Weekly Reflection: Brochure Design

This is my weekly reflection for the week of April 25th.

I'll be showing you my brochure design for my InDesign composite project. It features my fake company, The Honey Thieves!

Click for a better view!

I wanted a predominantly golden theme. I tried to alternate between two different golden colors for each panel for variety. I included some hexagons. Although they were extremely easy to make, I think they add a lot to the layout and design.

The little hand drawn bee was indeed hand drawn. I used it in a previous assignment (I made a pattern brush with it). I use it here in a similar manner. It makes for a cute yet simplistic decorative border on the inside of the brochure. It adds a bit of flavor to the front and back of the brochure as well.

When choosing images for the inside of the brochure, I wanted images that worked well together. Amazingly, I found three images of different bee products all laid against a nice white background. It's like they were made to be together.

The images of the honey bees and the bee products are not my own. However, I did make the cell soap advertisement in Illustrator for assignment 11 (along with my awesome hand drawn bee).

I tried to keep everything very simple. There's only three colors in the brochure (brown, dark gold, and light gold). I tried to used an easy to read font that was not too stylistic. I want people to think that simple is good - The Honey Thieves want their products to be all natural, no artificial ingredients added. Plus, you don't have to be showy or expensive to have great quality. The Honey Thieves provide high quality products for great prices!

Assignment 17: Brochure Reflection

This Maxim Resources Inc. brochure is a half-fold brochure. It appears to be an oil and gas producing company, as is evidenced by the images and some of the text (which is a little hard to read). This may be an "Answer the Query" type of brochure to answer questions that consumers may have about the company or a "Sales Kit" type used to promote their product.

Line: Explorer Turned Producer

The line shows this company in a positive light rather than a negative light, as oil drilling is not really the most environmentally-friendly activity. 

Their company name is large and visible. They also make it a point to put Maxim Resources Inc. on many sections of this brochure to ensure that the customer remembers the name. I see at least five instances of the name on this side of the brochure. 

I like the color scheme. The many shades of blue are very unifying and calming, perhaps trying to invoke pleasant thoughts about their company and their cause. A warmer color, like red or orange, might elicit a more negative response, so blue was a good choice. The images are okay - there is not really a positive or negative feeling associated with them. Suggestions? They could have shown some industrious workers or teamwork and communication as well to elicit more positive responses. 

I like the use of a separating bar to create distinct "boxes" where they can insert text and images.

Weekly Reflection

Weekly reflection for week of April 18th.

This image won't make sense to most people. I play World of Warcraft and raid with a priest named Sephur. I actually don't even know if he likes me. My guess is no. Just look at him!

Anyway, I used Adobe Photoshop to create this. I used about 6 layers total, one consisted of the preliminary sketch, another with a better sketch, a layer for the outline, and about three layers for color. Some use of the dodge tool, but not much. I handwrote SEPHUR to finish it off. Stared long and hard at a reference image of Sephur. Done with a tablet.

Assignment 16A

SPCA Advertisement

Target Audience: Lonely people, probably older children or adults who are able to care for an animal.

Line: There’s no better friend. Adopt a dog.

Simple yet effective. Might also be considered the tagline in this particular advertisement.

Visual: The visual is emphasized, the text is short and brief (“big visual, small type”). It shows a girl who is clearly saddened (apparently by a sad movie) being comforted by her pet dog (which is handing her a tissue). Both are enjoying a movie snack together. Ad type: slice of life/demonstration?

Body copy: None.

Product shot: If one can consider a dog as the product…

Tagline: Adopt a dog? One could argue that there is no line in this advertisement, just a tagline.

Improvements: I think I would have posed the dog doing something that dogs actually DO for people, rather than have a dog with anthropomorphic characteristics (sitting up, eating ice cream, offering a tissue). I understand that they are emphasizing that dogs are “friends,” but the truth is that dogs aren’t people.

