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.