Ma Non Capisco

This is my final project. I used InDesign to design this layout to look like it would in a publication. I used many tools, some that I have not yet used and learned many new things that I will hopefully be using in the future. The main picture on the left was the one I shot and the picture on the right, I used from the school's trip to Florence, Italy. I wanted to make the story stand out and have some color in it, so I created a gradient into an Italian Flag. This story was about learning to get around Italy while barely knowing the basic words. The story told the reader what the Italian citizens thought of tourists and whether it was appropriate for people coming to Italy to first learn some words before coming to a place that you've never been to. Turns out, it's expected by the Italians.

Wanderer Magazine

This is my magazine cover I created with the tools I was given. I used InDesign to create the layout and the template was already made for me. The picture in the background was one chosen by the class that I toned, cropped and made my own in Photoshop. The original looks somewhat similar but a little lighter, and the people are a little more cropped in this picture. Also, I focused more on the cathedral itself than the background. In the original picture, on the left hand corner, the van was very prominent, so I did the best I could to crop the picture to take the focus off of the van. I kept the headline font and size the same, but changed the color to match roof the cathedral with the eye drop tool in InDesign. I also chose the best colors that would stand out against the background for the other headlines of the stories that might be included inside this magazine.

Toned Pictures

I toned these pictures in Photoshop to make them look more recent as well as cover up the holes in the photo displaying their age. That is the first thing I actually did in the first picture; I cloned the colors that were closest to the picture so I could cover up the missing spots. I also made the image as a whole sharper, to make the features of the picture stand out more. The woman in the picture had age spots on her face, and with the clone tool, I covered them up also. In the second picture, I cropped the rounded edges to make the picture completely square and filled in the missing spots, as I had done for the first picture. I also made the picture just a little less red.

Revised Midterm

This is my revised midterm web design. I took the corrections that were given to me and revised my design. I lightened the background color so it would be more visible to the readers and bolded some of the headlines to be more readable. I also made the logo smaller so it would not catch the readers attention as much as they stories should. I switched the pictures around because they were too repetitive and focused on another one as my main picture. In my previous design, the text was touching the edges on most of the stories so I made the actual text box a little bit smaller. I took the advice and skills my professor had taught me to revise this design to the best of my ability.

Fast Travels

This is the design I did for the midterm. I wanted to design my home page to look like the Sun-Times with the blue but I also chose that color because blue is the color of the sky and even though my web page is about commuting, that essentially means travel. There are also travel ads on there, which I put, in order to "get away" from the daily commute. I wanted to make it look as real as possible, so I added the links for Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!Mail, Blogspot and Google, though the links don't really work! My main story takes up most of the page, with the three toned pictures and their captions surrounding them. To the right, I have another major timely story with another picture I borrowed from the internet. I have two teasers under my main story that can be read further if you clicked the "see more" link. I borrowed the two travel ads from applevacations.com and funjetvacations.com. My logo is blue, matching with the color scheme, and it resembles different roads to me, which is why I chose this logo. I think it fits well with the design overall.

Student Commuters

I chose to do my project on the student commuters. Some of my pictures are shots with groups of people and some are individuals walking to the train station or away from it, to their destination. I chose this picture to tone because for a beginner, it gave me a lot to work with. The top picture is the one I toned and the bottom picture is the original.

The first thing I did was crop the picture. I focused only on the four commuters and cropped the other distractions out. I made the commuter in the red the center of the picture because her jacket was the most noticable so I also brightened that up a little bit more. In the top left hand corner, the school isn't really noticed in the picture that isn't cropped. It is distorted by the sun, so I toned a part of the school a bit darker and made it look more like a building. I also sharpened that up more to make the windows and lines of the building noticable. Also, the sky was really bright but it hadn't touched down in the city, so I toned the two green banners above the commuters just a little bit to make them stand out more.

Midwest Coffee Drinkers

For this design, I used the information I received and turned it into a graph to show it in a visual aspect. The map of the United States was given to us and with that, I used a variety of tones to differentiate the parts of the country with how much coffee they drink. I also made a list of all of the working professionals that need coffee to get through the day. Along with that, I created a graph with percentages and descriptions of how Midwestern people drink coffee.

Magazine Article

This was a magazine article that I replicated from Shape Magazine. I used the amount of volume given to make it look as similar as I could. There were many different planes that were used in this layout and I put them in the same place as the article. I matched the tones as closely as I could, and positioned the lines to match each other throughout the article, except where there weren't any lines. I believe that the rhythm of colors used in the article creates a positive space. The two blues in the pictures, the brown sand, and the brown background to the main article, and the greens are used well. The majority of the colors are tertiary and are working together.

I also found pictures as closely to the original article as I could, and used the same headlines to make it more authentic.

Warm Colors

This design was the same as my previous ones, but used in warmer colors. In the beginning, I was going to use a variety of warm colors to create a harmony in the space but I decided to stick with fall colors. This design creates a bit of balance because of the way the three colors I've used contrast throughout the piece with each other. On the left side, I focused more on the yellows and oranges, and on the left were more of the reds with some tones of orange. I used different tones and hues in all of the shapes to make a different color in each.

Tertiary Color

I used the same design as the Black & White post. I played around with the dimensions of hues and tones in order to get a good color on this draft. Using tertiary colors together creates a balance in an otherwise contrasted layout. I was trying to play around with the percentages of the colors to avoid too much repetition of the same color swatches. I added some more techniques than I did in my last post. I made one of the squares in the middle see-through, using light colors in order to see the other squares behind it.

Black and White

In this design, I used a variety of shapes to contrast the image. This design was intended to have more volume in it, so that each shape gets specific attention. Sketching the draft first took time because I did not want to have too much balance. I rotated the form many times in order for the layout to be in harmony. I didn't want this layout to have too much of one color in one space, creating too much rhythm. This design is simple, but each shape is complex in its own way. The colors in each shape are different and have frames to contrast the image.