Category Archives: DesignAssignments

Contact me – Or don’t I really don’t care

This assignment is the Create Your Own Business Card. I chose to make a business card for my character Evelyn Calico. She works at the New York Times as a journalist and doesn’t really care to move up in the world. She likes where she is and will continue to work her wage and no more.

Evelyn gives very few out but when she does, its because a story has really interested her and knows she can do well with it, or a supervisor is watching her and she needs to give them out like candy according to them. The stories that Lynn looks for are stories that tend to bring controversy to the public. She likes to listen to gossip and make news out of it, but professionally of course. Her business card consists only of work contact information, she will not tolerate those who go contact her personally (i.e her personal phone, email, and landline – yes she still has one).

I made this business card using this Canva template and I made up a phone number using the area code from Montana as that is where Evelyn is originally from. To make her email I used the classic first initial and full last name email that most professional companies use. I then went to a “contact us” page on the New York Times to see what kind of email url they typically use. I then make the address be the New York Times headquarters building. I imported the New York Times font into canva to make the header and the “T” logo in the corner. Overall, Im happy with how minimalist the card ended up looking and I feel like it fits my characters overall vibe!

Destress and Color

Week 3 Assignment #1
A colorful mandala drawing.

I saw a lot of people doing this assignment, so I thought I would give it a try! I always loved coloring, because it has always been a relaxing activity I can turn to if I need to distract myself or need something to do. Especially in this specific design, the mandala, which are known to have therapeutic effects when coloring them, such as decreasing tension and anxiety and encouraging creativity. According to an article by Pine Rest Mental Health Services, the shapes and the colors chosen for the mandala can symbolize whatever the artist wants it to be. When thinking about this specific drawing, I liked the colors, since some of my favorite colors are in it, such as pink and blue. Also, the almost floral-leafy design of it was appealing since I love nature in art. Overall, I enjoyed this assignment and it was a great way to destress from my work from other classes!

A World of Color

After a very long and stressful day I had minimal motivation to do work of any kind. I was tired and groggy but knew I had to relax and get something done, but I didn’t know my assignment would consist of both. I was browsing through design assignments and the Destress & Color assignment caught my eye. It seemed fun and a good fit as it would give me a much needed mental reset. Downloaded the app and boom, there’s all of these choices and I don’t know what to choose. After a bit of browsing I went for lots of landscapes involving nature to fit with the calmness I was aiming to achieve while doing this assignment. It worked swimmingly, as I immediately got into a groove and zoned out until I was done and realized how pretty all of the pieces I had chosen were. I had a lot of fun with this assignment and was glad I could share the theme I had in my mind while selecting what to color.

Visual and Design Projects

The first two assignments were made with my character Max in mind

Max Matrix

Brave? – Assignment Bank

For this assignment, I was inspired by the game over screens when you fail a game. At first It seems you have hit a stopping point but then you look down and see try again but and you find a new way. Things aren’t over till you give up. Max has hit dead ends all her life, but she knows that It’s only over when she stops fighting. So, until then she will punch through firewalls and bodies. Photos and edit done by me. I made this using a software called Picarts using black boxes to fill in the computer screen and finding a font that fit. Took a but to maneuver it properly though.

Personal Trading Card – Assignment Bank

I decided to visualize max through a site called Picrew. Artist ne_yolk. With that and the trading card creator it was easy to bring Max to life and flesh her out a bit more. Dirty brown hair, deep dark circle, and unhealthy pale skin due to all the smog cover and being inside. My thought process was of her getting caught eating sugar to keep herself up after not sleeping all night.

Destination Poster – Assignment Bank

Images and edits by me, the image is off certain day on campus that I saw a rabbit and thought it was stunning so naturally I snapped a photo. I try to preserve small moments if I can. This was back last semester when I walked past for work and the light was hitting perfectly, I couldn’t help myself.

Week 2 assignments

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/10-Moreland-Ave-NE-Atlanta-GA-30307/35843574_zpid

This dream house is a newer house that is updated with newer electronics and appliances. This house also provides a constant source of creativity due its abstract nature. It is also in a city that is known for its creativity.

This design assignment is from the app that I downloaded to destress and color it came out better than expected. This is a very bright and colorful Japanese style building. Even though I wasn’t allowed to select the colors myself the color palette they gave me was very easy to use and allowed me to actually relax and complete this assignment.

Modern Dystopia: A Tech-Noir Book Cover

This week has been insanely busy, so trying to figure out which assignments would fit into my schedule was quite the challenge, especially figuring out how to incorporate the theme. However, when I saw the opportunity to design a Noir book cover, it was perfect. I felt comfortable in my Canva abilities, I know book covers, I could incorporate it into the theme, and it wasn’t a large time commitment. I decided to keep it simple and to the point. It’s not very involved and if I had more time during the week outside of my other classes and my job, I probably could’ve produced something more detailed and showcasing more of my abilities, however it unfortunately was not in the cards this week for me. I thought it best to create something I felt just okay about than to not create anything at all.

