#Filtered

All the pictures below are shot with a iPhone 4s and edited in Photoshop.  The represent a day in the life of a design student.  You also get to experience a day in the life of a member of the Iowa State University Cyclone Football Varsity Marching Band ( The ISUCF’V’MB).  In my class, I am experimenting with mobile cameras, DSLR cameras, and the effects in Photoshop.  So yes all of the pictures for this project will be #filtered.  I’ll be putting my Instagram knowledge to the test.

Just a country girl in a design world

Design and Pumpkin Spice

Essentials to being a design student

The calm before band practice

Loyal Sons Forever True

Shades, and Tints and Colors Galore

This week in Graphic Design we moved upon the world and started working with color.  I personally love color.  I love looking at photos and trying to find out what colors are in it and why I like or dislike it.  We dissected colors, color schemes and photos  for project two.  I have gain a great amount of respect for the process of picking and choosing colors.

Day one of the project I was required to do different shades and tints of  red, green, blue, white, and black.  I found out how to efficiently use the CMYK drag tab.  I did not realize how many different shades and tints of one color there could be.  Each one with a unique beauty, except for gray.  I am not a huge fan of gray.  Gray adds a certain elegance, depending on the shade and accent colors, but for a “color” project I did not enjoy it.

Day two of the project I was required to look at color schemes.  Analogous, Monochromatic, and Complimentary were specifically looked at.  I like using analogous color schemes.  It might have something to do with my favorite color combination being orange and pink.  I feel like the colors work well together.  Monochromatic gives me a boutique-like feeling.  Simple yet perfect.  Complimentary color schemes work well together most of the time.  Like purple and yellow go great together.  But red and green remind me of Christmas.  Depending on ones background, those colors might have a different meaning.  I learned that in my journalism and mass communications class.  Some people see red and green and think pizza or Italy. I like how I can do a cross over of curriculum.  It makes me feel like all my core classes and electives intertwine on purpose.

Day three was the most fun for me.  I was able to explore the world.  I searched high and low for fifty photos to pick colors from.  I am obviously obsessed with sunflowers so I chose to use a sunflower as one of my nature photos.  I was also required to take ten photos of art.  I tried to use ten photos from my own art projects. There were a couple of photos that I took from HuHot in Ames.  They have very interesting murals on the wall. If you have not been there yet, I would recommend going just to see the murals. Anyway back on topic.  I learned how to make my own color swatches in Photoshop and transfer the swatches to Illustrator. Not going to lie I kind of nerded out when I found out I could do this.  I had this picture of sunflowers and the yellows in it are absolutely gorgeous.  I will most definitely use the yellows in upcoming projects.

So my life lesson during this project: Color is one of the most beautiful things we have.  Without it, the world in grayscale would be boring.  No expression, no life, no vibrancy. The most beautiful colors are natural.  Take yours eyes off the computer screen or phone and enjoy them.

My first adventure with Adobe

Well this is kind of cool! My first ever blog post! I am mainly writing this because I have to let you know how my life in Graphic Design is going.  So far so good. I had the opportunity to work with three of the Adobe programs.  I would have to say that out of InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator… I like working with Illustrator the most.  I like Illustrator partially because I already have background knowledge of it.  Eventually I will become more knowledgable with the other programs.

I did like how I could do all ten pages of forms in one document while working with InDesign.  I have been told by other professors that InDesign is one of the better programs to use for Graphic Design so I will have to become fluent with that. I thought InDesign worked similarly to Illustrator when I was making forms.  This aspect made me enjoy working in InDesign more than Photoshop.

I did not particularly enjoy working in Photoshop because I had to deal with keeping track of my layers.  A few times I grouped layers together that should not have been grouped together.  It made my life a little frustrating.  I am sure the more I use Photoshop, I will love it like I love Illustrator.

The program I really enjoyed for this project was Illustrator.  I probably liked it because of my background knowledge.  The forms seemed to appear on the page naturally. I did not have to search for things in Illustrator and rarely got frustrated.  But my favorite set of forms I created was in my least favorite program, Photoshop.

The reason my favorite forms were in Photoshop is because it took me longer to figure out how to properly use the program. Once I had the program under my belt, the forms flowed on to the page.  I also liked using Photoshop because I can use the brush tool along with the shape tool.  I was able to use the brush tool to create positive and negative space in the forms.  The brush tool fascinated me as well.  I have always had a soft spot for painting and I wanted to see how accurate the brush tool could be.  It turns out it was more accurate than I thought.  I learned how to change the settings for the brush.  I could control the weight, wetness, stroke, build up and many other qualities of the brush. It amazed me that I could do that on the computer. Discovering that I could do that made me love Photoshop a little more.  Even though the layers were a pain in the but to sort through and group together, the end result turned out effectively.  By using the Pathfinder, I was also able to create positive and negative space within a form.

The most important thing I learned from this project is to keep going. Keep making iteration. Use different programs to get the effect you want.  Most importantly, step out of your comfort zone because you never know what you might discover.