For this project, I utilized Adobe Photoshop as a baseline for developing an image for a metaphor I think about often. In terms of the metaphor “justice is blind,” we often visualize a blind woman in the form of a statue representing Justice holding the scales, though I visualized a more modern and personified approach where the Scales needs a white cane to navigate its environment.

For this project, I found that envisioning a concept such as this requires a certain degree of imagination. It was not difficult to imagine this concept, but the amount of originality that should always go into graphic design weighs on the conscience of the designer, so it’s important to find accessible yet copyright-appropriate material.

I found it easy to pick two images that seemed to show compatibility and fluidity, and it was similarly easy to remove a background from a white cane and a set of scales and add it to another image with a simple maneuver.

I found it challenging to place my blind scales in an orientation that made sense to the rule-of-thirds, which I heavily considered.

I’m still not entirely familiar with the rule-of-thirds and I feel as if I could have done more to line up my figure appropriately. That, and my methods of desaturating the colors in the scale may be a little rusty as I am not reacclimated to using Photoshop from the time I used to use it more frequently.

Simple does not always mean easy; the limitation to short metaphors can stifle the envisioning process of the designer and the process can often feel rushed. Perhaps extending the criteria to longer metaphors (or even idioms) can help with a visualized design that makes overall sense.

Should my employing director make a point of allowing me to create a fantastical design, I’ll be more aware of the process that leads to a successful product and fit as many subjects as needed into the image to make it seem appealing.

I took heavy inspiration from other students’ work. I feel as if their simplicity for their projects helped me to look outside the box.

For this project, I primarily chose locations that I knew would set an idea for places I would want to go to in the future and establish a baseline for the hidden history of my own hometown. For what it’s worth, I already had aspirations to at least vacation in Ireland and Japan, but my target cities had much more to offer than the aesthetic I held them in my mind for. As for Philadelphia, if I want to design a fictional cityscape that makes sense, architecture is something I can set my sights on.

During this assignment, I learned that there are more nuances in everyday designs that serve as aesthetically pleasing examples. As it stands, designers prepare their subjects to match or complement the established environment or canvas for a more appropriate look.

It was easy to choose the locations I prepared for each stamp. It turns out that if you favor the subject you’re designing for, you’ll enjoy the process much more.

The notion that there is plenty of work to consider for each location and there is a degree of bending reality to fit a complementary or triadic color design really toyed with my brain – I’m not used to breaking the rules though I feel I’m getting much better at it.

I imagine that if I learned to push out of my comfort zone with the subjects I chose, I could choose more relevant, yet challenging locations to research and design.

There was a slight confusion that gave me the impression there was supposed to be four topics of interest for each location. A slight panic set in when I wasn’t entirely sure whether I was supposed to have 16 designs or four.

When I’m designing video games, there will be times where scenery or character position will matter when their designs need to complement each other and set each other apart. If I want to go for designing tile screenshots where there is limited space for design and contrast, I need to factor in my skills here.

Other students’ examples put my goal into perspective. It was difficult to imagine the process was simple and that the designs could be minimal yet effective, but seeing other students factor their imaginations in so simply let me know that it was fair for me.

In this project, I found it necessary to decrease the saturation and increase the luminosity of the background theme, as it became difficult to see the text in front of it.

Prototyping was undoubtedly the smoothest aspect of the project. Once I placed the elements, I followed along, registering each of the flow elements with the corresponding screens they should be showing.

Acquiring the gumption and inspiration to achieve a workable, presentable prototype was no easy task. At this point, I’m satisfied that I followed through with my promise to myself to complete it on time.

Likewise, to my third Digital Illustration project, I wish I gave myself more time and patience to work on this.

I can’t see this project changing any time soon if we end up ridding ourselves of the COVID-19 pandemic in the next few months. However, I’m inclined to see it call for a more customized approach so that users of the newly-defined applications hold more personality while using them.

