Final Presenation

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Bind and Blow Cards

This was done in InDesign.  I did not find it too difficult to do.  The font was just plain Arial, and the lines at the bottom were the hardest part. I kept typing capital "i's" and changing the font size to match the original bind and blow card.  I though doing this card was easy because there was no colors or images to match up with the original, just text.

This was also done in InDesign.  The most difficult part was the "best deal" part with the circle around it.  I used a script type writing for that text, but the arrow was the hardest to figure out. I could not get it to match perfectly, so I eventually drew it as best as I could.  The image background is a zebra image I found online and cropped to only see the pattern. I used the same pattern on each card, to keep it the same.  The pink was a simple magenta, and was not too hard to match up once I figured out how to use the eye drop tool.  I used Myriad Pro for all the text on each card, and the letter code at the bottom is typed in OCR A Std.  The entire card is 5.6 x 4.1 inches, for each different program.

This card was done in PhotoShop, and was probably the most difficult.  Luckily, I did this one first, so the cards were easier.  Layering was a pain, and I kept getting confused and loosing layers. I drew the arrow in this one too, and it took a few tries before it looked OK.  I google image searched the Cosmo logo, so it is an image, not text.   Once I figured out how to link and group layers, to layout was easier to manage.  

The final card I did was done through Quark.  I am not a huge fan of Quark.  For some reason, whenever I drew boxes, they kept getting locked and I could not move them.  The circles were also very difficult to draw.  I ended up having to use text boxes shaped as circles to get them on the card.  I'd have to say my favorite program is InDesign, and Quark comes before Photoshop.  It was very frustrating to have the boxes keep locking, and I never figured out how to unlock them.  I ended up having to delete them and keep trying.  Other than that issue, I did not have much trouble.

Music Soundslide

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I chose to do Jack’s Mannequin for my music PowerPoint because they are my favorite band. I’ve been listening to their music since my friend introduced me to them in high school, and have remained a big fan. I’ve been to one of their concerts, and own both their albums. It is also a band that not too many people know, and I thought the class would enjoy being introduced to them.

The first thing I did was collecting a bunch of images for the slideshow. I gathered a good amount, and saved them in a folder to add to the PowerPoint later. At first, I was using a cursive font, but I eventually decided it was too hard to read. That’s why I switched to Handwriting-Dakota, because I felt as though it matched the theme of their first album, Everything in Transit. I am very happy with my decision, because I got positive feedback from the class when I presented.

For the title slide, I chose a black and white picture of the entire band. I also came up with the idea to crop the band’s name off of their first album through Photoshop, because it looked really cool the way it was flying in the plane. The cropped image did not look good against a white background, so I decided to make the background match the title image. I actually cropped a small corner from the end of the airplane image, and applied it as the background.

The second slide was Jack’s Mannequin facts, and I originally had all the slides with the blue background. I could not find space to put in a picture along with the facts, so I had to change the background to make it more visually appealing. I went into Photoshop and applied a gradient effect. Then I inserted it as a background. The new background made if difficult to read the black font, and I could not find a color that worked. I eventually figured out how to fill in the text box, and I made it 50% transparent. Then I layered each text box on top of each other and custom animated them to ascend in and out automatically.

The third slide had images of Jack’s Mannequin’s albums and a list of all the tracks on them. I could not get both albums to fit on the slide with their tracks, so I had to layer them. I custom animated them to dissolve and ascend in and out as well. This was probably the easiest slide for me, and I did not run into much trouble.

The next slide was the chart, and I had trouble coming up with an initial idea for it. Eventually I decided on a comparison chart. I compared Jack’s Mannequin with The Fray, because they are touring with them this summer. I also compared them to Something Corporate, because the lead singer, Andrew McMahon is the founder of Jack’s Mannequin. The Fray was the only band with any awards. I thought my chart looked pretty boring, so I tired to liven it up by making the album images float in.

The final slide is what I’m the most proud of. It took a very long time to find all the images I wanted to use, and even longer to Photoshop them. Resizing every image and figuring out where to place them was very time consuming, and it felt like I was doing a jigsaw puzzle. I converted some to grayscale, and made the final image with the band’s name a link to their website.

