In the first week of this course, we were tasked with creating an illustrated icon of our faces. The strokes used to illustrate this icon had to adhere to one width, and the background image had to be a circle filled with a colour that best represents us. Upon starting this task, I wasn’t very experienced in Adobe Illustrator. So, I used all the resources available to me through this course to become more comfortable with the software. My first iteration of this design was based on a green background, as green is my favourite colour. After further consideration, for my final design, I decided to use a yellow and orange gradient to represent the energy I aspire to exude in my everyday life. In terms of stroke width, I received feedback about changing all strokes in the icon to one width, even if it meant leaving out minor details. So, for my final iteration, I made sure to make all strokes of equal size. By the end of this task, I felt more confident with using basic controls on Illustrator and felt set up for the next task.
In the second week of this course, we were tasked with creating a logo for a tech startup company from New Zealand (based in Australia) called ‘WAVE’. This company aims to connect local independent music artists to a wider audience. The client is drawn to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture but is unsure of how to correctly incorporate it into a design. They seek to channel an ‘Australian vibe’, through incorporating Australian flora and fauna. When researching for this project, I decided to explore the concept of sound waves travelling through water as I felt this worked nicely with the brief. I steered away from using any Aboriginal motifs as I did not have consent from any custodians of the land in Australia. The feedback I received in regards to my initial iteration included avoiding tracing images from the internet to avoid copyright issues and working with an undulating effect for the ripples in the logo as well the name of the company. My final design took all parts of the feedback on board, and as the project progressed I gained confidence in Illustrator (particularly with the direct selection, text, pen, and brush tool), and was able to produce a clean outcome that adheres to the brief.
In the third week of this course, we were tasked with creating an A5 poster for an open studio community event for the furniture company ‘Hello Furniture Co.’. The client had provided an example of what they wanted the poster to look like but wanted their own unique twist on it. The client also hadn't paid a licensing fee and didn’t have permission to use any of the intellectual property displayed in the inspiration work. In the first iteration of this design, I used Illustrator to illustrate my own hero image (a large lamp spotlight and couch). At this point, I wasn’t completely confident in Indesign, so I used all the resources available to me through this course to become more comfortable with the software. On Indesign, I then, according to my chosen grid, applied text in both a sans serif and a handwritten, rough-looking font. I chose to position the handwritten font vertically to emulate the feel of a handmade poster. However, the feedback I received encouraged me to position this text horizontally for easier reading. Other feedback I received included considering hierarchy and reconsidering fonts. So, for my final design, I changed the rough handwritten font to a sans serif and played with hierarchy by making subtexts bigger and the title bolder. By the time the project was finished, I was a lot more confident in Indesign and Illustrator and felt comfortable with their controls.
In the fourth week of this course, we were tasked with creating an A1 political poster. We were to conceptualise, design and print a poster that encapsulated a theme that was important to us. The theme I decided on was the overuse of cellular devices in our everyday lives. On a sheet of paper, I hand drew icons that represented a group of people staring at their phones, and one person without a phone. I then scanned these icons and arranged them in Photoshop to put them in Illustrator. I did this to keep the gritty, handmade feel of the drawings. I then chose a bold sans serif font to write the main text (Forgetting Something?) in black underneath the icons. When refining this design, the feedback I received included refining the drawings to make them more professional looking, adding a background colour, and adding more context to the page (maybe as a subtext). So for my final design, I redrew the icons and repeated the process of scanning and arranging them. I also added a yellowish-green background colour to evoke an uneasy feeling in the viewer. I also decided to not add a subtext to my final design as I did quite like the crypticness of the poster. Ultimately, this project greatly aided my confidence in both Indesign and Photoshop and set me up nicely for projects to come.
In the fifth week of this course, we were tasked with conceptualising and designing a surreal, composite image from images in an Unsplash album. The outcome had to look relatively believable, with attention being paid to perspective, scale and shadows. I decided to use two images. A piano in a forest in the background and a horse playing an accordion. Colour In Photoshop, I used the magic wand tool and quick selection tool to remove the backgrounds of the horse image, the move and transform tool to scale the image, and image adjustments to make sure that the lighting and colours matched up with each other. The feedback I received encouraged me to add another layer to the image, so I repeated the above process with an image of an elderly couple pointing. This project was very beneficial to me as it taught me different keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop that I had not known about.
In the sixth week of this course, we were tasked with redesigning a document (The Gender Pay Gap by Age Group, June 2022). Through redesigning this document, the outcome should increase readability and ultimately expand the reader audience. Firstly, I used ChatGPT to summarise the text in a way that brought forward the key points. Then, in my first iteration, I used the proposed grid in Indesign and laid out the information in a way that would make me want to read it. The feedback I received from this first iteration included using left align rather than justify for text, fixing overset text, adding a ChatGPT use statement, changing the layout of the first page in a way that highlights the hero image and makes the title and intro fast-reading, and to add colour to the document. I incorporated all of this feedback into my final design except for the colour, as I felt the negative space improved the readability of the text. This project definitely gave me confidence in Indesign and set me up very well for future Indesign projects.
In the seventh week of this course, we were tasked with creating an image library for a perfume brand that uses unconventional ingredients in its products. The library was to include a minimum of 3x photos taken in a light box and a minimum of 3x staged photos. The subjects of the images were to adhere to the purpose of the company by being random, unconventional objects that tend to not go together. The photos I took included a battery, an orange, and glue. I chose seven images to include in my portfolio. The feedback I received on these initial images included lightening the shadows in the styled pictures as they are very harsh, lowering the temperature of the lightbox photos, and removing any imperfections in the fruit. So, for my final images, I used Lightroom to edit according to the feedback and used the clone stamp tool in Photoshop to remove the imperfections in the fruit.
