His Shadow is Light

Dave encouraged me to continue with the blog thing even after Graphic Design was over. I think it's a good idea! So here I am detailing my final project for that class. We were to redesign packaging for an existing product, doing our best to be innovative.

I chose to redesign the packaging for the CD His Shadow is Light by Jay Tholen. He is one of my favorite musicians and I had been listening to tracks 2 through 4 quite a bit at the time!

So first off, I needed to do a ton of sketches. Most of these actually came very easily to me, which is encouraging. Do I have a future designing packages?

The album has a very heavy religious vibe, but there are also creepy undertones. So I went with a lot of imagery involving the cross, along with some "He's watching you" touches here and there.


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The one below was inspired by this CD package design that I found on Google. By this point I had met my sketch quota and was just brainstorming with extra time.

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After viewing my sketches, we all decided that the "eyeball" sketch would be the best. I then went about creating a mockup at about 1/3rd scale. I didn't think I needed to spend as much time on that and instead concentrated on the package decoration. I regret this now, as my flimsy paper mockup LOOKED just fine... but if I had really spent time examining it I would have found that my measurements were completely off!

But I did not. And so I went ahead with my design. I used lettering I'd created for a typography project on the package. I thought that the whimsical look I was going for was captured well by that text.


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After that, it was time to make the actual packaging! Finding the right materials that would work with my printer proved challenging. First, I tried to run card stock through my printer but it refused. A friend gave me some nice glossy paper I tried to use instead, but my inkjet printer hated it. The lettering came out all fuzzy. I ended up having to use plain printer paper and spray tack it onto poster board.

I managed to get through the cutting phase mostly unscathed, but once I began constructing the package I ran into a host of problems. As I said before, my measurements were somehow off. One flap of the front cover was too short, and the other flap was too long by just as much! Eek! So... I doubled up the magnets I had procured on one side so that it would even out. As I folded up the sides and began to glue them, I found that rubber cement, the best thing I had available, just wasn't going to hold it. I guess I should invest in a glue gun. After a great deal of grunting and pinching, I finally got it to stay in place.


Look at my beautiful package! (yeah, I know, not that beautiful)

If I had enough time to refine and redo this thing... Perhaps, an extra week, I am confident that I could have made it fantastic. As it stands, it is just... mediocre. But I learned a great deal!


At least I now have an actual CD case for this lovely CD I downloaded :) (feel free to examine this image and question my tastes in music/games)

What is Graphic Design?

Is Graphic Design "art"? Like true art, it is definitely misunderstood by the general public. A view of this (very entertaining) video gives one a glimpse of what the layman considers graphic design to be. What many don't realize is that Graphic Design is an integral part of thousands of activities they go through every day. Paul Rand is quoted here as saying, "Everything is design. Everything!" The food you buy, the television you watch, the magazines you read, the buses you ride... Graphic design influenced your decisions to partake in all of these.

You might be asking yourself, "Who in the world is Paul Rand?" I did. Go ahead and Google him. You will see that he has created logos that have been in use by nationally-recognized companies for as long as you've likely been alive. You've never thought about who created those logos, have you? That is Graphic Design. Joshua Porter of Bokardo explains it best. Good graphic design is design that you don't think about. It just appeals to your sensibilities, it compels you to partake in the gifts you are offered without thought.

A gentleman in the linked video stated that anyone with a computer can create design. But we all know that is not true. While laypeople believe that design is as simple as plugging a logo into a web page, we know the amount of thought that goes into each piece that we create. We must identify our target audience, we must create that logo that will please them. We must choose colors that will please them. We must please our clients and our superiors, and we must (hopefully) create a unique idea that nobody in the history of the world has thought of before us.

Whatever Graphic Design is... it is difficult to do it well!

Homage to David Carson

For this project, we were given a choice between creating an homage to David Carson or Stefan Sagmeister. I chose David Carson because I find his aesthetic to be intriguing. What I find most interesting about David Carson is his apparent disregard for the traditional "rules" of graphic design and typography. I have always had a problem with operating outside of a strict set of rules. He takes a lot of risks with type legibility and color.

I also like the way he integrates photographs into his designs, making them an integrated part of his layouts rather than completely separate entities. Since I am more of an illustrator I appreciate the ability to make a photograph more of a design element than just slapping it on the page. I want to play with coloring over and placing lineart on top of photographs.

Based on the two paragraphs above, I worked on formulating my poster design. I created three thumbnails, though I honestly loved the first from the beginning and I think everyone agreed that it was the best option.


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The other two explored illustrating his use of puns in his work and also the fact that he helped usher in the "grunge" era with his convention-defying, dirty aesthetic.


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I really like how this one came together. All of the techniques I used were observed in Carson's work (photograph integration, coloring/drawing over low quality photographs, making layout guides apparent), but I tried to put my own spin on it. I also used a couple of letters from that hand-drawn font I created :) Dave suggested I offset the lineart a bit from the photo when I was drawing over it, and make it more sketchy. I think both suggestions worked very well.

