In continuation of the “location:animated gifs”, in GDES III, we were to decide if whether or not we wanted to see our gif concept through to book form. For me, I didn’t feel confident about the overgrowth vegetation, and a theme that I was going to put to it. Therefore I changed my idea about what I wanted my book concept to be. At the time of this project, it was in the ending of October-starting of November, so because of that I had remembered that Austin holds a great Dia de Los Muertos in which the hispanic culture comes together to celebrate their loved ones whom have passed. This is also a holiday that is dear to me, since I am a Mexican-American woman, I celebrate this festival at home with my family.

Therefore, I thought that this would be a great opportunity to showcase the holiday, and to put out a book about this magnificent holiday, so that people who are unfamiliar with the traditions, could read all about them. For my book, I really wanted to showcase what this holiday has to offer, in bright detailed HD photos. I wanted minimal text to contrast with a large eye-catching image next to it. I also wanted the images to take up almost the entire landscape of my book, crossing over unto the next page. In conjunction with the images and text, I wanted to add illustrations of my own into the mix. I thought it would be a nice balance of having the different medias together. I illustrated the book cover, inside pages, and skull vectors that are seen throughout the book. The sugar skull is an art form that I am fascinated with, and also paint in my free time. This was one of my favorite projects because I enjoyed everything from my concept, to the process, to the result of my book. The one aspect that allowed me to really push my own design was the fact that we were given full autonomy over our design decisions. Having no strict guidelines with this project, really let me experiment and have fun creating a book. In the end, I also printed and bound my book on paper I purchased and printed them on my own.

In Advanced Typography, we were given a heavy text loaded project, and our objective was to create a program booklet with the information given, just in block text. We had to dissect and put group together the information in the right areas of the booklet. There were multiple sections to take care of, including: a schedule, biographies of speakers, an extended schedule for attendees, and a complete list of personal that attended the event. We were also suppose to come up with a theme that could be used in the next FulBright conference.

On this project, I do not feel as if I did enough to fully execute my design in this project. I was dealing with technical difficulties with my home computer, which pushed back my time frame significantly. I wanted a theme that was about bridging gaps and connecting more people together through the FulBright experience. I was going to use a theme of transparency over laid in different colors. to show a connecting between things (literally) I didn’t spend enough time on the attendees list or biographies to show more of my design decisions for this project. I would like to go back and make changes to this project, for personal growth and satisfaction.

In GDES III we had a project that dealt with a specific neighborhood. The neighborhood that we were working with was Cesar Chavez. In our assignment we were to create gifs based off of what we had seen on our walks that we had taken down Cesar Chavez. We were to photograph objects, or places, typography, landscapes, and other categories. After taking photos of various subjects, we were to focus in one on thing and create gifs. On my walks I saw a lot of over grown vegetation within the neighborhood of Cesar Chavez. My design decisions to show case the overgrowth, were to first showcase the overgrowth in a image based gif (third from the bottom) and then from there I stemmed into creating how I perceived the overgrowth in the neighborhood.

I saw the overgrowth as something that took over the neighborhood and made it it’s home, in which the residents do not mind it’s presence, and some even incorporate the growth into their front lawn landscaping. For me, I thought it was fascinating to see a neighborhood that was completely taken over with vegetation and the people who live there, living in harmony. Though, as I had this idea for my animated gifs, I ended up changing my mind on following through with this idea, into the book project part of this project. For my illustrated gifs, I wanted to showcase a house that has incorporated the vegetation into their front decor, and then a gif that shows how some houses have vegetation that has completely taken over the house, and remains undisturbed.

For this project in GDES II, our class had to collaborate with each other to come up with a team name that would suit each partner, and then we had our uniquely designed team names screen printed onto t-shirts. Looking back at this project, I personally enjoyed this project quite a bit. I found it fun to have autonomy over more of our own design decisions that we felt would suit this project, instead of following strict guidelines. The design decisions that were put into this project were 50/50 between me and my partner. My partner and I came up with “Atrocious Monsters” while drawing inspiration from Dr. Seuss. We were to embody a ferocious and dominating monster that would win at any game, because we would be undefeated. My partner and I decided to split the work with designing the name, my partner rendered the name “monsters” while I rendered “Atrocious”.

Later we came together to see how our renditions looked together, and the name embodied a monster to be afraid of. After we finalized our design, we were to choose one color of ink, and one color of shirt to have our designs printed on. My partner and I decided to use a dark, almost sky blue color because we both had the similar taste for blue and it seemed fierce against the stark black t-shirt we chose to print on. The design decision that I would highlight on in this project is how both my partner and I were able to execute a scary but playful team name, for being monsters.

In GDES II, this was by far my favorite project, particularly because of the place that I had chosen to shoot at. For this project, we were to take a high performing video camera that could shoot HD, and we were to go and record footage at a location that we chose, based off of our previous project for our mementos (packaged buttons) I chose one of my peer’s location, which was The Great OutDoors (garden and nursery) This little gem is located right across the street from St. Edward’s campus and provides everything one needs to start a fantastic garden. In our videos we were to capture the essence of the location, so that the viewer could really get a feel for the location being showcased.

The design decision that I made consistent through out my video, was to really capture minute details in my shots in HD. At the Great Outdoors there were 2 parrots and a cat that I ran into, I chose to really capture the fine details in the bird’s feathers and features, as well as the cat’s coat. We used premiere to edit and publish our videos. I found it easy to maneuver and I like the turn out of my video.