Minimalist poster: Buffy.
So this took eight million years (aka like half an hour). I used this image from Google and then made it completely black with a red outline.
Wooden stakes, #1 vampire-killing method for Buffy Summers.
This week was my first foray into Photoshop and while I’m still trying to figure things out, I’m glad I know enough of the basics to begin to experiment. You can see the products of this experimenting here, in my visual creates for the week.
We also read some interesting pieces on visual design and creation, and while none of the ideas were necessarily earth-shattering, it gave me a good perspective on how to approach my projects in the coming weeks. I also liked looking at the applications of these tools on various websites and trying to re-create my own.
album cover blog post
This week was interesting in making pictures. One thing I forgot was how time consuming picture editing can be. Even if I know exactly how to do something and it is pretty straight forward, it always seems surprising to see how much time it actually took to create. Overall I rather like the graphics I made for this week.
Recently I really liked the minimalist posters from College Humor. I liked them because they felt relevant and accurate as the posters had to do with the general personality of websites. My favorite website is tumblr so I chose it’s poster. The element that makes this particular poster effective is contrast. While the background is blueish-gray the heart which is the main attraction of this poster is bright and contrasts greatly. While being minimilist in nature this particular poster does seem a little more complex and embellished than other minimalist posters but I still think it did a nice job being balancing simplicity with small flourishes. For example the boarder and underlining add detail but don’t make the visual overly complex.There are are a series of posters and each seems to take different elements but they are all effective.
For my minimalist travel poster I made it for London’s eye. I felt red and white would be good for my poster as well as keeping it simple. I didn’t want to use too many colors and red and white seem very British to me. I also used Arial font to keep the poster as simple and clean as possible. I used a plain circle to represent London’s Eye (which is a Ferris wheel.) I placed the eye in the center of the circle to emulate an eye. Overall I liked the project and feel people know what it’s about.
I’ve always been a big fan of contrast in design, and enjoyed Williams’ tutorial on this. It reminded me of my days as a yearbook editor in high school, which, while traumatizing, gave me the chance to do a bit of experimenting with design elements like this. However, I think sometimes his examples looked really crowded. I’m a fan of contrast in a more minimalist fashion, like the star wars posters. Having more than two types of font on one page, to me, is a terrible idea.
I had never really thought about repetition, however, and how influential it can be in design. I found Williams’ examples really interesting, and the importance of being visually consistent in a piece was something that stood out for me. I think that’s something I can struggle with, so it was helpful seeing his examples.
TED talk by princess Zelda. I combined three pictures to make this. I found a picture of Princess Zelda from my Guide book to The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. The graphic are symbols are from the game. The Ted talk stage is from a still of a ted talk. I covered the screen with a graphic which didn’t tilt/line up very well but I tried my best to get it to fit. I don’t really like it but couldn’t find a way to adjust the picture to fit exactly where the screen was. There was another person on the stage which I used the smudge feature to “erase” from the stage and place Princess Zelda over where they were standing. I really liked how that worked because at first I tried to fit my graphic over the person but their hands kept sticking out awkwardly. Smudging the person made it much easier to place a graphic over that didn’t exactly have the same stance. Overall I kind of like how the ted talk turned out because I like TED talks and it would be cool to have one from Princess Zelda.
I really enjoyed the minimalist Star Wars travel posters. I’ve seen similar minimalist artwork a lot and think that these are really well done. I think that the Bespin “Cloud City” and Endor posters are especially beautiful. I think the contrast that Williams discusses work well in these posters, where light text is used against dark backgrounds and vice-versa. It creates a pleasing balance, I think, that directs the eye to the name but doesn’t distract from the vibrant colors in the rest of the poster. I’d like to know what mediums the artist used to create some of the textures in the posters, especially the Endor one.
Alright, so here’s my own project for the week: me trying to figure out photoshop again, and ending up with this by (happy) accident.
I took this picture and was trying to figure out how to improve it - I wanted to try to mess with the focus of it, and make the person in the foreground a little sharper. I came at this whole thing with no tutorial and remembering little to nothing about how to use photoshop. I ended up doing this by using “work paths” instead of (instead of…?) layers, in a way. I selected the person in the foreground and was able to sharpen some aspects of the photo, but had trouble adjusting it so that it would be sharp enough without looking fake. In order to contrast this, I blurred the background more by deselecting that “work path” and then applying my changes to the rest of the photo. I also fooled around with the brightness, contrast, saturation, etc., and ended up making the foreground person black & white because, with the added sharpness and blurred background, he almost looked “photoshopped in,” and I thought that it would be interesting to b&w him to see how much it would stand out. To me it now looks like he actually was just randomly placed in the photo, which I kind of like, because isn’t the exact opposite of the point of photoshop?
Design create: Color splash.
I took this photo of my friend Nick serenading me today and decided to try the color splash trick on it when I was looking through pictures. I was really happy with my ability to figure out how to do this on photoshop! Brian’s instructions were really helpful and it actually went pretty quickly.
In general I like this photo a lot because of the perspective (I took it while sitting on a balcony overlooking the room) and the general composition of the room. Also, it was finally sunny today which also adds to the atmosphere. In black and white/desaturated, the color from the window is really washed out, and it was impossible (for me, at least) to get rid of that, which is the only thing I wish I could change about the photo. In all, though, I think it’s nice - I like that Nick and his colorful shoes and DDR mat are sticking out in the rest of the room.