For the audio section, I wanted to use songs that maybe some people would recognize. This is why I chose “Dark Blue” because it was the hit single from their first album. The second song was “Resolution” because it is the first single from their second album, The Glass Passenger. It is also a very powerful song about Andrew McMahon’s survival from lymphoblastic leukemia. Once I got accustomed to Audacity, it was not difficult to combine the thirty second clips from each song to one. All I needed to do was copy and paste the clips, then export them as waves. I think my transition between songs worked well, because it changed right when there is an instrumental break in the first song.

RIIFF Horror Newsletter

Stacy and I worked on this project together, and we decided to split up each side.  She took the front page and I did the back.  I had a section on the Lovecraft Walking tour.  We agreed on using a serif font for the text because it would be easier to read, so we chose Book Antiqua.  We also wanted to use something different for the headlines.  At first we used Papyrus, but it just did not look right. After trying many different fonts, we ended up choosing Lucida Blackletter. The headline of the entire newsletter was supposed to jump off the page so we downloaded a Creepsville font from the internet and bright green. It fits perfectly.  We converted all the images to black and white through photoshop, to create a creepy, old fashioned look.  The only graphic that still has it's color is the banner at the top of the back page, so that it would stand out more.  The format of our newsletter was not much different from our mock-up.  We basically put everything where we said we were going to, and just adjusted colors and fonts.  

Choosing coloring for the news letter was very difficult.  We knew we wanted to use a black background, but we were unsure about the text color.  At first we had yellow text, then purple, then red, but none of them looked right.  After getting some advice from Professor Shiebler, we did a black and gray background.   The gray background had a bit of gradient in it, and  black text.  The black background had white text. It ended up coming out to look really good. We had trouble getting everything to fit on the pages, but once we got everything on there, we adjusted sizes to make it fit.   

Roger Williams Park Zoo Brochure

Stacy and I chose to make a brochure for the Roger Williams Park Zoo, because I went there at the beginning of the school year and had a great time.  I do not think many RWU students know about the zoo, so this would be a good way to get the message out. We went on the park website, and saw that the colors they used were green, yellow, and blue, and decided they fit perfectly.  At first, we just had a solid green background, but Professor Shiebler told us to try out gradient.  We did not want the background to be two different colors, so we added a little white to give it the gradient effect. 

The font on the entire brochure is Papyrus.  I like this font and think it fits in well with the zoo theme.  We got all of our information from the Roger Williams Park Zoo website. 

Stacy did the majority of the InDesign work for the brochure, and I was in charge of finding all the images.  I googled different types of animals and picked out the ones I liked.  I then used Photoshop to resize and crop the images, transferring them to CMYK style.  I originally wanted to make a banner going across the top of brochure with different types of wild animals, but I could not find images that worked.  Instead, I used the black zoo animals on a collage from google.   I used the Photoshop lasso tool to crop them and we placed them in their respective places.  I love the picture with the children looking at the seal, and think it goes nicely with the page it is on.  We had the most trouble with the cartoon image that is in the centerfold of the brochure.  It was hard to fit on the page. We kept on loosing the panda bear's feet and the top of the eagle's head.  Eventually, we got it to fit without stretching, and I'm very happy with the way it came out.

Concert Poster

Deciding how to approach this assignment was very difficult for me. I know I wanted to make Madonna pop off the page, but I had no idea how I was going to do it. I could not think of any other graphics that I would be able to make fit with the poster, so I decided to take up the majority of the space with a large image of Madonna.