Should I be tempted to make another application soon, I’ll remember to keep peak fluidity and accessibility in mind.

I was particularly feeling fixated on puns and ecstatic about the irony of restaurants’ priciness for good food, so I combined my feelings and worked towards an arduous-to-realize concept, strangely.

In this project, I learned a crucial point of making the text more visible through decreasing the opacity of the backgrounds of the icons.

The least-arduous aspect of this assignment was acquiring a proper selection of images. In my case, I used them for reference and as backgrounds for the various icons. Unsplash has an outstanding selection of creative commons images, and I think the photographers and artists are worthy of such praise.

For me, deciding how I wanted to design the spot illustrations was painstaking. There were many possibilities and opportunities, and I took way too much time accounting for the work we put into labs, learning the many concepts we needed to know to explore for the project. In short, I should’ve acted far sooner than I did.

With more time and patience, I could improve this piece by listing menu items for the tavern. I’m better off designing, but planning is one of my pet peeves.

Perhaps it’s my missing the preparatory classes that defined how I visualized the concept, but it might also be the lack of art style examples shown on the assignment document that held me back. I appreciate references to other students’ works, but it gives an unseemly idea of what the professor is looking for out of a finished piece.

I’ll consider many of the elements I learned in this piece when I’m completing my fourth project in this course. Spot illustrations are minimal yet entertaining, and I have much more to learn from the potential I can achieve with them.

Ryan Gelder’s project, at https://ryangelderdma.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/project-3/, gave me much-needed inspiration when I was finishing this project. It taught me the ideals of spot illustration that have a range yet a boundary towards what artists should discover for their works.

After personal consideration, I chose the Celeste: Farewell album over The Three Caballeros movie poster for simplicity’s sake. Designing and re-designing the aves raras was a lot less appealing to me: someone who has a soft spot for gradients.

In this project, I learned that there’s a condition for “merging” objects in Illustrator so that they share an effect, such as drop shadow, instead of laying Effects over each other. Grouping is the only solution I’ve figured out so far, but it works for me.

Live Paint Bucket saves the day again, giving me hope and a clear-cut, quick way of flat coloring in Illustrator. I find it easy to use in time-constrained situations, and it provides a unique level of satisfaction in a vector-based program.

Okay, scratch what I said about how much I love gradients – I love gradients, but everywhere but Illustrator. Designing a new gradient is an adventure I don’t think I’ll ever get over, and neither is applying a gradient to an object that already uses another gradient since the gradient tool recognizes the old gradient as that which you want to use when it isn’t.

Creating inventive backgrounds is something I struggle with for all facets of art, and I’m slightly ashamed of how quickly I overlooked that for this project. I also know not to beat myself up over it, but I know it’s still important that I get it done, rather than not.

I find it hard to make decisions in personalized settings, and the personality of creating a chosen movie poster or album cover is the indecisive’s nightmare. If it comes to be such an issue that I don’t know what to start with, I’d like to see more examples than just a movie that pokes fun at sharks.

This project got me to test my Pen Tool skills, and it let me understand more about the tools and how they work to create lines and curves – especially in a setting where I had to work quickly to achieve a finished product.

I found Becky’s Project 2 (https://razzchan.wordpress.com/2018/10/18/project-2-5/) a great source of inspiration with the consistency of used effects and their fields of application, especially in separating the foreground and the background.

I decided to grab a picture of Mark Fischbach (Markiplier) for Project 1. Creating it took a while, but it was worth the effort.

For Image Tracing, I learned that I needed to choose the Extend option to show the paths of the traced image and use the Re-Color option for the custom palette. (There’s nothing particularly interesting about how I used it, but I know there were some difficulties about using it in the last lab.)

I found it easy to use the filters and image editing techniques that we learned from the first two labs. Although some of the work took time, it’s intriguing discovering the outcome.

