Real Job: A team of designers created branding a social campaign for the latest 'drop' from a community interest fashion brand.
Author: KaijaHunter
Developing Basic Skills in Photoshop
Introduction
In this part of my journey, I was asked to edit a variation of images in Photoshop. Upon approach to this task, I felt quite skeptical because I had very little experience in Photoshop. However, Photoshop is something I have always wanted to excel in but had not yet had the opportunity to fully practise the software. This was my perfect opportunity. As someone who is aware how crucial Photoshop can be in the Design world, I was eager to get on and start this task.
Design Ideas & Process
I began by familiarising myself with the software. Considering my lack of experience in Photoshop, I thought practising a bit first was important. I research a couple of tutorials on youtube and this is where I found the inspiration for my first practise where I made a cow disappear from the scene using the clone tool. I would then take this skill i’ve picked up onto something a bit more relevant to the likes of a Typography and Graphic Design Communication Podcast cover.
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I then directed my practise towards something a little bit more complex. I wanted to create a sort of colour pop image where everything is in black and white but with a pop of colour. I instantly thought to make the colour of an eye pop and thought this would be great practise where I could then go on to apply this to something more relevant. Here, I am experimenting with adjustment layers and the eraser tool to create an hole through the adjustment layer, therefore showing the image behind the black & white adjustment layer.
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After having a bit of practise, I decided I may be ready to start some more relevant designs. I came across a desk image which I thought I could play about with. The cup of coffee was a bit awkwardly placed for me, as I also wanted to include some text. I applied my previous cloning experience to make the cup disappear. I used a variation of colours to contrast the clinical background and then used the clone tool with a more abstract approach to create a David Carson grunge inspired Typographic feature in the bottom right. I felt this would most definitely be suitable for a podcast cover.
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I then came across another image that inspired me and I thought it could be more abstractly interpreted into the design world as it is quite artistic and unique. With this image, I wanted to practise upon the previous black and white adjustment layer I had managed where I erased the layer to reveal the colour layer behind. I’m really happy with how this turned out, I think i’ve developed well on previous skills and I could now easily be able to carry out this task again with little difficulty.
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Lastly I found this one image that I was particularly drawn too. I felt it was extremely fitting to the Podcast theme and I wondered how I could change it to make it somewhat my own. I used same black and white adjustment layer technique to create a pop of colour but I also edited the colour settings to achieve a darker more grungey appeal. I’m really happy with how this panned out.
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Software Tutorials
The resource above is the one that kickstarted my design and development journey. As you can see right in the beginning, he removes a sheep from a field – I found this quite fascinating and from this I recreated my own using the field of cows you have seen above. This was a great starting point for me as a way of removing things from an image which I then went on to use further in this task. This was extremely quick and helpful, sometimes the longer videos can be a bit longwinded and you tend to loose focus but I found this was straight to the point and when I got stuck I had just had to rewind and watch a bit more carefully. So this was the basis of the skills behind my first design where I experimented with the clone tool in many different ways. I also read through THIS page > https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/retouching-repairing-images.html < before starting and this helped me to understand the true basis of what I was about to take on.
Below is another link that heavily influenced a lot of my work here. This resource, although short, was extremely helpful and I only had to walk through it once before getting the hang of what I was doing. I did have to rewind once but it was very good at portraying the message it wanted to convey. I was really proud of myself and what i achieved with the help of this resource.
Skills I would want to develop further within Photoshop, would be the cutting out and replacing the backgrounds of images. I have always been interested in the likes of these projects and it is something I would like to practise within my own business where I buy and sell or hand-make items. Generally I would love to develop my skills in Photoshop, as this is something I have always longed to do but I never really had the confidence. Now I have completed these tasks, I do feel I could take on future challenges much more willingly having the confidence i do know my way around the software now.
Resources & Inspiration
As you can see most of my resources were taken from youtube. Youtube is a great platform for learning and I always turn to it when I am unsure where to start or if i’m stuck on a particular thing – if you are unsure on how to approach ANYTHING, youtube it! There is always a solution on there for everything.
Not only have I payed close attention to the resources provided by the lecturer of this module, I also made sure to venture out and discover my own resources. I find these type of videos extremely helpful as long as they are not too longwinded and confusing. The videos I provided were all short and to the point which is how, I believe a good tutorial should be. The tutorial below is a perfect example of good qualities in a resourceful tutorial.
