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.

For GDES II, this project was both fun and challenging. This assignment called for the creation of a mini adventure, which then we were to make a souvenir with packaging. To me, this project was very challenging. I feel that my work does not fully embody this project. I made my mini adventure for the Zilker Botanical Gardens. I made the design decision to post my instructional design on the pack of the packaging, and then had the buttons (souvenir) placed in the plastic which had symbols to identify significant points in the adventure. For this project, the design decisions that I would highlight are my buttons, and my vectors on the back of the packaging. I made my buttons reflect parts of my adventure that I state within my instructions. My decision to create abstract birds went well with the fact that I have an instruction to only listen to birds that surround you, I didn’t want the person to go searching for birds, therefore I feel that creating them with colors and transparencies gives the birds of sense of mystery.

For the time frame that we had for this project, I feel that I could have created a more concise and well put together piece but with the time given, in order for me to finish, was too short and I was not able to fully have my work embody this project. I spent the majority of my design time on the flower vectors, therefore my over all design was lacking greatly in other areas of this project.

WeatherReport from Danielle Zayas on Vimeo.

This exercise was to see how effectively we could use the L.A.T.C.H structure to design. We were asked to create a weather forecast for the future. The main challenge within this project was to try to seamlessly transition from each structure to the next. The way I tried to accomplish the task at hand was to create structures with simple, but visually appealing transitions. A couple design decisions that I made helped me to achieve a weather report that flowed well.

I decided to use the structures: Location, Time, Category, and Hierarchy. The structures that I feel best embodied this project were my structures for Hierarchy and Time. I feel that the two structures had seamless transitions and also were visually appealing. Also I liked that I chose to use a organic background for the entire project. It felt more consistent and together.

The objective for this assignment was to create instructions to a game that we created, or a variation of a existing game. I chose to use the existing game UNO since it is one of my favorite childhood games. With UNO I always wanted to have strategies or more “special cards” so that the game would be more interesting. With that being said, for this project I created “UNO Screw Up!” it is UNO with a twist. I wanted to make design decisions mainly about the special cards I added to the game. For my cards I had rules that included: Give away, A third eye, the silent spell, and cut!.

For the card “Give away” the player that obtains this card has the ability to give away a card to any player they choose. This allows the cardholder to get a card closer to UNO while also screwing someone over with giving them another card to their pile. For my “silent spell” card this card is played with every player through a game of UNO. Whomever obtains the “silent spell” card can play it at any time and every player has to remain silent for the remainder of the game, if they can last! If not, the player who breaks the silence has to draw four cards.

These are examples of the type of cards I implemented into this game. I had a total of eight special cards, with four of them having multiples of 2. With all the design decisions that I made, including the back story that I gave my game, I am happy with my turn out. I feel that my work enhances the original UNO game with a fun twist and because of that this work does embody this project.

Time 2 DZ from Danielle Zayas on Vimeo.

H-storyboard2 from Danielle Zayas on Vimeo.

Alphabet 2 DZ from Danielle Zayas on Vimeo.

For the LATCH project, LATCH stands for Location, Alphabetical, Time, Category, and Hierarchy. We were asked to create five short films showcasing the way in which each of these LATCH structures would transition in and out of a screen window. My work showcases Time, Hierarchy, and Alphabetical. I lost and tried to re-create Category and Location but was only able to generate the vectors and positioning in which I would have the structures work. My pieces fulfill this project by generating at least three of the five structures, showing both in and out transitions within a five second window. I chose to make design decisions based on the information given.

For Hierarchy, the information that was provided for us only listed each person’s last name and income. After doing my research I put names to faces and then started to design my structures. For instance, in Hierarchy since the information is dealing with billionaires with a yearly salary, I made the design decision to put the faces with the information, and then have the information put into order of highest income salary to lowest income salary, showing this through the scaling of each set of photos and information.

In my other structures that were completed, I designed my alphabetical sequence to be bright and fun. To show alphabetical order in a visually enticing way, I wanted the first letter in the word to be scaled larger then the rest of the word, and then having the rest of the city’s name to be wrapped around the first letter some how. For the design decisions that I made, I was content with this LATCH structure. I felt it fulfilled this assignment with the way I structured my sequence and with the design decisions that I made. I think the pop of colors and the wrapping of the text enhances my piece.

Lastly with Time, the information given was just holidays. From that I created a visual calendar which contained the holidays along with other useful information to help bring this structure together. I decided to put all the months together, showing the days of the month, with a highlighted day to point out a holiday. I chose this process because for a five second video, I was able to incorporate all the information needed in a organized manner. I wanted all of my information to be in a organized manner within a five second video. For this reason my structure for Time effectively fulfills this project alongside the design decisions that I made.

What would you take in a backpack for an adventure? That was the posing question for this project. We needed to gather items that we thought we would need if we went on an adventure, any kind of adventure. Therefore, for this project I gathered my items that I would need, then from there I styled my items in the way that made sense to me. To create this poster, I first took photographs of my items, then isolated them in photoshop. From there I started to position my items so that the layout of everything looked clean and sharp.

I decided to start with my biggest items. I first placed my backpack, then followed with my hoodie and shoes. After I saw how much space my biggest items took, I then styled the rest of my items around the bigger ones. It was much easier to place my smaller items around since I had a few tiny items, my poster ended up looking the way I wanted it to. For this project I do feel that my work fulfills the assignment. I did lack in one area and that is making sure my photos were defined and sharp, not pixelated at a certain point. Though, other than that I am content with this turn out.