Cubes

In Illustrator, we created perfectly symmetrical cubes using the line tool and rotate tool from Lynda.com.

Each cube is 50 pixels across on the suit and later transferred over to Photoshop for small editing. 

The center angle is 120, rotated and copied 3 times. 

The opposite side is Alt+ drag and then joined together and colored.

From a tutorial again Lynda.com,  I learned how to copy and past at angles. Color and created a 3D colored cube.

Afterwards, I created my own cube art of sorts. If you recognized this logo, it's the Nintendo Game Cube logo. I've always loved this logo and I took this as an opportunity to re-create it. This is one of my favorite game systems even though there wasn't that many games from it that I enjoyed. But This logo is my favorite non the less.

What is Graphic Design?

Graphic design is communicating through the internet using the power of words and pictures.

It's communicating with people and trying to make them feel what you are feeling using only the internet.

 Concept

Idea 

Life

It is a language for the living.

We see it in every aspect of our daily lives. Everything we eat and by is convoid by graphic design. 

Sometimes it must be intricate, other times it must me subtle; but it must capture the attention of the people. If you must use something, make it interesting. If it's interesting then people will want to be there.

Match books, posters, and book covers are just examples of graphic design.

This is the new book cover for Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

Now, almost everyone has read the novel and know that in this future, fire fighters burn books. With this book cover, it gives the book some irony with the match and striker side to actually light the book ablaze. 

Graphic designers need to communicate with the people, know what's up, and how the current times are. With graphic design the world wouldn't be the same as it is now.

eComm Magazine Cover

To me, eComm is art on the internet. A way anyone in the world can look at your artwork. That's why I joined eComm.
I kept the edges shaded over because to me, I still have a lot to learn. The center is lightened more because that's what I do know. In the center I put words that barely scrape the surface of what I can put into words. The texture in the back is of a brush that I slashed around the page, it's of all the projects that I've created and of the works that we all have done. This is one of the best projects I've done that I'm actually pleased on how well it turned out. No overbearing guide lines or "creative borders" that I've hated from the very first day.
The 6 blue names on top are the teachers.

Video- I didn't go into this strand mainly because I wasn't good at it. Allam and Morris teach Video class and it breaks into 2 different strands. Broadcasting and Entertainment. Broadcasting deals with the school news while entertainment dealt with the Katy Perry music video for "Roar".

Web Design- I dabbled in web design last year because it was a requirement, and I wasn't really fond of it either. It's taught by Olson. Web design you create websites for small companies and yourself.

Animation- I chose this as my second eComm class. It's taught by Netterville. In animation you create 3D models and animate them or add special effects to videos like fire or glass orbs containing something inside. I am fairly good in this.

Graphic Design- The main eComm branch I went into. We create posters, magazine cover, and other things as well. Its taught by Lofquist as the main teacher, and Revelle and Olson teach the freshmen enrolled in e9 a little graphic design. The image above is the result of my time in this eComm branch created in both Photoshop and Illustrator.

My Logo

 A Logo is a symbol or other design adopted by an organization to identify its products, 
uniform, vehicles, etc.
To me, a logo should capture whatever you're trying to do into a small image. Nothing too extravagant, something simple. 

My colored logo.

 My black and white logo.














I personally like the black and white one more because I prefer to not have color. The colored logo looks great I like how it turned out but its more for looks than pleasing to me. 

With my logo design, it actually looks good with any color; I believe black to be the default color. 

Frozen Orb

Glass Orbs to Frozen Orbs

The tutorial I chose was the Glass Orb tutorial and i started this tutorial just how this Andrew guy started it.

A smudge image that I applied the CC Sphere effect to. I created two copies of this layer, one set normally and the second which was in front, set mode to inverse, and the opacity turned really low. To animate this layer it took me a day to figure out you're suppose to  alt +click onto the stop watch on the y-axis and type in "time*20". This took me so long to figure out...

   After about this time I decided I liked this background as the reflection than the one the tutorial called for. I found this image after searching for a city panorama and created a sphereized version of it in After Effect. I created a mask to smooth out the edge to make it look seamless. 

Masked and then CC Sphere again. This took me a good day to figure out how to make this longer too. I realized after a while you're suppose to pre-compose the layer. 

I put a circular mask in the center of the sphere and then feathered out the edges. I turned the mask layer off to create a somewhat transparent look.   

By now I decided I didn't want to do exactly what the man doing the tutorial did so I started to do things on my own. He recommended a CC Curves effect and I played with the colors. I put a snow effect later and then added the sphere effect again to make the snow inside the orb.  

I added a background using two separate layers. I added a grey solid layer and let that sit. Then I took an icy floor image and squished that to half screen and added a mask to feather out the top to making it blend. On the layer with the light effects I messed with that layer again and made a nice glow to it. 

This tutorial was really simple and only a few time I didn't understand the video. This was the second tutorial I did after the first one which was the light ribbons required a plug-in that was never mentioned until I was half way through the video. I'm happy I switched projects since this looks a lot nicer than I thought it would be and I could do this again with other images. 

Last Saturday, I attended the eMagine festival. It's where e-Communication students and other students from around the area apply their skills and see if they are good enough to win an award from 17 different categories.
I didn't submit anything this year, and would not submit anything next year either because I doubt I could do anything like the people did.
My favorite submission from the festival was from an animation category.  It was called 'RED V.S. BLUE' and I was very excited to hear the name and know where the creator got his or her idea. The idea was from Rooster Teeth's 'Red vs Blue' web series. The animation was almost flawless and well made throughout the entire length. This was my favorite piece of the night.

Kerning

Kerning is the adjustment of space between text. There was a kerning game that I've played several times  I'm not good at kerning manually because this took too long, about 30 minutes worth of work that I spent doing this. This too a bit too long for my liking and I have been loosing patience. 
Kerning is important in graphic design because it is the space between the letters of a text. It applies to typography greatly and is an important thing to learn when doing anything with text.