I also took some different approaches by keeping an eye out on for inspiration on the likes of Pinterest and Instagram. Similarly, I looked up key words like “Typography” and “Design” on free image download website as a way to kickstart my creative thinking. Another way I kept myself inspired, was by referring back to our classroom Padlet wall where we all post our work. Sometimes I find it helpful to look at my peers work, making sure i’m on the right track and to draw inspiration from here while keeping it original and true to myself.
Inspiration is something you can find in all different ways and walk of life. All it takes is to take a walk or look around the house to draw inspiration from things you may never have expected. I found it helpful familiarising myself with the task brief and then coming back to it a few hours later while I had collected some thoughts.
Conclusion
I really impressed myself on this particular topic and I truly do feel like I have learnt a-lot along the way. Having come into this with next-to-no experience in Photoshop, I am leaving eager to get practising my skills again. I have selected a variation of tools and developed them in such a way that I now feel I could do it again without much difficulty. I really enjoyed myself here and felt i pushed myself to achieve more than I thought possibly. I have done things that I have always wanted to learn to do and i cant wait to practise this for fun rather than because I have too.
TY1SK Photoshop task
Design ideas and process
With my first design, I wanted to keep it pretty simple. Considering my lack of experience with photoshop I was still navigating around the software. In the image you can see a girl sat on a laptop and I’ve created a more abstract feel by not including any texts. I actually attempted to edit a few things out of the image to make it more relevant to the message I was trying to convey. I’ve done this by matching the background and overlaying a white box one top and locking this over the image. I’ve also repeated an oval shape, changing the colours of each one to create a ‘Creative Thinking’ concept which is obviously crucial in the Graphic Design world.
Next, I wanted to create something a bit more controversial. Using the basic representatives of Graphic design – A laptop and a phone. I was also really attracted to the pastel blue colours. I’ve laid some white boxes on the top of the devices because there were some graphs I didn’t want to be shown as they were not relevant to the task. I’ve used the text tool to put ‘Typography&Graphic Design Communication’ making sure the space of the words looked correct. I used the eyedropper tool to match the colours of the text with the colours of the background that I liked so much.
Along my research of inspiration, I came across this calligram image of Martin luther king. I was drawn to the bright contrast of colours against the black and this is something I have tried to reflect in my own design with the bold, bright white writing that definitely contrasts with the background. I experimented again with the type tool and moving around the text to make it seem appropriate on the page. I’ve used a bold, san-serif type in white to create a clear contrast of colours similar to the main image.
Software tutorial
I have decided to log about my photoshop task because photoshop is where I least excel in, so I wanted to challenge myself more in this area. I have been briefly introduced to photoshop but other than a few short tasks I am pretty clueless as to the uses of the software. I was eager to learn how to use photoshop, as I am very aware it is a huge aspect of the creative industries I want to strive in.
Software tutorials were an extremely important part of my process with my lack of experience with the software – I know from experience with other Adobe softwares that the never-ending tutorials on the internet are very important and actually a way of key learning for most creatives. I needed to start from the very beginning and decided to watch a video just showing some navigation of the interface. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN37eDqYvfQ. There’s also some little videos as you hover over the interface which I found very helpful along the way. Some of the skills I learned on my journey include placing the images in the interface, experimenting with the type tool and similarly experimenting with the different typefaces. I also used the eye dropper tool to do some colour matching. I feel like I’m pretty familiar with photoshop now and will feel more comfortable in future photoshop tasks.
When considering some of the skills I wanted to develop further, I’d like to experiment with overlaying and merging images – maybe through the use of cutting out and placing on top or even experimenting with different transparencies et cetera. I’m very interested in this photo editing side of photoshop and it’s something i’ve been meaning to experiment with for a while and will definitely be taking this with me after this project.
Resources for inspiration
I started my research of inspiration by looking at a website called Picabay mainly for inspiration but also this is where I was going to source my main images. I started by researching some key words like ‘Typography’ and ‘Design’. I was finding myself drawn to calligram-like images. I’ve always been inspired by David Carlson and his grunge typography style. I definitely wanted to include something like this. I was drawn to one Calligram in particular of Martin Luther King. I loved the true contrast of bright colours on the black, but also the message that we resonate with Martin Luther King is ever important. Although some might feel he is irrelevant to the topic of Graphic Design, if I was to have a podcast I would be including content that resonates with the morals of Martin Luther King and likewise the celebration of other black artists.Similarly, I seemed to gravitate to more colourful images which is evident in the final images I picked with paste blues and elements of pink but I also managed to keep it quite simple. I did some similar inspiration research looking up keywords on the internet (similarly websites like etsy and pinterest) and found this pretty helpful when i was in times of a creative block.
