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Oct. 6th, 2006 03:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kirkcudbrightThis semester's class is Advanced Graphic Design, so the projects are bigger and...more advanced than in previous classes.
Here is the brief for the first project:
We got this assignment around the time of the 9/11 anniversary, and was reminded of the days right after the attacks, when the whole world mourned with us (with a few exceptions in places like Palestine). And it wasn't just sympathy over the loss of "our" people, but also direct mourning for "their" people. Because people from all over the world worked in the World Trade Center. We really are part of a global community, whether the buttheds in Washington or Texas like it or not.
So that's how I approached the assignment, as a reminder of the connections we share with every other country of the world - connections that go in both directions, with Americans living abroad, as well as foreigners living here. The project is ostensibly for the foreign audience, but I think it works just as well for the domestic audience.
As usual, you can click on the picture to see a larger version. In this case, you can click on the larger picture to get a full-size pdf.
I spent an insane amount of time on the graphic for this. There are around 50 flags shown here, each carefully (or carelessly in some cases) placed, rotated, and stacked. I made light use of a displacement map to wrap the flags around the hands. The background was originally black, and the two adult hands faded into black before the edge of the frame, which is okay on black, but would have looked really weird on a transparent background, so I reconstructed wrists and, in the case of the lower one, a sleeve (with a tad too much texture).
The small text says "Citizens of every country of the world live and work in the United States. Citizens of the United States live and work in every country of the world." That and the headline constitute the main text, which communicates my central point, but just leaves the point dangling. The tag line "America, Your Neighbors" is only there because the instructor insisted the poster needed a closer and a sponsor icon.
The putative sponsor is the Bureau of International Information Programs, which is an actual office in the State Department, which actually sponsors stuff like this (but they probably don't put their bureau name on posters). The cheesy icon took about 5 minutes in Illustrator; I'm not proud of it, but I'm not overly embarrassed either.
The flags are scraped from flags.net; the hands and background flag are by way of google images, and I really should go back and credit them properly, at least in my own records.
Eh. I started this one first, and finished it last (as in this afternoon). The idea here was to represent different countries with different colors, and represent the US with a sort of acid-trip rainbow.
The first problem is that, while flags are recognizable as flags, even if you don't recognize the particular flags, there aren't that many countries that are recognizable out of context, and almost none are universally recognizable. Here Egypt is standing in for the entire continent of Africa, and Francie didn't recognize it. Worse yet, Mexico and Cuba (both in North America) are standing in for the whole of Latin America, because I couldn't find a South American country that was recognizable when decontextualized.
The second problem is in the coloring. The US looks like some kind of insane weather map at full size. For the other countries, I added a Clouds filter just to have some texture (because nothing's more boring than big areas of flat color), but that works better in some cases than in (most) others; Italy looks like complete ass in the print-out.
The colors and the placement of countries are completely haphazard, and the background was an afterthought. And the text has some bad interactions with the country borders.
All in all, not a great effort, and it's not going in my portfolio.
Now this is better. (Open with a strong piece, close with a strong piece.)
NYChildren is a project to produce portraits of children from every country in the world, who all happen to live in New York City at the time. These images are all scraped from that website; I don't know how to extract images from Flash, so I screen-captured each of these, and trimmed and re-sized them in Photoshop (I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit). These are some great photographs, and they came out surprisingly well for all that mistreatment.
I think the text here does the best job of contextualizing not just the images, but the poster itself.
I originally picked the font (Fatboy Slim) for this poster, then carried it through to the other two. It has the mood I was looking for, but it's not one of best or most completely designed of the freeware fonts. It has some sharp corners that should be curves on the capital W, the lowercase R, and the lowercase O (I changed to a capital O in the headline). It's also missing a lot of punctuation glyphs, like '-' and '&'. But it's good enough for this project, and these defects won't affect my grade one way or the other. Someday I'll get my hands dirty in font design, and then I might fix things like this.
The next project is to interpret a piece of music.