Fictional book cover titled, “Modern Dystopia”

I chose to use Canva because it was a software I use regularly, so I didn’t need to set aside time to learn how to use it. Not to mention, it’s good at getting the job done with design projects of this nature; very user friendly and accessible. Again, I don’t feel super great about the finished product, but I feel good enough about it matching the theme and vibe of the class and it shows a little bit of something I’m able to do.

She’s a Full On Monet! – That’s Not It

The prompt for this assignment was to mix two movie scenes together, to change the meaning of the conversation. The original Clueless scene had Tai and Cher talking about Amber dancing with Tai’s crush. To make Tai feel better, Cher starts trashing Amber’s appearance. To change the scene, I made the subject of the conversation Regina George. While the meaning of the original conversation didn’t change, it was fun to put Regina George and Cher Horowitz, two iconic characters, together. I picked this assignment because I thought it was cool that just a little bit of editing can transform a whole scene.

Making the video involved downloading the scene of Cher and Tai at the party as well as the scene of Aaron and Regina at their Halloween party. I ran into a slight bit of trouble when downloading the scenes because the only version of the Clueless scene that didn’t have a huge watermark was without background music. I remedied this by downloading a song from the YouTube audio library and mixing it into the video and adjusting the volume. After that, the video was very easy to make. All I had to do was cut out the scenes with Amber and use the Mean Girls scene. Lastly I exported the video and uploaded it to YouTube. This was definetly one of the easier assignments, the only thing I really struggled with was coming up with an idea. I couldn’t find any scenes where there was an opportunity to change the context of the conversation. Once I thought of this idea I was very excited and got to work. Overall, I’m proud of this edit, I hope you guys like it.

We are not far…

I wanted to start this streak of assignments with a design assignment because as of right now the creative design part of my brain is a bit easier to connect to and it is something I have the right tools for at the moment. The destination poser caught my eye and I thought it would be a great way to incorporate our course’s theme to.

This is the Destination Poster. This poster is about how our society is changing to revolve around our technology, specifically the technology that we hold in our hands. The way that people use their phones in their daily life and how it consumes them is something that I see everyday and to a certain point indulge in. While I try to stay present in life it is tough with the society we live where everything is so digital and it hard to navigate through life without technology. Watching the development of technology, how we use it, and its rapid development I don’t see how “technology taking over the world” isn’t that far away. If we aren’t already there that is.

I started the process of creating this poster by simply googling “tech noir city” and looking at the images that come up and gaining ideas through that. I noticed a lot of bright colors, and lots and lots of robots. According to wikipedia Tech Noir represents “technology as a destructive and dystopian force that threatens every aspect of our reality” and seeing the collection of robots reminded me about the phones we carry in our pockets and how the overuse of them can make humans robots, which threatens our society from being the community it once was to being a technology driven world.

The editing program I used was Procreate for Apple. I googled images of people in a city looking at their phones and imported that onto my canvas. I then google images of robots in a city and imported that onto my canvas but mirrored. I made use of the empty space in the first image (the top image) and imported my text. I didn’t want to specify a place because at this point its basically the whole world so I opted to just make a commentary on where we are now, technology wise, compared to the dystopia we see in the movies that are shown to be bad.

Love is Embarrassing – Compilation Video

*****Spoiler alerts for The Good Place!*****

Edits are very popular these days, and I LOVE a good edit. I have seen some really amazing ones for Barbie, WandaVision, and Community. I really wanted to take a crack at it, since I’ve had some experience using Adobe Premiere Pro, which meant I wouldn’t be starting from square one. For this edit, I took one of my favorite shows The Good Place and put it with one of my favorite songs “Love is Embarrasing” by Olivia Rodrigo.

Eleanor Shellstrop has a significant arc over the course of The Good Place’s run. She starts as this loner who is very selfish, self asorbed character and ends the show surrounded by her chosen family whom she loves and would do anything for. These characteristics have been inside Eleanor all along but the people who were around her put down those traits, so she has to learn how to be okay with taking care of others and being a good person. This especially comes through when she stars to catch feelings for Chidi. At first Eleanor thinks he’s a nerd and doesn’t want anything to do with him. Eventually, however, she realizes she has feelings for Chidi even though she doesn’t want to. This song is the perfect choice to capture how Eleanor feels about Chidi because she is almost repulsed by how she feels towards Chidi, given that she has never felt like that towards a person before. She finds love to be embarrasing.

This video was relatively easy to make. First, I looked for and downloaded an Eleanor and Chidi scene pack which compiles clips of the two. Then I added the scenes into Adobe Premiere Pro and sorted through which clips I wanted to use. Once I had my clips picked out, I added Olivia Rodrigo’s Love is Embarrassing. After that I rearranged the clips, trimmed them to keep each clip short. I also tried to sync the clip transitions to the beat of the song. I feel like this makes edits more satisfying to watch. Finally, the last thing I did was export the video and uploaded it to YouTube.

Here is the final project!