I really liked The Problem is the Problem album cover. The reason why I chose this one was that I liked the title. The problem is the problem which to me is a little philosophical. People make things out to be much bigger than they are usually the problem is something very specific that then gets expanded upon and grows into something much worse than that specific something. As far as visuals go. The city scape picture is well composed with leading lines and a unique higher up angle. Overall it looks like there could be a filter or some enhancements on it but nothing too obvious. I also like how this is a night picture but that’s mainly because I’m a night owl. 

I really enjoyed perusing the Albums Without Sound blog, which I found to be surprisingly creative and diverse in its creations, especially given that this artist takes their inspiration from random Wikipedia articles. My favorite so far has been the cover for “Mass Flow Rate.” I was first attracted to it because the picture was so beautiful, but I also enjoy the minimalism of the cover, as well as the vertical sans serif typeface. I’ve always been a sucker for any sort of title that follows the line of BOLDED FIRST PART UNBOLDED SECOND PART or some variation thereof, and I think that the artist executed this really well, especially in terms of placing and font color. I think both features complement the picture really well - it showcases the entire picture for the most part, and gives you the information you need in a visually pleasing way without disrupting the landscape behind it. I also like how it lines up with the sun - that’s a really nice feature. I’m not very good at symbolism or anything, but given that the name of the band is “Mass Flow Rate,” I can only connect it to the fact that the background image is water - but again, because this artist also choose the photo at random, it’s up to interpretation.

I’m glad that today’s reading was “The Non-Designer’s Design Book.” I come from zero design background, unless you count at 9th grade “photojournalism” class I took with a teacher that barely graduated from college, so I was happy to be presented with the basic principles of design, which I think will make the projects in the coming weeks, especially the final one, a little easier to take on. 

I especially enjoyed the “Proximity” chapter and examples with the business cards. I see some pretty terrible designs on business cards - in fact, at the restaurant I used to work at that had one of those “enter your business card for a free lunch” raffles didn’t choose cards at random, but based on how nice they looked. The author’s focus on how our eyes react to the layout and design reminded me how important audience reaction is to your design, and how I will need to keep this in mind in the future.

So I finally opened up my old computer and worked on the splash of color project. Wow I forgot how old my computer was. Looking at the screen was weird considering the clarity is so much worse than the new macbook screens. I also forgot how slow the program ran because my computer always had trouble with it and it seemed extra slow. The plus side was that I knew exactly how to produce the effect I wanted for the splash of color I take the magic wand and select the blue area (hair.) I then keep increasing the magic wand tolerance  until most of the blue is selected without it also choosing things that weren’t her hair. Then I take that raster and make it a layer by double clicking and choosing make layer. I let the hair be the layer be on top of the rest of the picture. I then select the picture and turn it black and white. Leaving the hair the only thing in color. I noticed that after switching back to my normal computer I hadn’t noticed that certain portions weren’t selected all the way leaving some random portions gray and the rest blue. For future reference I’ll need to inspect the picture more carefully for flaws because I hadn’t noticed them on my old screen but opening them on my new computer the errors seem abundantly obvious.