Saturday, February 28, 2009

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Type Design


Self-Assessment

1. Are you happy/satisfied with your design? What are some of the features that make it so successful? If you are not satisfied, what would you have done differently to make it more successful?

Yes, I am both happy and satisfied with my design. I think some components that helped me was that the color scheme was balanced well throughout the design. I also planned out how the design may have looked before hand. The use of the lines for our focal points were very helpful when I started my design. I experimented with color, opacity, and the position that the letters and the background were placed on.

2. List some of the tools that you learned and used in this assignment. Which ones did you find the most helpful and in what ways?

During the making of the type design, I learned how to use the eyedropper tool, the rectangular marquee, the paint bucket tool, and the text tool. All of the tools were important in the process of making the type design but in a lot of times, I thought that the eyedropper tool was very helpful in achieving the similar color or the shade with the color near it to balance out the design. The paint bucket tool was also helpful when we were making the color of the letters and the background layers, because we didn’t have to use the brush tool and color it in and waste time. The rectangular marquee was also helpful because we could make different sizes and shapes of rectangular we wanted for our designs. The text tool was also helpful, because it would be hard to create letters if we didn’t have it. I liked the fact that if we picked a font, we could just make it larger and stretch it out to fit our designs.

3. With what areas/aspects of Photoshop do you have questions? What activities would help you better understand basic design concepts, along with more Photoshop tools, tips, and tricks?

The areas or aspects of Photoshop that I have questions on are how to make the pictures look more natural. I think learning the basic background of some designs like we did with notan, will help us be better when we create a more complicated design. I’ve noticed that while we work on our designs, we get more comfortable with the tools that we have used before. We also get to practice using new tools when creating a new designs. I think it’s best that we learn the tips and tricks and just remember how we used them in order to be faster and a better designer.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Pop Art

Pop art represents short words, and it gives a bold meaning to them. The words are shaped into geometric forms.They are usually wooden blocks with bright colors to grasp the viewers’ attention. Indiana’s pop arts usually represent culture and life.

Stuart Davis-

Stuart Davis is an American painter, who was born in 1894. He had many influences while he was growing up, since his father was an art director for a Philadelphia newspaper. Davis later worked with Robert Henri from the years 1910 to 1913, and he created covers for a realist periodical called The Masses. After visiting Paris in 1928 to 1929, he learned the idea of cubism, where he used natural forms to express the characteristic of an American life. I like his work called Report from Rockport from 1940, because it really represents the way of life of a typical American. I’m assuming that it’s a street where people interact with their neighbors. You can also see the natural side of this drawing, where the clouds are represented with different colors. You can also see the landscape of mountains in the back. And People going on about their lives.


Robert Indiana-

Robert Indiana is an American painter who was born in 1928. He studied Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica, New York, which led him to study in School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From the Institute of Chicago, he won a traveling fellowship to Europe, and ended up studying in Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. He got his ideas from Longfellow, Whitman, and Melville, who are known famous for their anti-transcendentalistic and transendentalistic ideas in writing. Indiana is very famous for his pop art designs for the words Eat, Love, and Die. And he is most famous for his pop art work for the word Love used on postage stamps in 1973. I like his work called The American Love from 1975. It represents his style of designing, which reflected upon the American pride. It is shown in the red, blue and white colors with the word Love formed into different forms. It also shows the ‘transcendental’ ideas from Whitman, which can be found from his poem I Hear America Singing.