Finished web design

This is my finished web design and honestly I am proud of it.  Even thought I do not no the program as well as i would like i feel as thought I have learned a lot in this class about Dreamweaver and using CSS. For my design I tried to use a sense of hierarchy  to the title with the works with the Information. I uses just  two shades of blue to create contrast with the white text. It came along way from what i was expecting.

Research for Bruce Mau

Bruce Mau is a Canadian Designer that was born on October 25th 1959 in Sudbury, Ontario. Mau studied in Ontario College of art and design but did not finish because he went to work for Fifty Fingers design group in 1980. He founded Public Good design and Communications with to others and soon after established his own studios. His studio is called Bruce Mau Design.  He was the creative director for I.D. Magazine for a few years.
 From 1996 to 1999 he was a professor at Rice University School of architecture on Houston. He has also worked at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, California Institute of arts, and Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.  Mau is a member of the Ontario College of art and design, The royal Canadian Academy of Art. He was awarded the Chrysler Award of Design Innovation in 1988 and  in 1999 he was awarded teh Toranto Arts Award for Architechure and Design. He is married to Bisi Williams Mau.

Reading about CSS

From these articles I learned a number of important things. First of all CSS are casading style sheets and these files allow you to organize your website it make it easy to stylies. Internal stylesheets are best used when you have alots of different pages that you want to look differnet.External stylesheets are created in a texteditor and have no HTML. You can go back and edit these pages easily. The last way to create style on your pages is inline stlye sheets. These are the more containing sheets because they dont allow you to have as much freedom. CSS syntax contains three different parts. First the Inheritance which tells you what the properties of the elements will be. The second one is Combining Selectors. This helps you combine within one selector. The last one is Comment tags. These are usefull for when someone else is looking ar your file so they can find things more easily or you can just leave a random comment.

Hand coded resume

This is my hand coded resume it took me a long time but it was relatively easy. I is not very fancy but i took a while making sure the lines were set up right.

This is the resume views in the safari

My first website

This was my first website. It took me a while to get a hang of i think its something I just need more practice on as we go I think ill get better.  But it was cool being able to do it on my own.

This is my final piece mounted. The colors in my final are a lot better then the other prints that I did they are a lot brighter and more vibrant. Im happy with my final piece. I had some struggles with the whiskers on the walrus but it just took me some extra time and it turned out okay. For the vector image I created the title of my magazine. The scanned image was the walrus and for the photograph I actually used a picture taken of the sky as the background with created a nice gradient.

For our final project I did a test print and this was it. Im glad that i chose to do a test print cause it was a lot different from what I was expecting and it gave me a chance to fix things. For example there is a huge line down the side which i could not figure out what it was from but i realized that it was from the photo that i uploaded. The extra few dollars really helped out.

Pictures

Magazine Masthead

After talking with classmate about my magazine i decided that i wanted to go more for a children's interactive magazine. So i changed my intended audience to age 6 through 13. Its for kids in elementary school and middle school and it will be a learning aid as well as a fun activity book. For my Masthead i wanted to create an hand drawn feel for the title. I fell like this will work well with my magazine idea. Im class today i searched different fonts on font squirrel. i found a font that i liked and i decided to recreate it in illustrator. I also am considering trying to create the font using potatoes. (Reference this website) http://potatofonts.com/

Magazine Sketches

These are a few of my sketches and ideas for my magazine. I decided to change my mind about this magazine a little i want my audience to be children and i want this magazine to be interactive. As a child I remember the magazine highlights being interactive with word searches puzzles and articles and activities. I want this magazine to reference that. Its still going to be about nature and the articles are going to teach the kids different things but there is also going to be coloring pages connect the dots making a deer or a mouse. It will be a learning experience and but create a fun environment with is a necessary element of learning anyway.

 

http://www.wildernesscollege.com/building-a-fire-pit.html

I found this website very informational I got a lot of ideas from it about what type of articles could be featured on the cover

Mindmap and Moodboard for magazine project

1. My target audience for this magazine is anywhere from college students to like mid 30s because its going to be an informational magazine with lots of educational things.

2. Mother Nature is the name of my magazine because its about the natural things in life and there beauty and animals and landscapes are a part of nature. This relates to my topic in a funny way because we do not see the term a lot but mother nature is everything around us.

