In this assignment, we were supposed to create a metaphorical book cover based on an excerpt from Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. First we had to analyze the story and identify the main idea. My story was about a man going into a restaurant and being repulsed by all the posh adornment. He’s extremely uncomfortable in his borrowed suit jacket and just wants a simple meal from a street vendor. The metaphor I decided on was: Going to a fancy restaurant and wanting a hot dog is wearing sweat pants with a suit. I found a model and dressed him in a suit and sweatpants. We tried different locations including home, a restaurant, and later an office. The office ended up having the greatest contrast between the formality of the suit and the casual nature of the sweat pants. I asked my model to show timid body language in order to reflect how uncomfortable the story’s main character felt in his environment.

Here we were assigned a map of St. Edward’s. Personally, I spend most of my time on campus because of my double major. Much like the coffee shop map, I wanted to map out where I could go on campus for either work or leisure. My choropleth, or informational layer, was where I worked, where I relaxed, or both. Because JBWS ended up being a mix of both, I added a floor breakdown of my productivity.

I made the structure 3D with crooked lines because I wanted to have a fun style. I settled on shades of green for my roads as my base color. I was trying to avoid using white again. I selected pink for work because of it’s intensity, and yellow for leisure because of it’s position on the color wheel near pink and its mellowness. Originally, I did not have the gradient key in the top left. The key was in the subheader with the bolded and colored words “work” and “leisure”. After a few critiques, it was obvious this key wasn’t enough, so I added the gradient key as well. Buildings that I don’t venture into were left very neutral so the choropleth could have extra emphasis.

Logic played a large part in this assigned because we were making language and sometimes avoiding existing language references. Because I had not done an activity like this before, it took some getting used to.
First, we picked out our symbols, three traced, three stylized, and three abstract. The traced and stylized objects had to be somewhat tangible. The abstract seemed to be mostly adjectives.

Next, we spliced together iterations. This was weird. Combining abstract and traced symbols seemed forced because I wanted something realistic, not weird and spliced. It took me until the next round of iterations to realize that I was supposed to go crazy mad scientist and create a new, unique symbol cyborg.

I finally started getting the hang of it, although I felt like my original symbols almost started holding me back because I hadn’t had as much direction when I was first creating them.

Finally, we got to our last iterations. I’m happy with the process. In the end, I learned the basics on how to create a good symbol. My results were appropriate for a sophomore who just started symbol making, I feel that I succeeded in regards to the purpose of the assignment.

A rubric would judge heavily on process. It would be good to measure improvement between iterations. It may also be helpful to judge mastery of the pathfinder tool in Ai by how well the vinyl cutter versions came out.

I would also like to note that many beautiful symbols had strong symmetry. I will try this in the future.

We were given a quote in class and told to imagine we were a character in a world that the quote suggests. From there we were to produce a collection of images that describe the world. My quote was “Space melts like sand running through one’s finger”. I clung to the word “space” and created an alien being that’s being transported across the universe. In the narrative, he wakes up in a ship and observes his surroundings.

I needed to create very bizarre surroundings to match the narrative. I tried many failed methods, but I ended up photographing flour and water on glass. The whole thing was lit from many angles with different colored gel lights. I was trying to create different scenes out of flour that didn’t look like a pile of wet flour.

What was the assignment? For this assignment, we were supposed to pick five typefaces and one character from each. From there, we applied a fill and a transformation to each. I was new with illustrator, so my process was a bit clumsy. This project forced us to use the pathfinder tool, which was a new experience that I’m glad I got to have.

This project was challenging because the fill needed to be dense enough that the letter was legible. Also, we were plotting with a laser cutter using gel pen on black French paper. Pen choices needed to be visible on the paper. I found that dense jelly neons worked best on black paper. The assignment outlined a few types of fills and transformations, and I started by seeing which transformations would best match us visually with which fills. Next, I figured out which transformation best complimented each character. Minor adjustments were made to the fills in order to complement the character best.

grduation speech booklet

In this final assignment, we were instructed to make a pamphlet for a graduation speech. We could only use two fonts, one being a font we designed. The pamphlet could only use black ink. This is the first time we designed with a document grid and a baseline grid. We added one pull-out quote.

This was a group project, so I had to collaborate with Mary Flores and Anna Davies on the design. We ended up concentrating mostly on layout. Margins were made thick because we didn’t want the reader’s thumbs hiding text while holding the book. We decided to use our display front sparingly. We set the title, the pull-out quote, and the first letter of the book in our student-made font, trying not to go overboard on the display face.

This assignment required us to use a classmate’s font to design a series of type specimens. The first poster could only show one character, the second poster had to show the phrase that inspired my typeface, and the third poster had to show the complete character set. The quote was “A shiver in the workshop of the brain”.

I went about creating these specimens by looking at the quote for inspiration. I decided to focus on the words “shiver” and “brain”. Shiver led to two cool colors, purple and light blue. “Brain” led to a peachy pink color. The block way conveying that the quote was cold. It’s huddled in a corner, pressed in, searching for warmth. It wants to heat up. For the single letter poster, my most successful one, I placed with a few letters and settled on W because it stacked well.

This was my very first assignment in my very first graphic design class. We were told to create 26 characters for the uppercase alphabet, 10 numerals and basic punctuation. The design was supposed to be inspired by a quote give to us by the professor, executed in FontStruct. My quote was “the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places”. I began by curating a Pinterest board inspired by my quote to figure out the style that I was going for. Next, I designed the H, O, M, R, and A in order to develop a cohesive structure. From there I used the basic forms to make all other characters. FontStruct was very limiting, so I worked very zoomed in to really customize the details. Because of this process, this font is best used as a display face. The font specimen was supposed to use 2-3 colors and basic shapes only. Again, I drew inspiration from the quote to create a moon-like scene to hold my font.