From Crappy to Snappy

This week in Visual Design, our assignment was to take a mediocre design and create a new one. I chose to redesign the logo for Brevard Archers, a local archery group whose competitions I frequent. Their current logo is shown below:

It's not terrible, but there are a few problems that I have with it. For one, the eye on the deer looks unnaturally large and cartoony, in contrast too its overly intricate antlers. The target is obscured by these antlers, and it personally took me a while to recognize that the circle and the u-shape were meant to resemble a target. I hoped to fix these issues with a new design:

The new design still has the deer, however it has simplified and the eye removed. I decided to get rid of the target all together and instead have crossing arrows to represent archery. Instead of using the full group name, I went with the initials to emphasize the simplicity of the new logo.

Welcome to London

This month in Visual Design our assignment was to create a simple, 3D map in illustrator of a city of our choice. I chose the City of Westminster in London, as I may be visiting it soon. During the assignment, I learned quick shortcuts to skew items, as well as how to create three dimensional objects. I had to get creative with some of the buildings (namely Big Ben, the London Eye, and Westminster Abbey), as they lacked traditional rooftops. This assignment taught me how to improvise when you are faced with an uncommon problem. The finished result is shown below:

Holiday Project

For the holiday season, our Visual Design instructor had us create a self-directed project. Because of my love for Disney, I decided to create a short animation starring Oswald and Mickey, where they would have a snow ball fight. I had used the Animation window in CS2 before, but this is my first experience with the Timeline feature in CS6. They are very similar, but the Timeline feature has a few more options. It wasn't difficult to switch between the two. Below is the frame-by-frame animation that I created as a gif.

Portfolio Update

In honor of completing the fist half of my Junior year, I've updated my portfolio to include even more pictures. I created a logo to don the front of my portfolio from earlier in the year (And, if you haven't noticed, has the honor of being my favicon for this blog). The colors remain mostly the same, but fonts have changed and text has been added. Below I have included a few pictures from my portfolio: the cover, the about page, and an example page.

Choke Lift

One of our recent projects in Visual Design was to create a simple fight scene in Adobe After Effects within our group. My partner and I decided to create a scene where someone chokes another by lifting them up by the neck. This project taught us how to use KeyLight and how to alter video in After effects. One difficulty we had was making the hand look realistic and not choppy, but we fixed this by manually altering it frame by frame. Below is a frame from our video.

POP!

This week in Visual Design we learned how to create pop art of ourselves in illustrator. I learned how to make a pattern and how to change the style of a stroke. I had some issues figuring out how to make the pattern, since the tutorials were not very clear. After a bit of searching, I figured it out very quickly on my own. This project taught me how to solve a problem on my own as well as some very helpful techniques which I hope to use in the future.

Before:

After:

Don't Feed the Trolls

This week in Visual Design we were given a tutorial on how to create a troll in illustrator. The troll is a play on internet trolls and those from fantasy, as shown below:

In the original tutorial, the phrase "YOU SUCK!" is meant to go over the troll's head, however I was unable to download the font. The project was fun, and I learned a lot about creating brushes and swatches as well as using the transparency window.

- Emily Hazen