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.