These Final Photoshop Projects

For our Graphic Design Final, we photoshopped some pictures for school spirit. These took multiple days, but they were quite fun to be honest. Some of the tools were new and hard, like the clone stamp, but I still managed to finish *sweat drop*.

Project 1

Here is the first! It was the easiest for me. All it involved was cropping a picture of our school and adding a picture and text as an overlay.

Project 2

Like I said, the clone stamp tool (which I used for the fluttering effect) was a bit of a challenge. Although I liked this other tool that I used to color the butterfly: the magic wand tool. It only took me one day to complete it, and the colorful butterfly is very beautiful.

Project 3

Okay, I will admit that this one was harder that I thought. I don't like the type mask tool, because it is just too diffucult. Just when I think I had it, my teacher pointed out that I spelled: "Norththwest". Then I had to start all over, ugh. My favorite part about this though, was the gradient tool. It's so easy to use, and very pretty.

Project 4

Here is the one I just finished, and I'll admit it was my least favorite. I don't know if you can tell, but I'm not fully sure it was supposed to look like this. The only part I enjoyed was cropping the image, because that was the only part I was sure I was doing right.

That's it. See you after spring break! :)

Quarter Three Final: Another Website

Wow, there's only a quarter left of school until I'm a sophomore! Time is flying, and we were given a web design project for our final. Unlike last time, when we wrote about ourselves, this time we wrote about Invasive Species. Most of the project was easy, because we watched instructional videos on how this is done. The only struggle I had was when I was trying to rename all 6 pages. It somehow completely messed up the html and I had to start from an entire video previously. Lesson: ALWAYS SAVE BEFORE YOU DO SOMETHING YOU'RE NOT SURE IS GOING TO WORK! You always have to pay attention to the html too. If you type in a semi-colon instead of a colon, it's going to get confused and not do what you wanted it to do. Well, I bet you guys are all excited to see what this website looks like. So here are 3 screenshots I took.

The Home Page

So as you can see, this just introduces the website. We had a word doc to copy and paste from, so everyone's home page says the same things. We also embedded a video from YouTube for each page. To do that, you get the embed code by right clicking the video and selecting "Copy Embed Code". Then you paste it into your html code where you want it. The links at the bottom our the sources for what is said.

Asian Carp

This is one of the invasive species. You may have seen videos of these fish flying out of the water and hitting something of someone (Ouch!). The logo remains at the top, but instead of the larger logo, we put an uncopyrighted image of the species. The headings are "About", "Impacts", and "What Can Be Done". These are self-explanatory on what they describe.

Emerald Ash Borer

This is another one. They are known for digging into the trunk of ash trees and killing them.

The other three invasive species are Zebra Mussels, Purple Loosestrife, and Africanized Bees (also known as Killer Bees). These are all in the state of Kansas, brought from other countries across the world. Because of their lack of adapting, they do these crazy things.

Anatomy of Type

Anatomy of Type

Well, here is my name, except of course it's not the way your used to seeing it. Perhaps this reminds you of the handwriting guides in kindergarten. Each of these lines represent a different part of the letters. My name does not have much variety with this, as it does not have a descender and it was hard to find a font to make an ascender. Well, at least this font somewhat fits me...
And that's what I'll tell you about today: fonts. Why isn't there just one universal font that is used in everything from books to billboards? 1: That would be very boring. 2: Like color, fonts have hidden personalities. If people use the wrong fonts all the time, life would be a nightmare. Think about this: You go get a job application for something very professional, like a lawyer. But the entire application is printed in Comic Sans *gasp*. Everyone in the room is now wearing clown noses, party hats, and too much makeup. You are embarrassed as they laugh hysterically at you for no particular reason.
Yes, that is an over-exaggeration. Still, you would think the paper is stupid, because Comic Sans isn't a professional font. So don't fill out an application written in it, because your employers are proving themselves to be...well, stupid.
So this moral: Pay attention to what fonts are saying and choose the right ones for the right things.

Color!

In my last post, I talked a little bit about about colors and their meanings. But this post will be fully about what I know. This week we learned all about it. What I didn't know is that all colors have a good and a bad interpretation, including white and black.

