Text. Image. Message

I really enjoyed this article. It taught me a lot about using text. I somehow always thought that text should just be there kinda thing, but now it can be combined with image and I can play with it to make it more interesting. The ideas of separation, fusion, fragmentation, and inversion helped me make my 3 posters more interesting than it was originally. At first, it was just text and a picture. After I read the article, I changed things around and now I feel like it's not as boring anymore. I love all the methods but for my theme, it seems like some of the ideas would work better than others. For one, I think separation or fusion would be the best choices so that's what I stuck with.

Web Layouts

We are working on our web layouts for our elements and below are my revised layouts since Friday.

Now that I look at them, I think they are better but they are similar compared to one another...

F+S

Found this while I was stumbling. It's so cool and fun.

Click!

F+S

I kinda want this. It seems interesting.

Radium

We are working on "logos" in Type right now using the elements in the periodic table. I was assigned radium, an radioactive substance that can't even be handled because it is a million times more active than uranium (awesome, I know). The symbol for it is Ra and I started by picking heavy, bold fonts because radium is pretty hardcore and then trying to combine R and a into a successful composition. We had to make 30 sketches, which by the time I had 15, I was stuck. Anyways, apparently I had some really good ones and below are the three that the class chose, in which I made five different iterations of each one.

I really like the fourth and the fifth of the first row, the third one of the second row, and the second and fourth of the third row. They were really fun to make, besides the bottom row since it was a bit harder to have to cut a stroke out of the A and the scissor tool wouldn't work on it nor could I get the knife tool to work properly.

Kings and Kingdoms

So we are done with our third project. Below are my compositions, images, sequences, and animation. I used to letter k along with the font Arno and Avenir.

These are the best two compositions with images applied to them:

All of my images:
I did so many sequences but these are my final and probably my best ones:
And then my animation using flash. I don't know what happened but the pictures have cuts in them even when I export them as an animation and mpeg-4 at the best quality. It looks fine when it's an .swf file though. Eitherway, imagine it doesn't have any cuts. :D

Yup. I loved doing this project because I learned a lot more about Illustrator and especially Flash. K was a hard letter to do since there are only so many pairs that can go along with each other. I think I chose a fairly successful pair, considering I made other pairs that weren't as good.

K's

So I decided to do K's (which Michael didn't seem too happy about >.>) and here are some of my words that I have chosen.

kangaroo

kite

kiss

kid

knight

king

kiwi

kickball

keyboard

knit

knife

key

koala

knee

knot

kidney

kennel

kaleidoscope (I'm totally going to do this one...I just have to find a pair with it)

kettle

kitchen

kitten

kit

knob

kanji

kelp

kiln

Yup. I really really really want to do kaleidoscope, so as for pairs, I'm thinking that with kite. Otherwise, knight and king works as well. Or kennel and kiln. This is still in the process of thinking. So more words and/or pairs might come later. Maybe even some images.

Final Statement

So the whole dot process was pretty stressful. I started off with the theme of "family" and I wanted to do something that defined what family is to different people. I use the term family loosely because I consider my closest friends as family, and I would like to believe that others think like this as well. From there, I chose 9 words to describe family, 5 good and 4 bad. I set up my book every other page, starting with a good, followed by a bad, etc. I felt like this way, the viewers can see that everything good comes with a bad, and vice versa. I chose to stick with colors and textures since these words were very open and there wasn't just one thing that can explain the meanings. So with the colors, I chose colors that went along with the feelings they convey. For example, I used red with fury because red conveys excitement and energy and yellow for neglect because it conveys betrayal and deceit. As for the textures, it was based on the word itself, like what is support. It could be anything really, from trees to metal to rocks and so forth. So that was how I approached textures and colors. In general, I think the book flows well. The last page is impenetrable, which I chose gray as the color. It seems like a really dull color since all the other were bright colors, but gray means security and reliability and I thought that was really deep for family and a good note to end with.

I definitely learned a lot during this whole project. I learned how to convey a word clearly using just dots. Which was hard, especially for "intact". You wouldn't think it was hard, but it was my toughest word probably. As for type, I really like having to print, cut, and paste each word/letter. It was way easier than if I was to do it in a program. And plus, I got to learn how to use the Konica. Craft wise, I could definitely improve. I got some circle cutters but for the circles that I had to cut by hand, they look so bad. And my pages aren't even. Yes. There's still a lot to learn and this was a good 1st project to start with.

Final Words

My title for this book is going to be somewhere along the line of "Good and Bad Characteristics of 'Family'." Except maybe something different. That's where I'm headed though, and it's a good start I think. So I'm splitting my words into 2 different groups. The good characters are going to be dependable or support, reverence, adoration, reliance, and impenetrable. I'm debating between dependable, support, and reliance since they seem to be the same idea. So I'm thinking of using one of those 3 and then intact perhaps? And then for my bad characteristics, it's going to be fury, hostile, suppress, and sorrow perhaps. I'm pretty positive with most of them, but some are still iffy. Maybe once I start thumbnails, it will come. So any comments or input would be awesome right now.

Overdue W's

I am so behind with my blogging for Type I, so here's a crash view of the first 2 projects. At first, we were given a letter in 5 different fonts and we had to enlarge them onto butcher paper. The following 2 pictures are of my 3 w's.

My favorite one out of all of these would probably be the 2nd one, with the black w on painted outlines of the same font. It was originally something else that was super boring (it was actually my first one), but when I made my charcoal one, the first idea seemed really dull. So I cut up the first one and created that one, which I really like. The following 2 pictures are, I guess, Project 1 redefined. We had to create 2 more drawings but with the anatomy of the letter on it.

I actually really like both of them. The first one, I was just drawing without measuring so there were a lot of lines and I liked the look so I just traced them. The second one isn't so bad either, but I wished I had written on the labels instead of pasting them on. I was going to do it with charcoal as well but I couldn't figure out a way that I would like. Guess I should've thought harder. >.>