Weekly Reflection: T-Shirt Design

Can we call this my reflection for the week of April 11th? I know I already posted this week...

The Isley-Baerg Entomology Club wanted a t-shirt design. While doing some mundane task, I came up with an idea. What if we had a dung beetle pushing a ball of dung that had the club name in it? BRILLIANT!

So I sat down in front of Photoshop, looked at a reference picture and drew a sketch. The typography is laughable, but it gets better later. I hand drew the letters, give me a break.

Then I gave it a rough outline and slapped some color on it.

 

After submitting this draft to a bunch of graduate students, I noticed that the text wasn't right. It should be curved the OTHER way if we are viewing this from the perspective of the beetle. I later fixed this.

So, I wanted to make this in Illustrator. Using the File > Place feature I inserted the Photoshop draft into Illustrator. I later deleted it since I realized I had to do something new with the text, because I just wasn't feeling it. The draft was okay but definitely not material I would put on a t-shirt (yet).

So, I chose a text that was bold and fat and typed out THE ISLEY-BAERG ENTOMOLOGY CLUB. I used the free transform tool to get the text to look vaguely like a ball.

 

I originally tried (several sad and unsuccessful attempts) to use the Effects > 3D > Extrude and Bevel to make the words three dimensional. Needless to say, it just wasn't going to work; it just wasn't rounded enough to look like it could be on a dung ball.

So, I made the text into a symbol. I planned on mapping the symbol to the face of a 3D sphere. It took me nearly my entire life to figure out how to make a sphere using Effects > 3D > Revolve.

I have left the path intact for you to view. By drawing a half-circle path that curves outward to the RIGHT, you can get a sphere using the Revolve tool. View my first sad attempts below. I got a lot of things that looked like tornadoes.

After making a successful sphere and mapping the text to its surface, I drew a circle behind it (roughened the circle to make it look more poop-like) and adjusted the opacity....

...then I began to trace the letters.

Using different brushes and colors, I achieved a dirty effect.

I also skipped a few steps.

I used my dung beetle from the Photoshop sketch. I placed it into Illustrator via File > Place and used the Live Trace feature to convert the beetle into vector paths. I then used the Live Paint tool to color the sections of the beetle. I added a lighter gray for highlighting.

I also added several tiny brush strokes to the dung ball to make it contrast the text.

Integrating Photoshop and Illustrator

Ways to integrate Photoshop and Illustrator:

You can export Photoshop paths to Illustrator. Photoshop lacks some of the tools which can make dealing with paths easier. The pathfinder window, for example, can merge two separate paths in Illustrator. Doing this in Photoshop is difficult and can be frustrating.

Photoshop files can be dragged and dropped into Illustrator. This can also be done by using the Place feature under File in Illustrator.

A Photoshop file can be Placed as a smart object in Illustrator. Changes that you make to the Photoshop file will appear in Illustrator. However, the Photoshop file must be saved before the changes will update in the Illustrator file.

Work large – it is better to have a project that is large and can be scaled down to print than to design too small and have to enlarge later. For raster-based images, this can result in serious distortion.

Using actions in Photoshop can help save time and reduce human error when applying the same effects/filters/etc. to a batch of images.

Weekly Reflection

This reflection is for the week of April 4th, 2011.

Last Wednesday, I took some images of tracheal mites. In the process of doing so, I noticed one trachea that was particularly packed with mites.

So here's the deal with tracheal mites. They live in the main trachea of honey bee workers, sucking on their blood through the tracheal walls and also mating and reproducing in there. Sometimes it gets crowded. These pests can be very destructive to the worker bees.

Here were the original images:

Using the mighty tablet (and Photoshop), I made three images into one!

Conveniently, there was an air bubble surrounding the trachea on the microscope slide. It acted as nice guide for trimming away the background (it looks like a thick black line around the trachea). The final is a tiff with transparency. Can you see all of those mites?

Here's an image with a mite outside of the trachea, so you can see it more clearly.