Business Card and Postcard

 This is my business card and postcard. We were to create a business card and on the font add a  mask for the text and a picture. For both business cards we were to have our personal logo and basic business information. I chose a view of skyscrapers to my card because arial views are a good picture and have good variety of designs and other things.

Below is my inspiration for the way I decided to design my business cards and my postcard. I got them from Moo.com.

Professional Article Review Graphic Design

Professional Article Review

"There's a method to the madness of breaking rules and pushing boundaries, and it's all for the sake of good design."

Design shouldn't always follow the rules.  In fact, when you bend or break the rules sometimes you come up with a better design.  Three main points to do this are: starting with design history, taking risks, and staying open.  

  Design history is very important. It is very good to stay up to date with the designs and styles that are being used around us. This is important because if we use those techniques and styles then we are more likely to be able to successfully produce a product. Knowing design history also includes learning from designs that have failed and making your own design better.

Taking risks is a necessity to good design. This is because when you take a risk over a certain design or style, you open up more opportunities to either get better and learn or even to start new trends and styles.

Staying open is key. Although you want to keep with the up to date looks, you need to be open about your design to be able to make it your own. If you stay open you can discover many different designs.

Following these key points is very effective in creating good design sense and successful production.

Technical Tutorial

Poly Thing

The object I'm showing how to make is a Polygon Shape that we made in class. I made a second one here, this is not my original. The object of the tutorial is to make a polygon and give it two shadows that bounce off the floor and two walls. Enjoy.

1. Create a simple sphere in the center of the grid in Maya.

2. Create a cylinder that is longer than the sphere and fits inside the sphere like so. 

3. Duplicate the cylinder and rotate it 90 degrees as above.

4. Do this one more time until you have this shape.

5. Once you have that shape, select all the components then click on mesh+boolean+difference.

6. Your shape should look like this.

7. Select the plain tool and create a plain (floor).

8. Make two more for the walls.

9. Color your poly object by click and holding right click and choosing Assign New Material+Blinn and select a color. Do the same for the walls.

10. To create a shadow go to the rendering tab and select the spotlight.

11. Make two spotlights and position them like so.

12. After positioning, click this render button at the top of the screen.

13. This should be the end result and from here you can save your image.

Story Line Blog

This is my story line animation. The scope of the project was to create a story that involve a character walking through at least 3 different scenes. In my particular story the robber goes through 5 different scenes.

My process involved drawing a picture of my character, making a story board for my plot, designing my scenes in photoshop, and then putting a walking character in the scenes through after affects.

The major thing I learned in making this project was not to procrastinate because it will hurt you in the long run. I also learned how to make a flashing light by adding a glow affect to the light layer and having it alternate from on and off.

Something I would've done differently was to not make the walk cycle out of pin tools and instead do the same way as the first character we did. That's because it took much more time to do it the way I did this time rather than last time.

Something I would do the same is how I did the layers in Photoshop because they seemed to work really well and I didn't need to redo anything because of layer problems.

An experience I will draw from this is that I will try to work with more focus and to have fun at the same time. I really enjoyed this project because there weren't any set things we had to create, it was just your own ideas.

These are my sketches for my character and storyboard.

Professional Article Review

        This article was about the description of computer animation, by the illusion of movement between images and objects. It described the 2D and 3D aspects of animation, and the frames and rendering models of certain objects and images.
       
        The author's point is that computer animation is the art of creation and ideas using moving images. His strengths are describing 3D and 2D animation objects by feeling your own kind of designs and ideas. His weaknesses are that he doesn't really have a structure to his article and there's no real argument between each side.
       
        There are a few things in the article that I don't understand. That is probably because we have not gotten that far yet in animation. Also, because this author's work is more professional. Although there are points that I don't understand, I can still apply this information to animation in e-Comm.
       
