Giant Vic

The other day my Mom was telling me that she really likes this image, so I'm posting it for her. It's the first project I ever did in Photoshop. I was for my Introduction to Computer Graphics class, I hadn't even made it to Photoshop 1 yet. Still it's a fun image and I was able to accomplish what I set out to do, which was to

make Victor look like a giant. However if you compare this to the some of the other Photoshop projects I've posted you can see that this was only the beginning.

As always I owe part of the success of this project to my husband and my son. They are both very supportive. Victor is always willing to be my subject. In this project I

used a picture of him that I already had but for others he has posed in very weird positions. When I know I'm going to use it for a project I take my own photos but Bryan is largely responsible for the huge number of older photos that I have to choose from. He also works very hard to make sure I have plenty of time to fuss over every project so It will turn out as good as I can make it.

My Mac

Today I posted a comment on my husband Bryan's blog http://bryus.vox.com and as he pointed out I didn't have an Avatar. Instead of a picture my comments just had the silhouette of a person with a ? in it's head. That's pretty lame. I've been wanting to get some thing else up there but I didn't know what. I knew I didn't want a photo of myself but that's as far as I had gotten. So today I revisited some of my older work and I found this simple picture of my Mac.

Creating the Mac picture was the second assignment I did when I started learning Adobe Illustrator. I actually still think it's pretty good. I also thought the mac would make a great Avatar for me it represents part of who I am, what I enjoy, and the new career I'm building. The picture did need a little tweaking because the width to height proportion was off and since the Mac is white I figured it would show up better on a black background particularly since it was going to be very small. So I used this slightly altered version as my new Avatar.

I'm pretty happy with it. I think it along with my comments will give people a sense of who I am. I'm also pleased to put up an image that I created myself since that is also part of who I am. I the future when I start thinking about doing freelance work I'll create a logo for myself and I'll use that to represent myself everywhere. For now though I think my little Mac will do just fine.

Losing Control

Well recently my relationship with JuJu Stx came to an end. Now that my internship has been over for awhile it seems the owner and I just couldn't agree on how to proceed with our business relationship. We seem to have parted on good terms though, with both of us agreeing that this just wasn't the right time for us to continue. I'm proud of the work I did for JuJu Stx. I think I developed a web site for that better represented there products and there brand identity. I'm glad I had the experience.

Tonight I visited the JuJu Stx site for the first time in several weeks. Quite frankly I wanted to see what changes had been made. I was particularly interested since I have the site listed on this blog as one I designed. I really wish I hadn't looked. I found that my design hadn't been changed (that might be easier on me) but that the work we did isn't being maintained.

One of the huge changes I made to the JuJu Stx site was to give it a cohesive color palette based on there product packaging. Already more colors are being added that just don't work. I know more and more changes will come with time. I also know it isn't really my concern anymore whether those changes are for the better or not. I just can't help cringing when I see it. My point is this, as a new designer it is so hard to let go. It is hard to let some one else take your creation and do whatever they want with it. After working so hard on something and painstakingly working out every detail it is hard to know that you no longer have any control, or even influence, over it.

I guess this is yet another thing we have to learn to deal with as designers. At some point our designs will be altered by others or we will be asked to alter them in ways we don't particularly agree with. I guess it pays to learn no to get so attached your work. However that's much easier said than done. I haven't found a way to detach yet. I hope in the future I'll be able to have passion for my work and still be able to let it go. I'll let you know.

5 words

This is our latest Typography assignment. We had to take 5 words (of our choice) and choose fonts and a layout that conveyed the meaning of those words. I had an idea for this one right away. Music was the first thing that popped into my head. I brainstormed some other ideas but the music theme seemed to work the best. I pick 5 types of music (jazz, rock, metal, country, and classical) to be my words because they all had very different emotions connected to them. It was easy to use fonts to make Metal seem intense, Jazz seem smooth and County feel down home. Then I laid them out like a note to show they where very different but they were all still music.

The black text on the white back ground was my first version of the project. I has pretty happy with it but got to playing around and came up with the white text on the black background. I really liked that one. It was more dramatic and it appealed to me. Bryan liked that one too but I was hesitant about doing it because I didn't think I could reproduce it by hand. So I did a couple drawings of the black on white version and I had some that would be totally acceptable to turn in. Then I figured I might as well try to do the white on black one. I'm happy to say it turned out really well and it's the one I mounted for grading.

During our class I showed both versions of my design. Then Tom (our instructor) took a pole of which one the class liked better. One student and Tom liked the black on white version best and the rest of us preferred the white on black version. It was really interesting to hear people's preferences. I'd love to hear what you think.