How I Designed a T-shirt

For this assignment, we were presented with three possibilities of client. I chose Burger Bank because it's an establishment I've had experience with. As well, it's suffered from some difficulties in the past and needs a bit of an image overhaul.


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The one thing I remembered from my childhood is their mini burgers, and how you could get four for a dollar back in the day. I thought that was pretty neat, and focused on that when I brainstormed for graphic ideas. I also thought they needed a logo of some sort, though I wasn't sure where I wanted to go with the design. I ultimately chose to stick closely to the original logo they'd established for themselves, leaving it to my own design to add interest.

I also played around with the idea of equating the Burger Bank to a blood bank, though that is admittedly not the most appetizing route to travel. There was also the really obvious idea of equating it to a bank that stores money.


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Feedback from my sketches led me to stick with the "bag of burgers" concept, though I added the mouth from another design to it to see how the two would go together. I played around with colors, though I mostly stuck with the earth tones and blue together. I wanted colors that would be fairly gender neutral. I decided to make my third design go down my other avenue, just to see if I could use a simple logo to communicate the point. I think that design is pretty boring and a standard shirt design you would see for businesses around here.

The final round of critiques helped me settle on the solid fill, since the sort of "deco" design wasn't quite clear enough. Someone also suggested that a hand-drawn logo would look best with my drawn art, and I fully agreed. I went back to my design and played with the colors a bit. I changed the lineart to a dark brown so that it didn't contrast quite so much with the other colors.



And here we are!

Critique of Various Illustrator Tutorials

The first tutorial I viewed was How to Design a Logotype from Conception to Completion. The title makes one believe the tutorial will be more indepth than it is. I do like how every concept of creation is covered, from sketching to management of the "corporate identity," and how a logo must be created for use in many mediums, as well as look good in simple black. However, all of these elements are simply touched on. The step by step instructions for Illustrator, along with the screenshots, are also very helpful. If one is looking for a quick and easy reference, this is the tutorial for you. If you don't have quite enough Illustrator knowledge or need to have more detailed directions, this one might be difficult for you.

The second was Design a Grungy Circular Logo. This one delivers exactly what it promises. Each step is simple and clearly illustrated with screenshots. It also very clearly explains a technique that seems easy to veterans of Illustrator, but completely stumps newbies. The only downsides in the tutorial are the links to stock sites. While those are very helpful, I feel that in logo design, one should be able to create their own graphics for the company identity. Right?

Lastly I explored Create a Silhouette Logo for a Steakhouse in Illustrator. I was immediately pleased with this tutorial because he expresses the fact that you should use your own material! See, I was totally right in my last paragraph, this guy says so. He explains how to use real reference materials to create pleasing logos in Illustrator. Each step is spelled out in clear and concise wording. However, being a visual person I would have liked a little more screenshot action on this one.

The History of Graphic Design

Surprisingly enough, Graphic Design started out in the neolithic era. The peoples of that time sought to do the same thing designers do today: fulfill a need and express a message. From that point forward, mankind continued to innovate in terms of visual expression. Civilization as we know it first used visual art to keep track of business and ownership. By Roman times, the arts and typography were used for a wider range of purposes, though they were still at the disposal of only privileged classes. And so they would remain until the invention of movable type made book ownership more accessible to the general public. Eventually artistic expression progressed along with political upheaval, and styles changed and evolved as often as popular thought did.

Personally, I've always had an interest in Illuminated Manuscripts. I'm a big geek for history in any form, and the first time I laid eyes on the elaborately vibrant illustrations in some of these books, I fell in love. The most impressive aspect of these, to me, is the dedication that went into creating each one. Men expended their entire lives doing nothing but copying each page, lovingly, by hand. These days, if someone were to do such a thing, they would be viewed as crazy... But this was a specialized craft that only monks were seemingly qualified to undertake.

The detailing in these pieces is just brilliant. They had such limited resources with which to create those books!

Goals for this Class

Here goes my first post! I have never used Blogger before, though I always wanted to start up an account. Hopefully I'll learn my way around this thing soon enough.

My goals for this course and for my degree in general are to LEARN as much as I can. "Graphic Design" has always been sort of an abstract concept to me, considering I always wanted to draw comics. I understand creating a product to fulfill a need, but I never researched the means of doing so. Firstly, I want to learn my way around computers much more. I have always been more fond of real media, and so I have tended to do as little in Photoshop and the like as possible. Last year was the first time I had even touched Illustrator!

Secondly, I want to learn more about the business in general. I don't know much at all about how things work and how I would go about getting a bonafide graphic design job! I also need to work on having more confidence in myself. Things like job interviews and critiques have always scared the tar out of me.

A last thing I would really like to improve upon is my illustrative style. My stuff has always been really cutesy, bright and cartoony. I would like to move away from that. I also have a pretty strong "anime" look to my work that turns a lot of people off. Despite these things, I do feel I have a unique style that defines my work and I don't want to move TOO far away from that.