Surrealist Design

During this project I preferred Photoshop to Illustrator because of the ease in Photoshop to crop images and create layers on top of one another. Instead of having to put a clipping mask on my images and thus limiting my ability to change the selection afterward I could simple select an area and change or delete that specific area. The overlay feature in Photoshop offers many opportunities to explore. My favorite feature in Photoshop is the history tab which makes it much easier to compare changes. I did not like that pixilation became a factor in Photoshop. I also did not like having to remember to switch layer in order to get the selection I would like. I think that I will find many benefits to using Photoshop. Combining photos will be very easy and placing contrasting objects together will be a breeze. I really like using texture to change photos and think that this will be a key feature in photos I make in the future. 

Graphic Designer - Saul Bass

This poster is a dedication to Saul Bass. He was a graphic designer born in Bronx, New York in 1920. From a young age his artistic abilities were recognized and her received a scholarship to attend art school. He worked for many big name companies but his career as a designer really kicked off when he opened his own studio in LA. Saul Bass is most well known for his movie posters and title sequences. It was said that before Saul Bass the credits at the beginning of the movie were not even shown but once he evolved the title sequence into an art form they became an integrated part of the movie. The big name directors for which he design were Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, and Martin Scorsese. During a brief break from the Hollywood scene Bass made his impact on logo design creating the well known Girl Scouts logo, AT&T globe, and Dixie logo as well as numerous others which are still used today.  

Saul Bass works primarily with text and images. His style includes usually black text on plain background with only one color. It has a very cut and paste feeling to it. The font of the text he uses is very important and often has a very hand written quality to it. Bass uses lots of big bold designs and is fairly simplistic in his designs. He also uses a variety of silhouettes. 

Check out some Saul Bass movie posters here.

I chose Saul Bass because I like his simplicity. He let the title speak for itself while enhancing its meaning through a simple image. The image is just decorative at first but after seeing the movie it represents it actually has very symbolic meaning. I liked the colors he used as well. 

It is important for everyone to learn about Saul Bass because he marked a turning point in design. He opened up an entirely new media for design work as the "Father of Title Sequences." His simple style is the epitome of how you can say a lot with a little. So often people think the more they have the better the work will be but Saul Bass teaches us that having less is a more powerful lesson. His use of font is also notable in complimenting an image well. Saul Bass lacks no talent and knew what people wanted to see. His logos are still used today on our grocery shelves and on television. 

Activism Poster

The assignment for this project was to create a poster for a cause you supported. I am part of Amnesty International and we are currently creating an awareness campaign about human trafficking. My poster depicts a shopping basket and a bar code. The bar code has silhouettes of women who are trapped in between the bars of the barcode. This symbolizes their imprisonment. The basket and barcode are emphasize how slavery is a modern day problem and how for some buying a human is as simple as buying something in the store. This design uses proportion as its primary principle of design. The size difference between the basket and the barcode emphasize the importance of each. Space is the primary element of design because the negative space in between the lines and space create the powerful message I was trying to get across. This poster also has harmony because the basket and barcode are both black and white and both use simple shapes to convey a strong message. When planning my poster I was inspired by the image below which shows how people are still in chains and its a modern and international problem. I wanted to keep my design simple with few words to keep my message strong. 

Photo Credit

Quote Design

The quote design project included picking an inspirational quote from a historical figure and designing a poster to illustrate the message of the quote. Before starting our designs we did preliminary work on the historical figure who was quoted as well as the impact the quote had when it was said. I learned that Gandhi was part of a political movement to make India independent. He took a nonviolent approach and believed in the potential of every person to be good. A basis of the project was typography and a focus was placed on creating clipping masks. In my design I focused on shape and value. Color also played into the design. I took the shapes of the countries and changed their opacity in order to appear as if they were clouds in the sky behind the trees. I  was trying to get across the message that the world is apt to change. Every year the world goes through seasons and living in New England we know how dramatically dissent each season is. The image also shows the sun and the moon symbolizing another change we are all used to. The world can be changed to but some changes do not happen naturally. The picture is balance by having four panels. The emphasis on the quote is made by the contrast between the dark of the picture with the white of the words. I also had unity in my piece by using a font which is organic like the shapes within the pictures. 

Emotion Words

The way that a line is drawn effects the mood of the design. For this project we needed to take four words and convey the emotion of the word through imagery. A line drawn with jagged edges conveys a sense of anger because people associate sharp points with anger. The font and line of design determines the mood because the emotions we feel can be expressed in many ways. For example the lines in lost form  a maze with several beginning and endings. When one is in a maze they are lost and therefore the word lost making a maze adds to the confusion and feeling. A fancy font such as the one used for vain conveys a more sophisticated and higher class feeling than the font used in the background of jealous. This knowledge can be used for future designs such as the quote design because you can get a message across visually with image and not only words. When words are paired with imagery the convey their meaning more strongly. Often we don't take into consideration the connotation of each word we encounter but when the emotion of that word is visually displayed we are forced to accept its true meaning.

FRESH Logo

 For Electronic Design class our class assignment was to design a logo for a company which encompassed the companies message while utilizing negative space. The company which I chose to design a logo for was FRESH. FRESH (Family Related Family Solutions for Humanity) is a new non-profit organization working in Northeastern CT. When designing the logo for FRESH, I chose to focus on symbols of community and family. I felt that the strongest symbol for family was a house. I went through a series of design, some including silhouettes and other based primarily on text manipulation. I made this design my own by picking a topic which was personally significant to me. I also used a combination of symbolism and design to create my design. Each design was focused primarily on space and shape. In most of my logos the design was encompassed in an enclosed shape. The shape its self served as the primary message for the logo. Space also was important in my designs in choosing how far apart letters should be and how large the lettering should be compared to the more geometrical shapes. The principle of design which I focused on most was unity. I tried to match crisp, bold lettering with sharp edged shapes, and create more organic lettering for less bold designs.