPoint because I feel so much more knowledgeable with the program.

In creating my PowerPoint presentation, I had to make various decisions that would affect the outcome of my project. One of the things that I had to decide was what music I would be putting in my PowerPoint. Since Cobra Starship isn’t really that popular I chose to use songs that I thought people would know better than the other ones. I also had to decide which pictures worked best for the slides. I wanted to put pictures on my third slide with the chart but in the end I decided it looked better to do one picture as the background and have the picture be dimed.

The most challenging thing of the whole project was the music portion. When we first used audacity I was having trouble putting the music together because I had gotten the music file from Limewire and it was bad. I solved this problem by having to download the song again so at that point I changed the song to a different one that I thought would be better. This new file was better and it worked when I combined the two songs together. Once the music was done, I had to make sure the music fit with the PowerPoint and ended at the right time. This part was hard because I had to slow things down or speed animations up to make the music sound right and look right with the slides.

I think I am most proud of the project as a whole. I was proud of myself that I could learn how to use a different version of Microsoft PowerPoint that had so many different features! I enjoyed it though because it gave you a lot of fonts and animations to choose from. I was happy that my project came out half way decent and my music eventually worked. Since we had just learned Photoshop it was good to be able to go back to that program and fix my photos.

If I had more time I would have worked on the music portion more. Because I had trouble with the music files in the beginning I wasted a lot of time on that, therefore my music wasn’t as good as it could have been. I would have really spent time on it and made it sound really creative. I probably would have also been more creative with the way I set up the slides. Once I spend more time on something I start to find more creative ways of doing things.

Font Poem slide show

I was hoping to achieve an end product that I felt was good considering I had never made a slide show movie before. I wanted it to look good and have the collage pictures represent my font poem and look creative. I think by doing what I did to the collage background it looks really good and aesthetically pleasing.

Some of the decisions I had to make when creating the movie was if I wanted to put my font poem words on my collage or not, or what kind of pictures I would put into my collage. I knew I wanted to use photos that were clouds or sunsets; pictures that would represent words such as imagination and dreams. I had to decide if I wanted the collage to just be pictures or have color to it. I choose to have my collage have a white transparent color over the collage that was light enough that you can still see the pictures of the collage.

Choosing the pictures for my collage was challenging because I wanted to choose ones that best represented my poem. One problem I encountered was trying to put all of the words from my font poem onto the collage. For some reason one of my words were invisible so it wouldn’t show up when I tried to put it over the collage. This created a problem for me so I decided to not put any words on the collage.

It was also difficult trying to upload the movie because it was a new program to work with. By the end of the class we did not have our movie posted but we all had accomplished one step of the process. It taught us how patient we have to be when learning something new that we might not get right away.

I am proud because I am expanding my Photoshop knowledge and learning new skills on the program. I don’t think my font poem movie came out horrible and I’m happy how it came out. I knew I wanted some of the pictures to represent the words in my poem and I think I did a good job at creating that. If I had more time then I might have positioned my collage photos in a more creative way.

Double Exposure

Contact Sheet

First row: For the first row we had to find a picture with a dpi of 1200. To change the resolution size of each picture we had to go into image, then image size and change the resolution to either 1200, 600, 300 or 72 dpi while changing the height to one. You can change the height in the same box that you change the resolution in. As you can see, starting with the picture on the left, the higher the dpi the clearer the picture will appear.

Second row: We first had to find a picture on the web with a dpi higher than 72. We changed the image to be 1 inch tall and then dragged the picture into the color RGB box on the sheet. Next, we then took the original picture and changed it to CMYK by going into image and selecting mode and changing it CMYK. For the next picture we wanted it to be black and white so we had to change it to black and white in the mode tab. To change it to duotone we had to change the picture back to gray scale and then click duotone.

Third row: First, we found a landscape picture that was also higher then 72 dpi. It didn’t have to be but the picture would look better if it was. Nothing had to be done to that picture so we put that one on the contact sheet. We then took the original picture and clicked the crop tool. While on the crop tool we had to change the height and width to 1 x 1 so when cropped it made a perfect square. To get a portrait sized picture we went back to the original again and when clicked on the crop tool you had to make sure the height was more than the width.

Fourth row: For this row we found a picture and then saved it. We used the original picture and changed the image height to 1, which made the width size change. When we clicked on the crop tool we had to make sure that the height was 1 and the width was whatever it had changed to when we first changed the height in the image size. This was so whatever we cropped it would stay the same size. We repeated the same steps not using the original image but the last picture we edited. The end picture should have been a close up of an object from the original.

Fifth row: We first had to find a representation picture and something with content. For this row, we followed a similar process to the row before. We took a picture and saved it and then with that picture we changed the height to 1 in the image size. Then when we went to crop we made sure the height was 1 and the width was the same width as when it changed in the image size. We cropped it the same way as row four where we kept going back to the previous image but the end image was supposed to look abstract.

Sixth row: We found any image we wanted and saved it on the contact sheet. We could choose any style filter we wanted and I chose poster edges, dark strokes, palette knife because I thought those looked really neat with the picture I chose.

Font Poem Final

The quote I chose was spoken by the Disney character, Tinkerbell. The way I positioned the word “laughter” was meant to look like a sequence of how someone’s voice would travel laughing. The font of the word, which is Kolo LP STD, was chosen because it gave the affect that the word is bubbly. When I think of the word “laughter” I think of someone being bubbly and laughing. I used the font Ironwood STD for the word “timeless” because it made the word seem as if it was frozen in time. “Imagination” is placed in an arch because imagination isn’t in a linear boundary. The font I used for that word was Marigold. For “has” I wanted to keep it simple so I chose the font Wendy LP STD. When designing the word “no” I wanted the font to have meaning and correspond with the word “age” so I chose to do it in a Rosewood STD font and have “age” in Viva STD. I think the way “age” looks is perfect because it looks as though the word is aging. I kept the word “and” simple and I used Spartan LT STD for the word “dreams” because dreams are happy. The word “are” is in font Ariel LT STD and I used Adriane LT STD for “forever” because it gave “forever” a sense of glow as if forever was a dream. The way it was placed is so it appears that the word will extend forever as dreams are meant to be forever.

One problem that I was having with the project was that I was making the words too linear. I had to think about what each word meant and how I could convey the meaning using the position of the word. Using the program Photoshop was new to me but I picked it up quickly and found it easy to navigate. What I would have done if I had more time is chosen a different quote where I would have been able to do something more creative with the words and positioned them differently. Overall, the thing that I’m proud of the most is how I was able to use different fonts to emphasize words. I had fun examining words and their meanings to come up with a style and position for them.