Passion for Fashion

For my final project, we had to choose a passion of ours, and create a 2 minute sound slide. I think that figuring out the passion of mine to choose was definitely the hardest part of the assignment. Once I figured it out and knew what I was going to say, it all came together really well. I chose to do fashion, which made me face many other challenges. One was that I really wanted to be able to take pictures in New York City, however I was unable to do that. If I had more time, I definetly would have gone home and taken pictures that really illustrated what I am passionate about. Once I figured out what pictures to use, I decided I wanted a French song to play in the background, so I chose "Tous les garcons et les filles", a song I know from my childhood. I thought it related well with my theme because I spoke of how Paris, France is the birthplace of fashion. I chose pictures from Vogue, my trip abroad in Paris, and from my internships with fashion designers. I had to rerecord myself multiple times due to either messing up, echos, or background noises. What I enjoyed most was making the pictures match up with what I was saying. I was really pleased with my final outcome and how smoothly it plays.

Bibi Card

I think that making the bibi cards was our hardest project that we've had all semester, but also one of the most valuable. We had to replicate a bibi card in both QuarkXPress, which we've used before, and InDesign, which we have not. Making the bibicard in QuarkXPress was easier for me because we had just done 2 projects in it, and I really got the hang of using it. I think I did a better job on that one than the one I did in InDesign. I used InDesign before in one of my graphic design classes, however it was just used for placing pictures, not creating a project. Once I got the used to it, it wasn't that difficult, but it was hard trying to get them both to look the same.
I faced a couple of challenges while doing this project. The first and most frustrating was getting the color to match the one on the bibicard, which I failed to do with both. The original bibi card was a neon orange/pink, and I had a really difficult time trying to match it. Another challenge I faced was finding fonts to match. On the bibicard I made in QuarkXPress, some of the fonts ended up looking differently once I printed it out as well. If I had more time, I would definetly try and find other fonts that matched better. All in all, I think I did a good job replicating the bibi card. I am most proud of the back of the bibi cards. Though it was simplier than creating the front, I know I did a good job replicating it.

Brochure Website

To create my website, I used Dreamweaver. I took a web design class before, however my teacher refused to each us on Dreamweaver because he wanted us to learn the old way by typing everything out. Dreamweaver would have made my life much easier, but it was interested to see what goes into a web page.
My layout was very simple and basic. All of my links were the pages from my brochure: about Montego Bay, where to stay, eat., and do day and night activities. In addition, I had a homepage, a links page, and a contact us page. After I typed all of my information up, I used FileZilla to transfer it onto the internet. Everything was relatively easy to do and I did a good job. If I had more time I definitely would have wanted to add picutres and play with the different layouts.

Come to Jamaica!

Making a brochure was a really fun and useful project. Once I decided what I was going to making it on, it was relatively easy to do because I was experienced in QuarkXpress from making the poster. I went to Jamaica over winter break and decided to make my brochure on it. When I think of Jamaica, I think of Bob Marley, so for the cover I used a quote from one of his songs "Come to Jamaica and feel alright". I chose Montego Bay because it is one of the main cities that tourists visit when vacationing in Jamaica, as well as one of the prettiest cities. For the back panel, I put a map of Montego Bay. The other four panels, I chose to put why people should visit Montego Bay, and then where they should stay, eat, and do activities.


When designing it, I chose to use red, yellow, and green for the inside colors, because those are the colors that best represent Jamaica. I decided to make all the picutres diagnol because it resembeled a scrap book feel, and I liked that idea for a vacation brochure. I chose the hotels based on price and stars. For the restaurants, I listed a broad range of restaurants catering to a variety of food types. For the activies, I did day activities as well as night time activites.
If I had more time, I would have played with the sizing of the pictures better so I could perhaps add more places for tourists to visit. It was hard telling if the pictures were going to be too big or too small, and I wanted them to be clear. I would have also put more information for the hotels. Brochures are usually very busy and can sometimes be a bit overwhelming, so I like how it is simple and the message is clear. The hotels are all beautiful and 4 stars, yet not outrageously priced. I have been to some of the restaurants and partook in some of the activities that I listed, so I know that they are must see locations. It is not your typical looking brochure but for that reason I like it.