        I agree with this article because it's intriguing to the viewer to see moving pictures. This article gives helpful information in learning how to use 2D and 3D animation and making your images come to life. I believe it's very important to understand these concepts of computer animation.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/computer_animation.htm

Picture Painting Fun

For this project we were to make a real picture appear as though it was painted. Pretty cool, huh? This project was not particularly difficult, in fact it was pretty simple. In order to make this look painted, I needed to create my own paint brush with certain settings that were found in the instructions, literally just paint over the picture, and that was basically all. The scope of the piece was very simple and the turnouts are great. I had a lot of fun creating this piece of art. You can also use different specifications for the brush to make it your own desired look or style. I chose to do the same as the instructions and am very proud of how it turned out. Unfortunately I ran out of time and was not able to add this style to my own picture but I could easily do that.

I added my original to my blog!

Personal Logo

This here is my personal logo! I did not make it based on a company, just myself. How I decided on this was actually kind of interesting. First, I had drawn about 15 thumbnail ideas. I thought they were pretty good but maybe too hard to figure out how to do them. I decided to choose a diamond shape with my initials in the middle. Once I out my initials in it, I went to change the font by highlighting the letters and noticed a black box from the highlighting. I then thought it would be cool to add a box of black just around the letters. I did this and kept the diamond but that was too boring. Since it was boring, I added more rectangular diamonds around the first one. I thought this added a very nice subtle yet exciting look. The box kind of represents me because my life is dark to a lot of people, meaning its a mystery and people don't know much about it. The blue diamonds can also show that my life is an organized chaos. I also thought the overall logo showed maturity. That is how I came up with my personal logo. Hope you like it!

Texts and Masks

In this project we were to move an image into a text. To do this I had to insert an image, create a clipping mask, a textbox, and move the image up. The purpose of this project was to learn more about clipping masks and how to use them. You can also use them when creating a gradient on an object. The reason I chose clouds was because I could keep it simple but yet still unique. You wouldn't want like a whole phrase but rather just a word or two. I really enjoyed this project and the turn outs of this. I did go through some obstacles during the process of making these. First, I wanted to do a nature type or something with trees and water. The problem with that was that it made it very hard to read. And, of course, if it's hard to read then nobody will enjoy it. That is why I chose clouds, because it has a nice empty space, perfect for the text.

Here is my original gradient.

3D Bottle Revolve

In this project we were to create a wine glass of some sort. This was to give us a better understanding of how and when to use the pen tool. Not only did we learn the pen tool but also how to revolve an object around a center point. In order to do this, I needed to trace with the pen tool around the outline. Now, this was only half the bottle, the rest was when I went up to the revolve settings. I chose revolve and it automatically made it look like a wine glass for me. I chose an exciting yet simple color, then I had to separate the cork lid from the bottle itself. Once I did that, I chose it a color. To make the tag for my bottle, I traced the outline again with the pen tool and put in a typeface to write my name. I duplicated that 4 times because the instructions said. Once I did that, I was able to put it on the outside of the bottle. I did this by going to the bottle revolve and went to mapping. I simply put my tag on the bottle and pressed ok. That is how I made my 3D bottle!

BMW Tutorial

This was not necessarily a required project but yet highly recommended to do. We were to choose a famous logo and find a tutorial on how to make it. This was done in Adobe Illustrator. The BMW logo was actually pretty tricky. I ran into lots of obstacles such as selected the correct circles for different gradients that I didn't even know were used in this logo. The hardest or most challenging thing I had to do was probably making sure the color tone and gradients were correct with the black and chrome appearance. This was difficult because the tutorial I used was out of date and I had to improvise in many areas. I thought this was a cool thing to make but it was very frustrating because I couldn't figure out certain things that needed to be done. Although I had troubles, I again was able to work around them. This was overall made by circles and not much other shapes, there were some letters, and a couple unique shapes in fhs very center. I think I did quite well considering my obstacles and frustration!

Bird Shadow

In this project we were to create a shadow from an image that did not already have one. I chose to do a bird and go further by adding a background. To make the shadow I needed to copy and paste the bird itself, flip it to an angle that would look similar to a shadow, turn its color tone all the way to black, and then finally change it to a low fill/gradient. It still seemed kind of boring so why not add a little effect?! I added a different color tone to the whole image and also found a vintage looking filter to put over and fade it a little bit. Of course, I couldn't have done any of that without the help of Ethan! He helped me make it look more exciting and realistic but yet vintage. There were a few other tweaks but after that I had a finished bird in a forest with a nice shadow!