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.