Xavier Doody’s DMA Blog

Project 3

doodyx — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 19:21:42 +0000

Through the package design project, I got a better idea of how companies formulate their physical products, and specifically learned how to utilize tools such as the pen tool for the coffee cup graphic and the roughening of the rectangle.
Setting up the initial design of the pattern with the previously-designed ‘Byrne Dairy’ logo was easy, and drawing the coffee mug itself was not difficult.
Constructing the physical carton itself was moderately challenging, but within the program itself, ensuring everything was legible after being ported was the most challenging part.
I could definitely work on the physical carton a bit more, but in terms of the design, the font choice and stylization could have more consideration placed on it.
I did not find any instructions to be missing or unnecessary.
Knowledge of Adobe Illustrator is definitely beneficial as I could see myself using the application to design other logos such as this, whether it be for a company, website, magazine, etc.
The mock-up construction video at the end of the slide helped me formulate the paper carton without absolutely destroying it.

Lab 6

doodyx — Sun, 18 Apr 2021 20:58:00 +0000

Having finished the tracing of the cow image, there are parts of the remade image which are of higher quality than the original, and vice versa. Tracing the udders was particularly difficult to match with the original image, with the original looking better overall, but many of the lines from the original image were not as precise or clear as done in the Adobe remake. This includes the sun, which had some jagged edges and wasn’t particularly rounded, as well as the points of the horns, which were relatively jagged as well.

Lab 5

doodyx — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 22:59:43 +0000

I found Lab 5 to be fairly simple, with the most difficult aspect of it being getting accurate gradients across the logo through the ellipses. The app’s tooltips are far and few between and requires either prior knowledge or learned knowledge to know what each individual slider and box does. Despite this, Figma’s user interface makes it very simple and easy to locate the tools, and traveling off the steps of the Google Slides to make other unlisted changes was also easy. The tutorial was very straightforward as well and was easy to follow and served as a good icebreaker into Figma’s features, all of which were very nicely tuned to transfer from the web application to the desktop application.

Project 2

doodyx — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 18:28:12 +0000

Project 1: Portfolio Reflection

doodyx — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 17:32:28 +0000

Throughout the process of making the portfolio, I learned more about photoshop, but also about InDesign, which I hadn’t ever used prior. I was able to figure out the different applications of the two softwares and where they differ despite their similarities. An example of this could be InDesign’s focus on individual pages in lieu of layers.
Creating thumbnails for each individual picture was fairly simple, albeit time consuming. The process itself was simple and helped me get more familiar with the keybinds and shortcuts bound in both PS and ID.
The challenging aspect of the project for me was finding feasible ways to cut down the images without losing quality or clarity. Many of the pictures I took were several megabytes due to my phone’s camera quality and needed to be sized down, some even after being saved for web.
I think I could have dedicated more time to properly cropping the pictures for a universal display, as I noticed the pictures appeared differently on varying screen resolutions and aspect ratios (e.g. My laptop vs. A library desktop)
I found the process and the instructions fairly straight forward, but felt the order of the steps was a little off-putting, as the project document mentions thumbnails and file management techniques very early on, and then again later on. I was able to get through the process once I read it over several times.
This assignment definitely allowed me to get a better understanding of the various tools used in the labs prior, but more specifically the shortcuts; They are great for timesaving and allow for a more rapid process, which I can definitely see myself applying in future projects.
Aside from the Zoom recording and the instructions, I cited earlier lab powerpoints (specifically Lab 3) for certain techniques such as the cutting of the background for one of the images.

Lab 3

doodyx — Sun, 28 Feb 2021 19:10:30 +0000

Of the three methods used, I prefer the magnetic lasso the most. It takes advantage of parts of a photo which stand out and is able to fairly accurately outline specifically what you are looking to cut. The only issue I can see arising is when there is little disparity between background and foreground, which the pen tool might be more useful for that.

The pen tool was, in my opinion, the hardest to master. It isn’t a hard tool to use, but it is significantly more time consuming than the others to get a clear and concise layer mask from. Positively, however, you get to more accurately cut things specifically how you’d like, and you are relying on your own raw input as opposed to assisted (magnetic lasso) or automatic (quick selection) methods.

A good way to improve the cuts would be to either dedicate more time to the cutting process itself, or to clean up any errors or faults with the marker tool on the layer itself. The latter will likely become more prevalent if you’re using the lasso and the quick select, whereas the former would definitely be relevant when using the Pen Tool as it allows you to make and undo individual points on the cut, where the closer they are, the cleaner the outcome.

Lab One

doodyx — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 18:56:10 +0000

Unsplash Photo

The photo I used from unsplash is of significantly higher quality than the one I took with my phone’s camera, as the lighting of the photo was considered and specifically placed to show the details of the dolls. The depth of field also emphasizes the center-most doll, while blurring the others. This is noticeable in the photo I took as well, albeit to a lesser extent, as the aperture is lessened on the phone camera as opposed to a professional one.

Newspaper

Looking at the two shots of the newspaper, the exposure on the scan evens the lighting out and makes the article legible regardless of the shadow present when the photo was taken. This shadow is visible is the photo taken from my phone, and the resolution overall is lower, making zooming into the photo more difficult to do without reaching a heavily pixelated view.

Drawing

The photo of the drawing and its scan differ in more ways than the newspaper due to the thickness of some of the lines. In the phone camera photo, all lines are fairly visible, regardless of how hard the lines were pressed against the paper. In the scan, however, the darker / heavier lines are more legible than in the phone photo, but the lighter lines becomes less visible, and the light shading within the mask becomes significantly less visible.

I can improve upon the quality of the photos by setting up more intricate lighting and focus more on shifting the environment in favor of the photo. Additionally, a professional lens or camera would also help bring the quality up, which would in turn allow for higher quality scans as well since I had taken the photos with my phone and scanned them to my laptop from my phone itself.

Hello world!

doodyx — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 19:41:22 +0000

Welcome to DMA Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!