Sound Slide

Today we embedded our sound slide which consisted of our PowerPoint and the music that went along with it. The sound slide was rather simple to create, and it was very exciting viewing my final project. After we made our sound slide, we added it on our blog through Filezilla, which we have used previously when adding our animated gif. I was proud to see that I remembered how to use it, and it was an even better feeling when I saw my successful final product.

If I had more time, I would have played with the timing of the song so I could have gotten it just right to where it sounded perfect. I would have also worked with the timings in my slide as well so that everything really meshed well together. I really enjoyed how simple it was to create the sound slide, and I think it would be interesting to use it again in the future.

Poster

For this assignment, we had to create a poster for the artist that we chose to do a PowerPoint Presentation on. We had to create it based on the idea that they were going to have a CD release party held at Roger Williams University, and provide the necessary information on it for those who wished to attend.

I am a marketing major, so I love to create advertisements for different projects. This was unlike anything that I have done because I usually am creating story boards, and not posters. My favorite picture of Van Morrison from my PowerPoint was one where he is singing and playing the saxophone. It does a great job of showing the viewers of what kind of artist that he is, and what to expect. I also chose that picture because the background of it was red, and I was excited to play with the color since I did not get to play with much color in my PowerPoint.

The background of my poster was a painting of Van Morrison that was very light. I then put Van Morrison in big bright red letters at the top of the poster, followed by all the information.

I was really proud of my poster. I thought that the visuals and the information worked really well together. If I had more time, I would have incorporated yellow into the poster. We had discussed in class how yellow is the best color to catch someone’s eye and grab their attention. Though I was aware of this, we also spoke of how red is used in the everyday world to do the same thing, and I thought that since I had a great image with red in it, that I would use it throughout my poster. When viewing my classmates’ posters, it turned out that yellow really worked best when trying to make a poster pop. Aside from that, I thought my poster turned out great.

PowerPoint

For this assignment, we had to choose a music artist, and create a PowerPoint Presentation based on them. One of my favorite singers is Van Morrison, so I decided to do mine on him. I have created numerous PowerPoint Presentations in the past, however this was by far the most enjoyable.

The most difficult part of this assignment was finding good photographs of Van Morrison. Many of my other classmates did more recent artists, who have thousands of pictures on the internet with various colors and graphics. Seeing their presentations almost made me wish I did someone more recent as well, because it definitely would have been easier to work with. Nevertheless, mine was unique because it did not posses these qualities.

I wanted my PowerPoint to portray Van Morrison as the sophisticated and talented musician that he is. I did not go crazy with my colors; I chose a very basic dual-tone background (blue and black), and repeated it throughout the PowerPoint. For my second slide, I wrote basic information about who he is, and the instruments he plays. For the picture, I chose him singing and playing the saxophone, which I thought really displayed his talent. For the third slide, I chose the album Moondance, and listed their tracks and track times. The fourth slide consisted of four of his albums that I like, and I chose my favorite songs from each of them. I enjoyed working on this slide the best. I also really like my reference slide. It is hard to make it interesting, considering it is just a list of links, so I chose a picture of him looking directly at the links, drawing the viewers focus to them.

I thought I did a great job of displaying Van Morrison as a serious talented musician. I did not clutter the slide with graphics and bright colors, because it does not pertain to his characteristics. If I had more time, I would have played with colors a bit more to make it a little more lively, or perhaps have chosen a more lively song. (I couldn’t help but pick my favorite!) This was one of my favorite assignments so far, and I think that the majority of the class would agree. Music is a great way to share and learn about other people, and I had a great time doing this project.

"Bing & decide!"

Bing is Microsoft’s new search engine, which was made public by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009. It is designed to do more than merely help you find information. Bing organizes search results and provides refinement tools that help you overcome information overload, get things done and quickly bring you to the point of using that information to make an informed decision.