Here is the brief for the first project:
As we have all become aware by recent world events, the United States is not the most popular country in the world. One of the things it needs if it is to restore its international prestige is a major PR campaign. You have been commissioned to design/illustrate a series of three 17"x22" vertical posters as part of the effort. They should be executed in English with the knowledge that they may eventually be translated into a number of other languages.
We got this assignment around the time of the 9/11 anniversary, and was reminded of the days right after the attacks, when the whole world mourned with us (with a few exceptions in places like Palestine). And it wasn't just sympathy over the loss of "our" people, but also direct mourning for "their" people. Because people from all over the world worked in the World Trade Center. We really are part of a global community, whether the buttheds in Washington or Texas like it or not.
So that's how I approached the assignment, as a reminder of the connections we share with every other country of the world - connections that go in both directions, with Americans living abroad, as well as foreigners living here. The project is ostensibly for the foreign audience, but I think it works just as well for the domestic audience.
As usual, you can click on the picture to see a larger version. In this case, you can click on the larger picture to get a full-size pdf.
I spent an insane amount of time on the graphic for this. There are around 50 flags shown here, each carefully (or carelessly in some cases) placed, rotated, and stacked. I made light use of a displacement map to wrap the flags around the hands. The background was originally black, and the two adult hands faded into black before the edge of the frame, which is okay on black, but would have looked really weird on a transparent background, so I reconstructed wrists and, in the case of the lower one, a sleeve (with a tad too much texture).
The small text says "Citizens of every country of the world live and work in the United States. Citizens of the United States live and work in every country of the world." That and the headline constitute the main text, which communicates my central point, but just leaves the point dangling. The tag line "America, Your Neighbors" is only there because the instructor insisted the poster needed a closer and a sponsor icon.
The putative sponsor is the Bureau of International Information Programs, which is an actual office in the State Department, which actually sponsors stuff like this (but they probably don't put their bureau name on posters). The cheesy icon took about 5 minutes in Illustrator; I'm not proud of it, but I'm not overly embarrassed either.
The flags are scraped from flags.net; the hands and background flag are by way of google images, and I really should go back and credit them properly, at least in my own records.
Eh. I started this one first, and finished it last (as in this afternoon). The idea here was to represent different countries with different colors, and represent the US with a sort of acid-trip rainbow.
The first problem is that, while flags are recognizable as flags, even if you don't recognize the particular flags, there aren't that many countries that are recognizable out of context, and almost none are universally recognizable. Here Egypt is standing in for the entire continent of Africa, and Francie didn't recognize it. Worse yet, Mexico and Cuba (both in North America) are standing in for the whole of Latin America, because I couldn't find a South American country that was recognizable when decontextualized.
The second problem is in the coloring. The US looks like some kind of insane weather map at full size. For the other countries, I added a Clouds filter just to have some texture (because nothing's more boring than big areas of flat color), but that works better in some cases than in (most) others; Italy looks like complete ass in the print-out.
The colors and the placement of countries are completely haphazard, and the background was an afterthought. And the text has some bad interactions with the country borders.
All in all, not a great effort, and it's not going in my portfolio.
Now this is better. (Open with a strong piece, close with a strong piece.)
NYChildren is a project to produce portraits of children from every country in the world, who all happen to live in New York City at the time. These images are all scraped from that website; I don't know how to extract images from Flash, so I screen-captured each of these, and trimmed and re-sized them in Photoshop (I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit). These are some great photographs, and they came out surprisingly well for all that mistreatment.
I think the text here does the best job of contextualizing not just the images, but the poster itself.
I originally picked the font (Fatboy Slim) for this poster, then carried it through to the other two. It has the mood I was looking for, but it's not one of best or most completely designed of the freeware fonts. It has some sharp corners that should be curves on the capital W, the lowercase R, and the lowercase O (I changed to a capital O in the headline). It's also missing a lot of punctuation glyphs, like '-' and '&'. But it's good enough for this project, and these defects won't affect my grade one way or the other. Someday I'll get my hands dirty in font design, and then I might fix things like this.
The next project is to interpret a piece of music.
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