Marks and symbols reflection

What did you learn?

I learned the differences and similarities betweens marks and symbols in graphic design. From reading about pictographs and lettermarks to key ideas in symbols.

What is the difference between a symbol and a logo?

Logos most often use words to easily establish their brand name while symbols can use anything from a picture of a bull to a seashell. Symbols are harder to promote where as logos are not as difficult. When logos and symbols are used together they are called combination marks. Nike is an example of a company that has a symbol and a logo and then pairs them together so the symbol can be associated with the logo.

Key facts?

Good symbol designs should be able to be shrunk down to half an inch and still be legible. Making a symbol is difficult and choosing positive traits like upwards directions can allow others to see your company in a positive light with only a symbol. Combination marks are very helpful to introduce a brand if the company wants both a symbol and a logo in the future. Getting the viewer accustomed to the symbol will help you move on to using it without a logo.

Favorite thing learned?

I enjoyed learning about the difference between a logo and symbols and also requirements on making symbols. I always though that symbols and logos were the same thing! The requirements for making a symbol were very informative and will help me in the future!

Conclusions?

Overall, I got a lot out of this article and will be going back to it frequently, possibly printing it out and using it in personal projects.

Graphic Design Typography

Typography

While learning typography, I watched a series of videos and read an article about the basics and rules.

Reflections

Video Summarization

In the set of about 12 videos, I learned about things that seemingly go untouched upon in the basics of typography. I learned about how the spacing between a b and a d are going to be shorter because their round edge allows for the illusion of more space. Not only I learn about tips for aligning the text but also about the text itself. Vocabulary for different parts of type and about the families of type.

Video Takeaways

My biggest problem with the videos was how uninteresting it looked. You had a woman standing in front of a blurred white room and occasionally a demonstration or edit would replace her on the screen. I believe if this video series had more editing segments that were also more intresting, then it would have held my attention more.

Article Summarization

In the article it talked about 10 rules when creating typography like complementary fonts and Hierarchy.  It talked about limiting numbers of fonts but also how you can break the rules with typography.

Key Points Of Typography

• Match your fonts
• Apply the message you want to come across as
• Don't be afraid to go wild

Most Interesting Thing Read

The most interesting thing I read was about how it was possible to break the rules and come up with a good design. It was interesting because usually you follow rules to a T

General Thoughts And Conclusions

The articles and the videos were both very informative and helped me learn more, I only wish the way the info was presented was more interesting.

snowflake animation

With the snowflake project, we created snowflakes by duplicating a polygon. We created a window to view the snowflakes and added bump mapping to the wall, then animated the snowflakes falling. This was one of the easier projects and I still struggled with it greatly. Making the snowflakes fall down gracefully was my favorite part of this project. If I were to change one thing about my results it would be rendering my animation in the correct type.

Salt Shaker

The salt Shaker and cup project involved using revolve and lofting. With the saltshaker, Lofting was used to create the  glass container for the salt. This project was difficult with how specific and touchy some of the directions were and a general misunderstanding of Maya. I accidentally turned my shadows purple and have no idea how to fix it. If I could go back I would definelty ask for help with bump maps, the holes, lights, and basically everything. I have difficulty in arranging the lights to look proper and realistic. Its a lot harder than just grabbing 3 lamps, you have to edit the distance, brightness, color, shadows, ect. My favorite part of the project is the glass, it looks really nice.

Final for Graphic Design

What did you do this semester?

What were the projects?

The projects were

• Typography
• Infographic
• Vectoring faces
• Learning about format with the raccoon.

Face vector

The goal of this project was to use organic shapes to make a vectored portrait of ourselves. It did not take me very long since I did not go extremely detailed since I like the minimalism look. I still went as detailed as I could. My biggest challenge was getting the shapes correct and the face. In the original picture of me, my glasses warp part of my face so instead of having a circle for a head I had to use a unique shape and it made it difficult to add the shading correctly. I learned how to use the pen tool which would come in handy in a project I did in my own time. My overall opinion on this project is I like it. It would have been better if I could find out how to make a paint splatter and make it look like a graffiti minimalist portrait. I used my time in class a little too well in this project. I got done around 3 days ahead but it gave me time to work on some personal projects. I would come back to it once in a while and fix the nose and whatnot.

Infographic

This was one of my favorite assignments I loved being able to pick a topic I was interested in Informing people on. The project's goal was to take a topic we liked and inform people about it. Some challenges I faced was to just overall make it look good. My favorite panel is the title panel and I wish I gave my other panels a cool background like on that one. Along the way I learned a tool that I do not know the name of but is selected with shift-M. Some feedback I was given was that It was too wordy and a section I had was all words so I changed the section to decrease the overall wordiness

Raccoon/typography project

The project was to create a raccoon in illustrator and then use typography to make a postcard with the raccoon on it. I love typography but I have terrible handwriting. This project took me the longest and I became a little behind. Some challenges I faced was creating the graphics. I was not accustomed to illustrator at this point and following the written directions was a little confusing since I did not know where anything was. In my opinion this is one of those projects that you think you did bad on but you learned a lot from it.

How did you use your time in class?

I used my time wisely some of the time. Sitting in silence working on the same thing for an hour is a little boring but it was fixed when I decided to listen to a podcast while I worked. I stayed productive in my times of being done, I have 3 side projects that I worked on when I was completed. Outside of class I like to look at fonts and practice typography and even sketch out future projects I'd like to work on like making stickers using adobe illustrator.

Areas of graphic design

My biggest area of strength is my passion. I love to draw digitally and although it's not with an expensive art tablet I still enjoy it. I also want to go into advertising and graphic design as I get older and possibly use these skills to open my own bakery.

Some areas I need improvement on are staying focused for long periods of time. My podcast has helped with that but the podcast won't always be there for me.

Summary

overall I'm 100% certain that I want to choose this class to have for the rest of the year. I loved learning skills and finding my passions in this class. The only thing I would do differently is to redo my raccoon project since it looks very bad. My take away is that I love graphic design and would like to pursue it as a career. Next semester I would like to add personal touches to my in class projects and do some more out of class projects to test my skills.

Final

In this project I actually got to animate the panorama and I learned how to place things so they can be used as a panorama. I picked this project because it was easy yet challenging. I had to do something easier so I could manage my time but I had a lot of issues with it. Iv'e improved with my use of the pin puppet tool and panoramas.



I was given this Ball project after being gone for a while so it's very amateur. I learned how to use after effects with this and it was a real learning experience. Looking back I can see tons and tons of flaws, the whole thing is a bad flaw


I like my worm animation, I think it's funny and the worm is based on Griffin McElroy, a funny cool radical dude. The griffin's goofers is a reference to something he did in one of his videos

Panoramic animation

In this project we created a Scene and animated it as if it was in a 3d space.
I made a lot of mistakes with this project including but not limiting to:
Drawing it wrong
Spending too long on drawing it and having no time to animate
messing up the format

Some things I think I did well with were the overall aesthetic of the plain drawings. My cloudy rock field had a lot of detail not present in the final animation. I learned to not get over-ambitious with these projects or I won't have enough time to finish them. I had a lot of fun designing the clouds and coming up with a theme/ design for this project.