When photo shopping the image of Madonna, I wanted to play with the colors. I did not like the way the image looked when I applied different filter effects, so I had to try to alter it in a different way. I used the Brightness/Contrast. I played with them until I found a spot that looked good, and made her stand out and look brighter. Then I used the magnetic lasso tool to crop around her body, which was surprisingly very easy to use. At first, I had the image on a hot pink background with yellow type, but there was something about it that I just did not like. I thought it was too boring and wanted it to be more exciting. I tried to add some fireworks, but they were nearly impossible to crop. Then I had the idea of adding spotlights, and found the image of the blue spotlights online. At first I cropped them, but they just did not look right against the pink background. I decided to make them the entire background, and had to resize the image to be at least 3400x5114 pixels. I had to keep going back to make it bigger and bigger because it would not fill up the entire Quark document. I then layered everything else on top of the spotlights, and was happy with the way it looked.

In my original draft the font was yellow on pink, but I thought it looked better as pink on black. I chose to do all caps with an Impact font, because it seemed to stand out on the page nicely. I wrote the headline at the top above Madonna’s head, and the remaining text at the bottom. I wanted to put the concert information on a slant, so that everything wasn’t the same.

I did not enjoy using Quark for this project. I feel as though Photoshop is more user-friendly. Every time I tried to move something on the page, I ended up moving the spotlight background by mistake. I also had difficulty figuring out how to apply different colors to the text, because there were only about five options on the toolbars. If I had the choice, I would definitely take Photoshop over Quark.

Jack's Mannequin PowerPoint

I chose to do Jack’s Mannequin for my music PowerPoint because they are my favorite band. I’ve been listening to their music since my friend introduced me to them in high school, and have remained a big fan. I’ve been to one of their concerts, and own both their albums. It is also a band that not too many people know, and I thought the class would enjoy being introduced to them.

The first thing I did was collecting a bunch of images for the slideshow. I gathered a good amount, and saved them in a folder to add to the PowerPoint later. At first, I was using a cursive font, but I eventually decided it was too hard to read. That’s why I switched to Handwriting-Dakota, because I felt as though it matched the theme of their first album, Everything in Transit. I am very happy with my decision, because I got positive feedback from the class when I presented.

For the title slide, I chose a black and white picture of the entire band. I also came up with the idea to crop the band’s name off of their first album through Photoshop, because it looked really cool the way it was flying in the plane. The cropped image did not look good against a white background, so I decided to make the background match the title image. I actually cropped a small corner from the end of the airplane image, and applied it as the background.

The second slide was Jack’s Mannequin facts, and I originally had all the slides with the blue background. I could not find space to put in a picture along with the facts, so I had to change the background to make it more visually appealing. I went into Photoshop and applied a gradient effect. Then I inserted it as a background. The new background made if difficult to read the black font, and I could not find a color that worked. I eventually figured out how to fill in the text box, and I made it 50% transparent. Then I layered each text box on top of each other and custom animated them to ascend in and out automatically.

The third slide had images of Jack’s Mannequin’s albums and a list of all the tracks on them. I could not get both albums to fit on the slide with their tracks, so I had to layer them. I custom animated them to dissolve and ascend in and out as well. This was probably the easiest slide for me, and I did not run into much trouble.

The next slide was the chart, and I had trouble coming up with an initial idea for it. Eventually I decided on a comparison chart. I compared Jack’s Mannequin with The Fray, because they are touring with them this summer. I also compared them to Something Corporate, because the lead singer, Andrew McMahon is the founder of Jack’s Mannequin. The Fray was the only band with any awards. I thought my chart looked pretty boring, so I tired to liven it up by making the album images float in.

The final slide is what I’m the most proud of. It took a very long time to find all the images I wanted to use, and even longer to Photoshop them. Resizing every image and figuring out where to place them was very time consuming, and it felt like I was doing a jigsaw puzzle. I converted some to grayscale, and made the final image with the band’s name a link to their website.

For the audio section, I wanted to use songs that maybe some people would recognize. This is why I chose “Dark Blue” because it was the hit single from their first album. The second song was “Resolution” because it is the first single from their second album, The Glass Passenger. It is also a very powerful song about Andrew McMahon’s survival from lymphoblastic leukemia. Once I got accustomed to Audacity, it was not difficult to combine the thirty second clips from each song to one. All I needed to do was copy and paste the clips, then export them as waves. I think my transition between songs worked well, because it changed right when there is an instrumental break in the first song.