Goo Goo for GOCA

This was the final assignment for my visual journalism class. The idea was to create a 2 page spread from scratch with entirely our work. I chose Serbia native Gordana Rasic, a molecular biology major at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She also runs her own fashion design company called GOCA designs. She provided me with these great photographs in which i chose my color template for the spread. I took the pink tones used in the drop cap, sidebar and Serbia itself from the color of her lipstick. I chose the pale yellow color for the other countries from the background with the floral designs. I chose to make the pictures very large because they are so colorful and interesting. I mean she's a weird looking girl. I chose the headline, I don't really remember how, but I liked all the g's and o's so I decided to focus on the typography a lot. The sidebar is all about her struggles trying to pursue fashion while her parents rather her focus on her school work. I was pretty satisfied with this spread, not my best work, but I didn't hate it. 

Serbia, land of the raspberry

For this assignment we were to create a map of of country for our final project. We were doing a story on an immigrant to the United States and create an info graphic highlighting their native country. My story was about a girl whose family comes from Serbia, a country in eastern Europe. When I have done projects like this in the past I have used Adobe Illustrator, so it took me a minute to get used to layering on Adobe InDesign. The trick is to trace over a photography of the country we chose. By locking the map and making it more transparent it was easy to trace over it. I then traced each country individually and the Adriatic sea. I then created an embossing effect on Serbia itself to highlight it, not just with a different color.

Not so Frida

For this assignment we were given a story, written by our teacher, and photographs and were to create two different layouts to display his story. It was about a review of a new restaurant, La Cocina de Frida, in Andersonville. In the first layout I tried to keep it simple. Two of the main photographs at the top and story underneath. I added some embellishments with the horizontal green stripes to liven up the page a bit. I got a lot of disapprovement from my classmates, but I like them and I don't think they are too distracting. In the second layout I took out the embellishments and focused more on the typography. I created a symmetrical art portion in the top for the photos with the headline underneath.

Tickle me (un)red

This project, similar to my last post, was to restore an old photograph. Along with using the clone stamp tool I also retouched the colors and the borders. The most important part was to get the red tones out of the photo since they are completely overtaking the pictures. By playing around with the color levels using the levels and colors tools I was able to decrease the amount of reds.

Restore me!

For this project we were to take a pretty damaged photograph and restore it using Adobe Photoshop. The only tool I used with this was the clone stamp tool. By cloning small pieces of the photograph near the torn parts you can then clone that color onto the holes in the photography. With a keen eye and a lot of pertinence I was able to restore this photo and make it look brand new!

Turtle Wax

This was my midterm project. We were assigned to create a web site homepage using Adobe InDesign. I chose the turtle theme because honestly I did it very last minute and ran out of time and didn't know what else I could do. I started with creating the layout on a sheet of paper. I drew the headline banner and worked from there. Then my three photographs on the bottom, adding in a Turtle Wax advertisement, the Facebook and Twitter icons and some of my own writing. The final product wasn't really something I was happy with or proud of at all, but this is what happened.

Smile for the camera

Above are two photographs that were taken by me of my pet turtle. The top photograph was taken using a digital camera, the second was then edited using Adobe Photoshop. The first thing I did was crop the pictures because there was a lot of excess stuff on the sides, trying to keep the rule of thirds. I then sharpened the photograph slightly as well as toned the colors to make it seem more clear and vibrant. As journalists we aren't allowed to tamper with the photos too much, but just enough to give them a better look.

Gay Point Graphics

For this assignment we were to create an informational graphic, or infographic as we like to call them. The source was from a short story about the most 'gay friendly' schools across the nation. Each of the six schools was given a number, so a bar graph was most definately in order. I first played around with the hortizontal or vertical aspects of the angle. Everyone in my class went for vertical, so I went horizontal. I chose the blue because it is a pretty neutral color and juxtaposes the rainbow of color on the headline. Also blue is my favorite color. I then split up the bars and created an extra box for each number just to make sure the reader can clearly see which school has which score.

Recreating a Men's Health page

My version. 

Original copy. 

 For this assignment we were to recreate a page taken out of a magazine. I got a clip from Men's Health Magazine. I think the hardest part of this assignment was finding pictures that resembled the ones in the original page. I never knew finding a picture of a shirtless man on the beach could be so difficult. But besides the pictures I think everything else went okay. I started with the dominant photograph because that seemed to be as the focal point of the page. I then worked around that picture adding all the text and the top black headline. After I did the whole left side, I moved over to the right column. It was also a bit of a challenge to try to fit everything on the right side of the page in one single column. 

Painted Glass - Cool

Cool Colors

This design was again just taking my original black and white design and turning it into a color piece only using cool color tones. I absolutely love cool colors. Blue purple and teal are my favorite colors. I also like that the color blue can have so many different shades and yet still be blue and still be considered a cool color. So here I used a light blue, a sort of indigo color and purple. I chose to leave out green mainly because I don't like green and I think these colors are the most cohesive together. I felt adding a green color would through off the gradient balance thing going on. 

Painted Glass - Warm

Warm Colors

Taking the same design as the previous post, I just updated the colors from black and white to the use of more warm colors. I took away the background gradient component just because I felt a color heavy design didn't need it. Also I tried it with all the shades of warm colors and I couldn't pick one that I thought deserved more attention than the others. 

Tainted Glass

Black & White

This design was made as an introduction to Adobe InDesign using only black and white. I wanted to stick to something with simple shapes, because things tend to look messy when there are a lot of different shapes and sizes on one page. In order to give it some depth I used the gradient feather tool to each individual square as well as the background. This gives the appearance of an all-over gradient and a bit of transparency between squares.