For my project, I chose the alps- while not technically a country, the alps are a beautiful and interesting region of this earth. I hoped to capture some of the most distinct and visually gorgeous aspects of it in my stamps, and I think I’ve succeeded, personally!

You can see a lot of halftones on my stamps: I originally was going to utilize solid colors to create borders around the photographs, but I thought a combination of photographs with greatly altered colors and contrasts with halftones to accompany the larger set pieces would harmonize much better. I tried to use general palettes dictated by the main photograph to surround each photo with general harmony: I do admit that I have two ‘blueish’ palettes, but it’s what worked out (I didn’t want to alter the central photograph too much).

I’m also incredibly pleased with my font choices: finding fonts that felt fitting was probably the hardest part of this project, especially in figma- it doesn’t allow previews of the font on mouseover or previews of the fonts in general, but I think the fonts I ended up with are solid. I kept the font for ‘The Alps’ the same font and color while every other font used, even for the cost is different to maintain a sense of cohesiveness between each stamp.

I hope I created believable/realistic stamps! I aimed to create stylish, but functional stamps, and I’d like to think I succeeded.

This course was a wonderful experience: I learned a lot of helpful tools (especially figma) and principles that’ll remain with me in all my future projects.

Thank you so much for a fantastic course, Professor Dunkle!

Onto the next endeavor!

Sea of Fire

For this project, I utilized Figma (primarily its icon plugin as well as its in-house photo editor) and several photographs to create a visualization of a metaphor. My particular metaphor’s in the header above: I actually struggled between choosing this one and “Blanket of Stars”, which I attempted, but it ended up not being visually interesting enough for my liking.

I’ve utilized several sea photos, as well as a photo of the earth to try and create the sense of the globe or a ball of water being on fire- admittedly I think the final result looks a little like a warning about oils pills, but I think at least visually, it’s more interesting than my previous attempts.

I really wish I had access to photoshop for this one: particularly, my skills in Figma aren’t strong enough to create a full vector wave with all of its jagged edges, of which I wanted to portray and mask with a fire photo, but for what it’s worth, I definitely did try.

Onto the next endeavor!

Photographic sources, courtesy of the photographers at Unsplash:

• Close-up of fire at nighttime by Joshua Newton
• Earth with clouds above from NASA
• Crashing Waves by Ivan Bandura
• Photo of ocean waves at daytime by Christoffer Engström

Once again, I had personal difficulties outside of the project; but I found this project in particular quite interesting, especially forcing myself to use only figma’s tools and use them in an artistic sense like this. I feel like my landscapes could be more ‘impressive’- while I feel like my urban city and seascape are the strongest, my arid desert lacks a lot of detail compared to the two. Even though this project is not about detail (it’s about color), I do wish I had done more for it, even if I didn’t have too many ideas for it. Color is extremely important in design, and reinforcing these basics is incredibly useful for developing my skills. I do wish that I could have had stronger or more complex scenes, but for what it’s worth, I tried.

I’m going to save some of these palettes for later for personal use- making the palettes themselves and figuring what exactly should use each color was extremely fun.

Onto the next endeavor!

Sketches

I did a few sketches: mostly attempting to get a feel for how I would carry this out. The initial sketches were simultaneously too simple and not focused enough for what the project needed; I then went onto another set of sketches. This time, they were a lot more polished and ended up far more akin to the actual result.

The Project Itself

Taking on the actual project was interesting- I do think I could’ve definitely done better, though. Admittedly, I haven’t quite got the hang of Figma and plan to do better in the upcoming weeks. Besides that though, here’s the actual panels:

Zhenghui Shen’s article Robin Williams’ four basic design principles for non-designers was really helpful for this- even though its purpose was for page design, the principles (overlapping with or containing gestalt principles) are universal for design. Contrast was especially my primarily tool of choice for this assignment: and while I do think overall my panels look relatively geometric/inorganic (frame 3 definitely suffers the most from it- it became the most abstract, perhaps to a point where it’s not recognizable), I hope they’re legible in some format. Ultimately, I feel moderately satisfied, but mostly aiming to do better.

To next week’s endeavour!