3. My masthead is going to consist of illustrations and text (the title of my magazine) I want to interact them some how but have the illustration be something that changes from issue to issue.

4. On the cover I want to have an image of an animal or bird and a beautiful landscape. I want people to see mother nature as beautiful even thought it may be scary when you are really out in the wild.

5. My sell line will be relating to my main article and it will be about which ever animal I decide to put on the cover it will entice my readers because it will be catchy and informational.

For my magazine I wanted to do something different that i have not done before and I have yet to work with wild life and nature so i gathered a lot of insperational pictures from the wild to create my mood board. It has more of a wild animal feel with the deep colors.

My Mind map took me in a lot of different direction i could not decide on which direction i wanted to do so i chose to do something that i had not had much work on yet. I have do not a project with nature but never with animals.

Exersice

This project was very time consuming but was easily done it taught me alot about the different ways to change photos. I even learned a few new things about photoshop that i didnt know before. It really just shows how much there is to learn about different programs. 

House Project

I really enjoyed this project I learned a lot about how to use google sketch up. It was a good experience learning and teaching ourselves to do use this program. It was surprised at house easy I caught on to it. I had a lot of trouble with the roof but after asking for help it was a simple solution. This was an interesting project to do and I am glad we got the chance to work with it.

Final Seed Packets

This was my final seed packets layed out and mounted. The black background worked to my advantage here because my colors were pastel and it made them pop.  I learned alot about using illustrator in this project that I had not known before.

This was the packet that I constructed for the final and I was impressed with how it turned out i feel like on screen you never know how it is going to look but the final product turned out great.

 

 This is my final project. I beleive it turned out really well After its all cut out and pasted I liked it better that I did on screen.  There is always room for improvement but im hapy with the final project.

Improvements to seed project

After our in class critique I left feeling like there was a lot to change which is exactly what I did. First I started in the background and brightened the background colors cause a few of the comments thought it was to dark and I agreed it was dull. The I focused on the pot and plant. Most of the comments on my sheet were about confusion of composition. I wasn't making it clear about what I wanted these seed packets to do. I took a suggestion about making it seem like that clock was growing out of the plant. I redrew the pot to make it look more round at the bottom. Them I changes the colors to a brighter color. I also tried to give the plant more of a lively feel instead of being so static I made one of the blades of the plant more life like and bending over the pot.

Seed packet First Crit

For out first critique we did a silent one where everyone commented on everyone work and wrote comments about what to improve. I received a lot of great comments from questioning concept to questioning color scheme. These comments made me realize how weak my piece was and left lots of room for improvements.

My mood board consisted of colors fonts and picture that gave me inspiration to create me seed packets. I wanted my packets to grow time so that you could give yourself more time went you needed. I wanted to experiment with more neutral colors. I thought this would give the seed packets an older kinda feel to relate back to time.

Mind Mapping

To start brain storming we created mind maps. These maps consist of anything that we can think of within a short period of time that relate to the project we are doing. Its not something that you are suppose to think its suppose to be easy and its a good way to get you thinking. One of the paths that I took was I started at beauty and then branched off to fashion and people  then from fashion I said design clothing and accessories. This path has potential because I thought I could grow accessories since every girls loves accessories and can never get enough. But they do get expensive so it would be nice if we could just pick them off plants.

Mushroom

Logos

For this assignment i had some difficulty i am not use to remaking logos and it was a challenge. I beleive that I learned alot about me skills and how fast i work on projects by this assignment. i learned a few new things that seem so simple but i never new before for example curving the edged on a line using the pen tool.

Circle Exercise

This circle exercise was a quick easy assignment but was very enjoyable. Compared to all of the assignment that are to come this one was more of a practice. Even thought I already am familiar with Illustrator and knew how to do these things it was a good review of the shortcuts and I even learned something new. I started out with doing a spiral with 10 circle and then I rotated and reflected the first pattern to come up with my final pattern.  I think that this pattern looks like a butterfly.

Video Summary

They videos that I watched on Lynda.com were very educational and I believe them to be very helpful.  The first video Laptops vs. Desktops would be great for someone who is trying to decide between the two. It gives the obvious points that a new computer buyer would look over. The second video about the five things that work in all applications even surprised me. Even thought I knew what all of these options were I did not realize that they were in all applications. These are some of the most simple things in all applications but they are definitely the most helpful. This video was great and i would recommend it to anyone interested in learning about computers.