The Process of Thumbnailing

This activity focuses on the importance of thumbnailing as a technique for testing design ideas on a smaller and quicker scale.For this exercise we were asked to draw a banana in 49 thumbnails and choose what we considered to be the most effective solution.

After drawing all my thumbnails, even though pacman was my favourite. I found this image jumped out at me the most and included a larger amount of elements and principles of design which I like.

Grids, Layouts and Flow

This activity is an introduction to the invisible grids used within designs to allow objects to have some association with each other.

Part A - Find two examples of layouts, one that doesn't appear to follow a grid and another that does. Explain why you think they have/have not used a grid.

I believe a grid has been used for this layout due to the clearly visible columns. you can especially see it on the bottom left corner where the picture has been cropped on the side to fit the grid.

After playing with a ruler on this page, the only evidence I found of a grid was down the right hand side; however that did not repeat throughout the rest of the page. This brings me to the conclusion that this layout does not contain a grid.



Part B - Find two magazine layouts that appear to contain grids and indicate where you think the grids are.

Elements Of Design

This activity was all about the elements and principles of design and how to use them effectively to help communicate ideas within your design.

Sketch some still life objects using a frame to crop the scene and focus the mind on the shapes inside the frame.

 

Find an example from a magazine that incorporates design elements and principles. Use a pen to show what they are.

Using Indesign, create a mini booklet comprising of  the elements and principles of design.

Use Photoshop to create a texture using the gradient tool and a filter. I chose the texterizer filter for this exercise.

File Structure

This activity was about file structure however, as part of it we had to put together a flyer using Adobe Indesign. So I thought I'd pop it up here as well.

Colour Fundementals

This activity was the most fascinating activity of this course to date! I love colour and the way it can effect you without you even knowing.

Part 1 Colour squares - collect a spectrum of coloured paper. I gathered mine in a hardware store.

Part 2 Colour associations - write the words you associate with different colours using a range of tones and shades.

Part 3 Colour wheel -  Add colour to a colour wheel using Adobe Illustrator.

Part 4 Colour wheel and schemes - make a colour wheel using the coloured paper collected previously, identify the primary, secondary and tertiary colours and use more of the coloured paper to create colour schemes.

Part 5 Create a colour collage - Use Illustrator and numbers to create a collage using one of the colour schemes.

Part 6 Colour associations 'Australia' - find colour schemes that reflect Australia and make a mood board. Also, make a mood board that uses the colours that reflect your life.

Part 7 Colour branding - collect an range of logos including what you think they are trying to communicate through colour.

Part 8 effective limited use of colour - a look at illustrations using limited colour and how effective they can be. 

Part 9 Colour research - research colour document to held understand colour use.

Here is the link to my research document. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByN7lShSXn_sd3A5N2psck1NbDg/edit?usp=sharing

Positive and Negative Form

For this activity we were asked to complete two parts. 

Part A: Draw the negative space using three of the words provided. I chose Jaws, Ghost and Ice Cream Cone.

Part B: Find examples or whitespace used effectively.

Billboard

There is a lot of white space used on this billboard. I find it quite effective. The eye is immediately drawn to the product being advertised.

Magazine

Very effective magazines cover. I like that it’s not crowded with other stories and the colour of the text used looks great.

Website

I love the colours used in this website. It’s warm and rich like coffee. Because of the white space around the stories, your eyes are drawn to read them but I found I took in the picture as a whole as well.

Movie Cover

I read somewhere that white space particularly with light blue was deliberately used for movies such as The Notebook as it appeals to the romantic side particularly with women. 

Design Industry Learning Activities

For these learning activities we were asked to research and share our knowledge on giving constructive feedback, finding trends in the design industry, ethical and legal work practices in the design industry and look at positions vacant and relevant skills for Pre-press Operators and Junior Graphic Designers. We also had to include links to relevant and helpful websites.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByN7lShSXn_saU5STDRZdGcwLTA/edit?usp=sharing

Black Squares

For this activity we were asked to communicate meaning using shape and space. We needed to use black squares to express the meaning of the six provided words. We were then asked to find examples of the words in magazine advertisements or business cards.

Black Squares

Order

Increase

Bold

Congested

Tension

Playful

Typographic Portrait

For this assignment, we were asked to write our name using a font style that would suit the description given. I had a lot of fun doing this one.

Inspirations

For this activity we were asked to unload to our blog, five things that inspire us.

My sister Shannon

Shannon and I have always been very close. Many a day in our childhood was spent making clothes for our toys or drawing together. It's nice to have someone to bounce ideas off and she is always able to point me in the right direction creatively and help me when I'm lacking confidence in my work.

Gaudi

Gaudi is by far my favourite architect. His buildings are like they are from another world or a dream. He has always been an inspiration of mine and I have previously taken elements from his work to use in my designs.

The Sky

The sky is one of the most beautiful natural canvases we have. I remember many summer days, as I'm sure many people can, laying on the grass staring up at the sky finding pictures in the cloud formations. Now I mainly enjoy watching the beautiful sunsets form my deck with glass of wine in hand marveling at the incredible colour palate nature has provided.

Fabric

Fabric is one of my favourite things in the world. I love nothing better then browsing fabric stores and looking at all the colours and patterns, running my hands over them and envisioning what I would make out of it.

This Sketch

For some reason I have been fascinated with this sketch ever since I saw in in an art magazine many years ago. It's just a simple charcoal sketch by Japanese makeup artist Shu Uemura, but  has inspired my to try my hand at charcoal drawing.

Prepress Research

For this activity, we were asked to watch a video and answer questions, research two printing methods for a magazine, make a word search using provided prepress terms, collect six examples using printing processes and make a glossary of prepress terms.
This one took me forever...https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByN7lShSXn_sYUpycXk0ZHBaRVk/edit?usp=sharing

How to use a scanner

For this exercise, we were asked to create a word based document including a range of images scanned using line art and greyscale with different dpi settings. We also had to include an evaluation on the quality and file size.

Conclusion: I found the line art or black and white setting on my canon MG6200 scanner to be great when used on a higher dpi for black and white images. The file size is not particularly large either. The serviette drawing came out really well and i was surprised the file size was so low for a 1200 dpi scan. The greyscale image doesn’t have very good definition for the 75 dpi scan (my scanners lowest resolution). The file size difference between the 300dpi and 1200 dpi was huge; however at such a small image size there doesn’t seem to be that much difference in quality.