Final Pages

For the final project, I interviewed professor of Physics Pan Papacosta. It took a while to set up a time to talk, as he was out of town, but it was well worth it. Pan was warm and eloquent, and exceedingly helpful.
He hails from Cyprus, an island in the West of the Mediterranean Sea. I felt as we spoke that my telling his story was almost pointless, as he told it better than I ever could. His years as a public speaker were evident, as well as his natural gift for storytelling. That gift is a big part of what makes Pan, Pan. His passion is not just for science, but for communicating and sharing that passion in ways easily relatable to others. That's why I began my story with one of my favorites of his.
The rest seemed to follow, if somewhat rushed as there was a lot of information to get into the story. But just meeting Pan made the project worthwhile.
As for the design of the project, the moment I saw Pan's picture of an 800-year-old olive tree in the midst of a field of mustard plants I knew I had to use it. The position of the tree seemed to provide for a natural background. It also had a little bit of a metaphor in there, showing the age of the land and culture Pan comes from, but also the youthful energy that he brings to seemingly everyday in his life.
The name, Positive ReCypriotcity, comes from Pan's life philosophy. He said the meaning of life is to do good work to make the world a better place. From there, it was just a game of balancing. I really like the look of the text on the gray sky on the first page, and I think the text is still easily readable on the next page, while keeping the vibrant background of the mustard plants.
NOTE: I subtracted the line on the side. I think the design needs the empty space, and the line draws the eye too much.

Fisting A Neighborhood Alive

Before:

After:

In between: I cropped a huge amount of the image as I found that the fist would make a better shape and more interesting picture for the web page. I cropped it evenly, and left some space around it, so that I could then play with the colors. I decreased the brightness, as the glare of the light on the fist was powerful. I found that the darkness surrounding the fist, which is still bright, made it stand out more. This goes along with the story that would got with it, which is about how Revolution Brewing kicked the revitalization of Logan Square into overdrive. So, they created a revolution, which they associate with a fist.
I also increased the contrast to give the colors of the fist and its background a bit more POP. I was lucky in that I had a friend with a high quality camera, and the know-how to use it. Gave me a lot more room to maneuver, with a high quality and high resolution image.

IN conclusion: Revolution Brewing is awesome, Logan is on the rise, friends with nice cameras help, and sometimes less is more, but it is better to find that out with too much than not enough.

Bisabuela, muy bonita!

I hope that is relatively correct Spanish. It has been a while.
This was my first foray into Photoshop, and it was pretty awesome what the program can do. This touch-up job doesn't display half the awesome, or even a significant percentage of awesome, that the program can wrought. First, the stamp tool. Hold the option button and click on the color you want, then click in the space you want that color. Easily fix holes from hungry moths. A touch of darkening and lightening gives the cheekbone more definition. Lighten up the whites of her eyes, stamp out some of the discoloration of the blue in her dress, let the almost ethereal haloesque crown of green stand as is, and voila!
There is also the sharpening tools and the text tool where a nice cursive Bisabuela (spanish for great grandmother for the uninitiated) could class things up, but I think it's better without it.

Summation: Photoshop is cool, I don't know Spanish as well as I should, and here is a fun bit of facts on thinking about your ancestry. It makes you smarter. For a bit, at least.

Rooms vs. Vrooms

NOTE: Blogger won't let me put an image up. I will try again later. NOTE DOS: And the file is gone forever. C'est la vie.

A silly title, but try saying it 10 times fast. While the story and graph's information are rather sad with a little reflection, this was a fun exercise. I used contrasting colors, purple and yellow, as they both would be soft enough on the eyes that I could still use black text without causing any strain to read. I thought the number of rooms and garages was important to include as it showed just how much was being bought for the same price as a car. The price per square foot emphasized that point, and the total prices are beside each other because that is what the whole shebang is about.

I felt the varying shapes of the houses demanded that they be given flexible outlines, so that a longer house isn't cut off to fit the rigid square of a tall and thin house. I put the homes in a zigzag pattern because I thought it was more interesting to the eye than a straight line of images. The cars are in a straight line due to space constraints but also because the houses are by far the more interesting images and elements of the story. I feel like the piece is balanced so that the eye is drawn toward the purple in the middle and all the information in it, which is what I wanted. Also, the source provided at the bottom was necessary and filled what would have been a strangely empty space.

My Time With the Lohans

This was an exercise in reproduction. Or maybe I should say recreation. Both sound like more fun than this project was. I did enjoy the challenge of finding ways to create the same shapes and such, and I feel much more adept at InDesign than I did before. Since I don't know what the original fonts used were, I, as instructed, just used Helvetica and Times New Roman. Finding similar pictures turned out remarkably easy, thanks to the near omnipotence of Google. I think that was the most I've ever thought about Ms. Lohan's family. It was too long.

After that, it was playing with shading and coloring and using shapes to match up, etc. It was annoying adjusting fonts until the headlines were just right.

In short: Useful exercise. Turned out well enough. Ms. Lohan has a predilection for sparkly dresses.

WARM and cool

First, I changed the tilt. Leaning to the right seemed more...aggressive? At least I hoped it would.

Second, in the warm version the dots phasing into lighter greens contrasted with the glowing yellow and red to give the composition some much needed pop. The orange, yellow and red really bounced off each other well.

Third, the cool image relied far too heavily on blue, and my hopes that a little purple might give the same contrast as the green does in the warm image were left unanswered. But that should have been obvious as red and green are contrast colors and blue and purple are not. I do like how the addition of white to the outer lines of the petals gave it a higher contrast while still remaining cool. I think more use of that would have benefited the whole composition greatly.

Black and White

For this first project, I concentrated on seeing what I could use the various tools in InDesign to create. I'm drawn more towards creating a recognizable shape over the use of an abstract design, so I combined the two by allowing myself a little box to play with the abstract shapes. I also wanted to see how it would balance out with the draw of the recognizable flower vs. the far busier box/vase. I wanted to create an even spread within the square, with contrast between sharper and softer edges, and little lighter spots for the eye to dance around. In a way, the goal was to catch the eye in the square to bounce around and occasionally escape up to the flower.

I played with the glow effects, giving the shapes within the square an outer glow and the flower's petals an inner glow, which was meant to give the flower a more inward and calm look while encouraging the eye to bounce around within the square. So the focal point of the piece I suppose would be the blackness within the square. Looking at it now, I think it would have been more interesting if the flower had been in pieces, spread out through a larger abstract area, with darker background shapes leaving the lighter colored flower fragments to draw the eye. I don't think the tilt of the image did a great deal to help, but I thought the upright version left the image completely uninteresting.