What I mean:

Red: Good is confidence and power, bad is war and violence.
You can look up the rest of the color meanings if you want, but that's about it. These are used in advertising all the time to convey a message from the company to the person. All of us can admit that we imagine color to have "personalities".

What is this?

It is a color wheel. Everyone who is an art student is familiar with this. Red, yellow, and blue are the primary colors. If you mix two of those together, you get one of the secondary colors: Green, Orange, and Violet.  If you mix a primary color with a secondary color, you get a color like blue-green or red-orange.

So yeah, I hope you find this at least a tiny bit interesting, or at least learned something.

Batman Logo (I tried)

Well, this is a little embarrassing...It's quite a story. I made a few rough lines, tried to fix it with the paintbrush tool (big mistake, I'm not an artist), made around thirty anchors, deleted them all, remade the bat in the logo, but in the end I couldn't color it because the entire thing went black. Well, at least I could get the shape somewhat accurate. Usually video tutorials work for me, but next time I should try to find a written one. This video isn't bad though, I just need to use a written tutorial for things like this. Well, I could've started over from scratch, but I was running out of time. At least I tried my best.

I'm in Graphic Design Now

Hello everybody! Winter break is over, it was good, but now I'm in Graphic Design. It's not as uninteresting as I thought it would be. One of the thing we learned so far is the use of color as symbolism. Ex: Red can represent violence and war, or love and passion. Really, that is useful for film and animation. I have yet to decide if this class is fun for me though.

Anywho, our first project involves color. So we searched the internet for our favorite book/movie/etcetera posters and covers. We can also choose pictures that just interest us. Here they are:

Les Miserables (2012)

Well, if you looked at my "about me" page, you know that I am a fan of this story. The characters on the cover are sized to how important they are. Valjean is the protagonist, Javert is antagonist, Fantine is tritagonist, Cosette and Marius are major characters. But when it comes to color, there is also some symbolism. For those of you who have seen this, you know the students sing about "a new tomorrow" all the time. "Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise." -Victor Hugo. You see the sunrise at the bottom and the night at the top. Well, we see the students and the barricade in the sunrise. So, you get the point. I'm listening to the soundtrack while typing this, so you can tell I'm a huge mizzie.

But now, onto the next cover!

The Demon King by Cinda Willams Chima

This is the most recent book I finished reading, and I enjoyed it. Briefly, it's about a boy who steals an amulet, and his life changes forever. The amulet is, obviously, on the cover. The color of it is green, which can be associated with greed (he stole it from a character who was greedy). The cover is mostly brown, with can show regret. The protagonist does many things he later regrets. I'm not going to give examples for the sake of spoilers, but let's just say that at the end of the novel, he regrets everything for a lot of reasons. You can see fog over the hills at the bottom. Fog is used in movies to so suspense. I think this is for advertising, to show that it is a page-turner.

And finally, on to our last example of graphic design.

This picture

This is called typography. It is pretty much a fancy way to write words. The colors and green and blue. Instead of the green amulet however, this green shows things like renewal and growth, while the blue can symbolize intelligence and wisdom. The green is below the blue. This can say that constant practice will grow your skill of graphic design. Then once your a professional, your a master at it and make lots of money. The words that make up the "G" is for what you'll learn, and they all seem interesting to right-minded people. So if your creative, you'll know you'll like this.

In the end:

All of these made me interested in graphic design now. I think this will be fun, because I'll make stuff somewhat like this.

Final Project: A website

For the final project first semester we created a website with two pages. One was about our bio and elevator pitch, which you can find in the "About Me" page I just created here. Then the other page was our best assignments. I don't have anything for Graphic Design yet (coming 3rd Quarter!), but for my animation, I chose my very first bouncy ball animation, and my horse girl chase video for video. Both can be found in past posts here. So you get the idea. Since this website was made in Adobe Dreamweaver and will never be published to the WWW, here are screenshots so you can see the whole picture.

So, that is my website. What do you all think? I am proud of it, even though I had trouble choosing colors. Well, that's all I'm going to post for a while because winter break is in 3 days! Have a Merry Christmas, and see you in 2016!