Saturday 10 December 2011

'My Space' collage - Day to Night

I came across Stephen Wilkes' photographs where he blends tens of photos taken at different times of the day and show a smooth transition of day to night (or reversed).



I don't have a tripod to begin with so I put the camera by the window to take pictures of the same position.




Tucked into PhotoShop tried to blend them as one...and failed completely.


The ground was split into brown and grey sections and there isn't really a feel of 'night to day'. I then reversed the order to 'day to night'...


...it turned out slightly better with the brighter sky but still looks rather sad, mainly because there is not enough contrast between day and night, also there isn't much depth and boring composition. I don't think I'll take this idea further.

Friday 9 December 2011

'My Space' collage - Symmetrical

For this collage idea I used photos taken in Britain, China and Japan. I was messing with photos of the buildings on the street I used to live in China and the symmetrical effect looked pretty good to me - so I carried on with this idea and added more elements.



I changed the sky to a previous experimental image I did for this project, which has a more dramatic blue to orange transition.

I played with blending modes to bring the objects together more naturally.


The difference is easy to see as I put 2 of the stages side by side.




I had some good feedbacks on the whole image and I do think it's eye catching. The oriental looking red leaves was in fact taken on the way to Birmingham, and the tower was a Japanese one. I'm glad that what I use in the collage aren't as obvious as they might sound.

I used this as my mock-up final poster, but I agree there is not much content in it. Focusing on matching up the horizon is easier to match photos and angles but doesn't give much depth to the finished result.

Zine cover

Since the cover for the Horizon zine should match the inside pages, I have sketched a few ideas with both serif and sans-serif type. I quite like one of the magazine covers shown in the lecture presentation, so I then tried drawing the title in cursive script type. It turned out as my favourite of all thumbnails because it's more fun and interesting.

I took a photo of Yara and quickly sketched her sitting on the curvy bridge between h and n like a swing. Unfortunately that quick photo didn't capture everything so I had to make up her shoes...


But I really liked the relaxing atmosphere and that certainly fits within the purpose of the Zine. I decided this is going to be the cover design and asked Yara to be my model again, and this time took a clearer photo (yay!)

I traced the mock-up cover printout on the light-box with pencil and traced again with a liner. The type gets fatter every time I draw it, which isn't bad since the cover is relatively empty.


And here is my illustrated cover, scanned by Yara who was happy with the cartoon version of her :D

I will be adding text to it once I know what fonts I'm using for the other pages.

Tuesday 6 December 2011

"Hello & Welcome"

Here are the initial thumbnails I have done with the given text, using 7 columns and 3mm gutter grids to help me placing the texts.

The circles layouts were inspired by Jess' example. I have also used grey for some areas to give a little more variety to the page.


I liked all of them but they will be a pain to fit in the texts, as we cannot change them and it's difficult to fit a circular text-box perfectly.


Then I considered using images.




I have done the first design in InDesign and got to know the basic controls of the software, but the full size print-out wasn't exciting at all. Partly because the columns for each section were too narrow, also the fact that I didn't place a picture of the original sketch into the programme to use as guidelines made the result look quite different from the thumbnail.

The images were simple so they don't dominate the page. The ones in the print-out below were drawn with pencil because I didn't have them yet. I am thinking of using line drawings to keep the simplicity, also matching the Zine cover.


I think the last 'image' layout looks best as the placement is more dynamic than the others, and will be tested in InDesign next.