This project was absolutely a test in precision and resource organization. I think what I came away with most from this was a sense of needing to make sure layers were easily accessable and neatly organized so every little shape will be possible to adjust. The easiest part was figuring out what aesthetic to go for. I decided on a campground map-type look, inspired by my years in the boy scouts. The hardes part was definitely making sure everything fit, while still being big enough that you don’t have to squint to tell what they are. I still feel like I could have done better in this way, making things spaced and sized better. Also, the submission could likely use more pictures to illustrate what the instructions are saying, I find that makes things go quicker in general.

This piece gave me a lot of insigt towards the methods in which product designers go about making packaging, as well as what they need to be mindful of. The easiest part of this project wasn’t any one thing in particular for me, but making the background pattern was somewhat relaxing, as it allowed me to excercise my creativity in making an aesthetically pleasing bit of art. Definitely, the hardest part was at the end when I lost my project, and had to start all over from scratch. That’ll teach me to save my project. It’s equally unfortunate that my parents don’t have a printer at their house, so I was unfortunatly unable to make the carton. As far as inspirations go, I would say the general aesthetic most coffee shops utilize, mostly with varying shades of brown, is what inspired my choices of color here.

This is the banner and avatar I did for project 2. In it, I attempted to make the background out of marble with the gold pattern overlay. The effect was less of a sculpture and more like a simple pattern unfortunatly, and because I switched from Photoshop to Affinity Photo in the interest in saving money, I was unable to salvage the individual layers of the origional photoshop file, so large edits were made impossible.

The pattern was pretty difficult to make at first, as I used an image of leather with a shine to it. This second image worked perfectly, however, so much so in fact that I couldn’t tell when the pattern was offset, and I thought something went wrong. As for the other image I think that star pattern held within the circle shape looks very good, and I apologize if the red cloud in the background resembles blood at all, that was not the intention.

All of these images were taken around my dorm. These all represent small parts of my everyday dorm life here at Canisius, and the items in these spaces all have a story behind them.

These all are items I put into the scanner, to varying degrees of clarity. The Jerusalem cross was from a retreat I took in high school, the ring belonged to my grandfather a little under 100 years ago, and the emoji eraser is just a funny little thing I had laying around. The ring unfortunately barely fit in the scanner due to not being a flat object, but I kind of like the weird effect that came out of it.

These last three images are all things I just found, either on the internet or my camera roll. The first image is from a comic I follow where the character is punching himself in the face for complicated reasons, the second image is a screenshot I took of the announcement of the unfortunate passing of Mister peanut, and the last image is of my little sister Anna with my late dog Fred. All these images really don’t have anything connecting them per say, they’re mostly just interesting for their own reasons, I think.

In this project I learned a degree of minimalism, and how to do more with less. It wasn’t terribly difficult, but I did what I could to make the images coherent and visually appealing. The challenging part was the image tracing, especially with all the inevitable fine tuning and glitches that come with it. If I could make my project any better I would like to go back and maybe improve upon the image tracing quite a bit. I can’t really think of a way to improve this assignment for the future, for a project due for the final week of school its very lax, which is nice when other teachers are bombarding us with major projects, but it still teaches design concepts concerning more simple design traits. I was personally inspired to do this work by images of Palermo that lined the hallway to Tim Hortons on campus last year, I have family lineage tracing back to there and it’s always seemed like a beautiful, colorful place, perfect for a post card or postage stamp.

This project I learned that photoshopping images together requires a lot more small complexities that I originally thought. It was easy once I found two images that actually fin together well, but before that I had plenty of trouble making the images look like they fit, as well as conveying what I wanted to with the visual metaphor. I think I could improve the project by showing the lions from a side view, which would make a linear gradient all I need to make it look like they’re making the season change as they run. Unfortunately, I came to this realization quite far into the project, so I just finished it instead of starting over from scratch. I think this assignment could maybe be improved by maybe being more specific on what sort of visual metaphor we should be creating. Even now, I feel like I may have cheated myself on this project by making a pun instead of visualizing the actual meaning of the phrase, even if I kind of have a fondness of how the final product turned out. I think I can definitely use what I’ve learned about harmonizing two images together in later projects, like how the lions running in the grass had parts of their limbs cut off by the magic wand tool in the early design, which made it look quite fake. If I had to attribute inspiration to one specific source for this piece, It would have to be album art from classic rock songs I’ve been getting into lately. Specifically album cover art from Dio and Journey made me want to try something with a sort of fiery action, while also being kind of abstract.