CINEMA.LISTING
As part of this task, we were asked to recreate a cinema flyer using some information provided to enable us a better understanding about how it works in the professional world, when working with clients. We were given the opportunity to create our own categories according to what we felt was appropriate regarding our target audience. I split mine into three categories ensuring that the wording was fun and engaging just like it would be on a flyer. In these categories I put the films in order of the dates they were being aired to allow easy reading and navigation. I’ve used a san-serif typeface for similar reasons and to allow more of a modern feel.
I decided on black and white as a colour scheme to keep it relatively simple but I also felt like black was a colour commonly associated with cinemas and therefore fitted the criteria nicely. I’ve tried to create an order of hierarchy with the name of the theatre being the most important. The times of the movies are at the bottom of the criteria but i’ve done this because i thought the names of the movies were more important and if the consumer is interested in a movie they can easily see when and where it is below.
I’ve added the recognisable age certificates to not only add a pop of colour but too again, allow for easier navigation. One of the target audiences we were given was a family and so they would only be interested in the U or PG movies so they know where to look straight away. following on from this i wanted to create the same effect with the Audio Description and F-rated movies so I made sure to include to certificates for these.
Twilight
As part of this mini project, we were asked to, not only complete a copy of our own penguin book by creating an identical frame, but to also interpret this into our own concept through the inspirations of anything we can get our hands on. I decided to base my idea on The twilight saga. I wanted to use the colours red and black, as I felt these are the colours most associated with the movie series. As you can see, I also created the vampire fangs with dripping blood, hanging from ‘penguin books’, to really capture the vampire characteristics.
Stairs
For todays task we were given the freedom to let our creativity flow in this Broken narratives activity. We were given the choice of four themes. I chose the theme ‘stairs’. As stated in the brief a man has been hospitalised for an unnamed disease, the hospital has 7 floors for people like himself, the lower floors are for the more ill patients. He is moved the lower floors as the day goes by he moves further down along the way he reaches a state of hysteric and therefore begins to hallucinate. He eventually reaches the lowest level and therefore death.
Throughout my work I wanted to portray images of illness, death and doubt. I think I did this pretty well and I really enjoyed this task. I wanted to tell the story through a series of different ways and techniques and feel like I achieved this relatively well considering the short time frame.
Some of my techniques failed but it was all about the creative experience. I tried to create stairs going deeper and deeper as every page turned but I couldn’t seem to get it. However i do think the stairs on the front cover are effective. I did the painting of the Earth because i wanted to try and make it as if he was moving further and further away from earth as mentioned in the brief but i didn’t end up finishing this. The black pages with the cut out lines is what i imagined the man would’ve been thinking in the dark times during the storyline because i wanted to make it more emotionally evoking.
Lettering in the environment
For this task we were sent away with the motive of finding lettering in the environment and capturing it in a photo to later analyse. Every day we look and read 100s of different typefaces that we may not even take a moment to think about normally, so it was nice to slow down and really question things like why did the creators of something chose to do it in this particular way?
I tried to capture a wide variety of different letter forms, techniques and materials but this began proving slightly difficult with being restricted to campus where they have a distinctive typeface to help brand the university. Over coming this set-back i looked for inspiration in more creative ways like car window stickers and stone drains.
We were then asked to individually group out photos in-whatever way we please and it was really interesting to see the different and creative ways other people chose to group their work. i grouped mine into the different techniques and materials in which the letters were formed which included vinyl/stickers, stone casts, card/posters and carved metal. I feel i approached this challenge head on and to the best of my ability but if i was to do it again i would try harder to think outside the box and be more creative with my ideas.
KH
As part of our task today we had to combine our initials to create a transmogrify. We had the choice of two typefaces: Future (A sans serif typeface) and Garamond (a serif typeface) – I experimented with both.
I decided that my initials were better suited to the Futura typeface which created a strong and more angular look, much like my letters K&H. Where as Garamond would’ve created a more rounded, overall, feel which would’ve been better suited to letters like C and G.
I also experimented with different colours, textures and techniques but felt that the block black was better suited to my final piece and ran nicely with the strong, block theme.
Overall i’m happy with my final piece, I think I created something not only abstract but eligible also.