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.

Contact Sheet

For this assignment, we needed to find different photos form the Internet and use Adobe Photoshop to alter the pictures. Then we were to put them on a contact sheet via Microsoft Word.  In the beginning, I wanted to try and have all similar pictures, making the contact sheet flow nicely.  I found my six pictures on morguefile.com using the descriptions on blackboard.  There was one with vibrant colors, a few landscapes, a wide angle with a lot going on in it, and a portrait.  I was excited that all my photos were beachy and the colors seemed to flow. However, once I got to class, I learned that not all of my photos were of the correct Resolution.  I was under the impression that all the pictures from morguefile.com were already 1200 dpi, however, some of them were as low as 72 dpi. I was very frustrated to realize that not one of the photos I found the night before would work for the first image.  Luckily, Professor Shiebler has already put a 1200 dpi photo on blackboard. Most of my peers were having the same trouble.

 To put each photo onto the contact sheet, I did the same thing. In order to save the photo correctly, I had to take multiple steps; First, I dragged the photo into Photoshop, and resized it to be 1x1.  At first, I could not resize the photo.  Every time I tried, the image would get distorted. Eventually I realized I needed to click off of the scale image option under image size. Once I resaved the new size, the image showed up on the desktop, instead of just a blank document.  Then I dragged that document from the desktop onto the contact sheet and dropped it in the proper grid box.  It was crucial for all the images to be the same size so the sheet would look right.

I used a monarch butterfly for the Resolution section of the contact sheet. I just dropped the resized image into the 1200 dpi slot.  For the next three boxes, I reduced the Resolution in half.  I did this by going to Image->Image Size.  Then I changed the resolution from 1200 dpi to 600 dpi.  I saved it again, dragged it to the contact sheet, and reduced it twice more, eventually having the last image be 72 dpi.  This image was much blurrier than the 1200 dpi version.  Once I figured out how to save everything, I did not have too much trouble with the Resolution portion.

 For the second row, I needed to find a picture that had a lot of color.  I chose a really cool picture of vibrant surfboards all lined up with a 300 dpi.  I changed the photo to CMYK mode by going through Image->Mode->CMKY. I saved it to the desktop and put it on the contact sheet.  Next I put it in Color RGB mode. I did not see much of a change, except for the colors were a little bit more vibrant. When doing the duotone, I was confused because I was unable to click on the duotone option.  Eventually I realized I needed to change the photo to grayscale before I could use the duotone effect. Once I did that, I played with different colors and eventually decided on a light red and yellow.

 For the third row, I had to change the orientation. I used a beach landscape with a blue sky and mountains in the background.  For this row I Photoshoped the photo to be a perfect square and then a portrait format.  This part was not difficult, and I cropped the photos to get the right sizes.

 For the fourth row I focused on framing.  I worked with a photo of a wooden deck with white rocking chairs.   I had to crop the photo to the right, then to the left.  Then I had to crop and do a close up.  I chose to zoom in on the wooden panels on the deck.

 The fifth row was titled Content and I chose to use a photo of a hippopotamus.  Again I had to crop the image to the left and the right.  This was more challenging than the framing row because the hippo took up more space in the photo.  When I was cropping, it did not seem like I was making much of a change.  However, once I actually cropped it, it did look different.  The last box was supposed to be abstract, so I chose to zoom in on the hippo’s mouth.  This is the thing I am most proud of, because I feel like a really did a good job at making the picture unrecognizable.   

 Finally, I chose to do a photo of Stacy Crain for my Purpose row.  I had a blast using all of the artistic effects, and had trouble deciding which ones to use.  I eventually decided on Fresco, Neon Glow Purple, and Glowing Edges. 

Font Poem

This font poem uses my version of a quote from poet William Blake. I changed his word “mirth” to laughter because I could relate to it better and thought it would be easier for people to understand. I love this quote for two reasons. I like the way it sounds, with the repetition of words. I also agree with what Blake is saying. I love to laugh, have fun, and of course, be happy. I translate this quote to mean that both fun leads to laughter, and laughter leads to happiness. In my opinion, someone’s cannot be happy without being able to let loose, have fun, and enjoy life.

The three main words I wanted to focus on in this font poem are laughter, fun, and happiness. I tried to make these three words stand out amongst the others, and catch the viewer’s attention off the bat. I also positioned the words a certain way for a reason. Since the quote is so repetitive, I wanted the similar words to have a mirror effect on each other. That is why I aligned it so that the two laughter’s are in similar positions, as well as better and some of the smaller words.

The word laughter is designed to contain some humor. I used a font called giddy up std make it look different from the other words. I also wanted it to jump off the page, so I applied yellow cover overlay to the hot pink font color. These are both very vibrant colors that stand out and combine with the font to make it look unique.

For the word better I used Copperplate Gothic Bold to make it look powerful. Better is a very strong word, and the red text with an outer glow effect seems to give it that powerful feel.

When photo shopping the word fun I decided to have fun with it. I played with many different effects and texts until I found the right one. I used Marker Felt text to make it look immature. Then I used a Nebula Texture style to give it the combination of colors inside the letters. I added a hot pink outer glow to make it stand out against the black background. I like the way it turned out and think it looks wild and fun.

In my opinion, happiness is the most important word in the font poem. I wanted this to be the word that stood out most on the page, so I used a cursive font instead of print like all the others. The font is called Zapfino and is much different from the other fonts that are all print. I think the font makes it looks fancier compared to all the other simpler fonts. It also has an outer glow and is paired with a light yellow font color. It makes the word jump off the page against the black background. It glows against the black background and is the first thing I notice while looking at the poem.

There are a few other words in the font poem that were not as important as laughter, fun, happiness, or even better. For these words, I used darker colors and applied no effects. I did not want the simpler words to take away form any of the bigger words. The word is appears twice in the font poems, and is green with Nueva std as a font. I have it tilting to the side and close up to the word that it is paired with. Than is a dark purple is in a simple myriad pro font. There is no effect and is placed under better to the right both times. Instead of using the word and I used the symbol & to conserve space. I also think it looks better with the other words, and fits perfectly next to fun and happiness. It is also dark purple to help balance and match the than’s.

I arranged the words so that laughter and better are on the same side of the page, aligned up with each other. I put fun and happiness together onb the right so that they are close and right on top of each other.

I like this quote, and think that the effects and fonts that I added to the words really bring it to life. I made each word unique, trying the bring out the qualities of each word to the screen.