Microsoft did a survey about internet search, and found that half of attempted searches fail to meet consumer needs, and nearly three-quarters of people consider search results too disorganized. With these results, they wanted to improve the search experience by creating a more organized search experience, simplifying tasks and providing tools that enable insight about key decisions, and most of all delivering great search results and one-click access to relevant information. Microsoft also found that 66% of consumers are more focused on using the Internet to get things done, rather than to simply find information. With this knowledge, Bing was created to be an Internet decision engine that will help one navigate through the irrelevant information and find the shortest distance to an informed decision.

As of 2010, Bing is the third largest search engine, next to Yahoo! and Google. On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that they had made a 10-year deal in which the Yahoo! search engine would be replaced by Bing. Yahoo! will get to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell adverts on some Microsoft sites. Yahoo! Search will still maintain its own user interface, but will eventually feature "Powered by Bing" branding. However, Google still remains the number one search engine.

My Animated Gif

Since I had already put together both parts of the postcard, this should have been the easiest part of the assignment, or so I thought. I had a lot of trouble putting my animated gif on my blog because my filezilla kept on getting disconnected. We also tried pasting our link for our animated gif into a html that we thought would display our animated gif, but we were wrong. It turned out that it was a lot more simple than we had imagined, and we could have placed it in the same way we add an image. This was frustrating for me because I spent so long trying to figure out why it wasn't working! Once I saw my animated postcard on my blog I was very relieved that it worked out.

Postcard

For my double-exposure photo, I chose each picture based on certain words from my poem. As you can see, there is grass growing, a bright sun, a bird resting, and the main photo, a sidewalk. I chose the hue to be a bright red becuase of the line "the sun burns crimson bright". My biggest challenge was placing the pictures in the right spot. It took a while for me to get them where I wanted it. I also wanted the grass to be greener and show more but it couldn't because of the dark layer underneath it. If I had more time I would play around with the placing of the pictures a bit more, and maybe even try out some new ones, but overall I really like how my images illustrate my font poem.

Font Poem

I found the font poem assignment to be more challenging than the contact sheet because of the words. It was hard for me to work solely with words, but once I got the hang of it I began to enjoy it. I used an excerpt from the poem Where the Side Walk Ends by Shel Silverstein, one of my favorite poets. I tried having different words throughout the poem stand out and have a meaning of its own, for example the typography for "grass grows" is growing. I really had fun exploring the different fonts Photoshop had to offer. If I had more time I would have experimented with colors, but I did not want to go overboard and have it be too much. I like how the black and white is simple and leaves more of an impression than it would if it were to be in color.
I used the following fonts:

• Weidemann Std
• Neuland Lt Std
• Cutout Std
• Itc Isadora Std
• Ex Ponto Pro
• Bruno JB Std
• Stencil
• Flood
• Wendy Lp Std
• Nupital Script Lt Std
• Medici Script Lt Std
• Apple Casual
• Juniper Std
• Briem Script
  

Contact Sheet

My first time using Photoshop was in my introduction to Graphic Design course, however it was used only to crop photos. I have always wanted to explore Photoshop and utilize all the elements it had to offer, and the contact sheet assignment allowed me to do just that. The first challenge I was faced with was having a limited selection of pictures on my computer. I had my camera for about a year until it broke, so the pictures I had were not as artistic as I would have liked for this project. If I had more time and a working camera, I would have loved to go out and taken pictures that I thought would have fit better with what I was trying to accomplish. However, I worked with what I did have and I am satisfied with the turn out. The following photos are taken in Marseilles, France, Paris, France, Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, Vermont, and New York City. I really enjoyed editing the pictures in different ways. Every picture has different meaning because of the way that it is cropped and formatted.

This is a close up of my favorite picture. This was taken in Marseilles, France when I was studying abroad. It is of the calanques in the South of France, one of the highlights of my trip. Calanques are a series of limestone cliffs, fjords and rocky promontories plunging into the Mediterranean. It was an hour hike down to the water, and we jumped off the cliffs.

Test

Test