The most challenging part was deciding the variety of content to use for the image. I didn’t have much content to begin my illustrating with, after all.
Next time, I think I should spend more time finding a celebrity who has more Creative Commons usage to their name. Markiplier, fortunately, has much content available to the public, although I couldn’t access most of it in picture form.

The selection of inspirational art was impressive and informative, but I’d still like to see examples that relate closer to the project we’re currently doing than various, unrelated artists.

With the time I’ve spent on the project, I think it was worth the redundancy in visual effects and decision-making that I now have an idea of promotional illustration and development. I don’t have any doubts that many people go through the process of creating multiple works in short amounts of time, and I think this project was a highlighting point of what I might be in for if I go into graphic design. \

The “EXPLAINING HOW I CREATE NEW DIGITAL ART” video was a great source of inspiration since my idea of making digital abstractions wasn’t too strong when I began. With the idea that I could still use something so precise and definitive to make something wacky, I felt empowered.

For this project, I came to understand the importance of compression, whether it’s lossy or not, and to know when is the best time to use each for specific jobs. Especially, in this case, the lossiest compression was the only way I could reduce the file size of some of these images.

I found it easy to practice level and curve adjustment when it came to touching up these photos. It was interesting to see the photos change drastically, and shift in tone and presence as if they weren’t taken from a camera after all.

The most challenging part of this project was its longevity. There weren’t too many times that I found myself completely disinterested in the process, but I found that it was getting repetitive when I had to crop every image the same way when all I really could’ve done is use a batch function or separate UI to crop multiple images at once. I don’t know if that’s possible without letting my computer catch on fire, though it’s certainly not a bad idea.

My submission could be improved by finding a better variety of images. Plain and simple.

I can’t be confident whether it would help, but instead of moving images to InDesign, each image could be placed onto a new artboard in Photoshop and be converted into a page each through its export function.

When it comes down to creating future portfolios, I will consider using this kind of formatting again. I don’t plan on doing it any time soon, but I might not know until I need it.

With this project, I learned how to control the opacity of a layer and its various elements and position it so that it can be layered on top of the layer that I’m working on if the image turns out to be as simplistic as this. Most of the time, I work by positioning the original image under the layer I’m working on, but that honestly seems more problematic in this case.

I found it easy to use the stroke thicknesses to create different roads using different thicknesses of strokes, and different line styles.

The most difficult part of this project was designing the icons for the legend and the map itself since clicking on multiple objects and buttons was the only way I could remember how to operate the Live Paint tool.

I’m actually not certain of how my assignment could be improved. Perhaps if I chose a smaller or larger target image from Google Maps, I could’ve had a more accurate map or a more detailed one, respectively.

I think the assignment could be improved by adding a suggestion to use specific color palettes for the map. I want to stress the difficulty of creating adequate maps with color palettes that consist of colorblind-friendly triads since many colorblind people have difficulty differentiating colors.

I may apply the knowledge that I’ve gained here to create more intricate and/or fanciful maps. I’m a big fan of world-building and that’s especially the case when I’m writing stories or designing roleplaying game campaigns.

In creating this project, I was able to pick Premiere Pro up again and learn about the various animation effects that come with it. One such effect was the translation feature, which moved the video layers across the screen.

The easiest part about the project was creating markings that would help me to shorten video clips to accompany the music with perfect timing. There was only some lag after I created a mark, but the precision in placement was dead-on.

The most challenging part about the project was properly navigating Premiere Pro as I tried using the keys to type on a Text layer. It turns out that I had unintentionally made Mark In and Mark Out points on the same frame, giving me only one frame of material upon export. It’s not only that they were there in the first place, but that I didn’t know that until I looked up a video explaining the mistake.

I feel as if I could improve my submission by exploring a little bit further from my neighborhood and my house to find locations or sights that would make me feel content. Not everybody finds everything as becalming and spiritually-lifting, but not everybody is the same; I felt as if I needed to emphasize that more.

The assignment could be improved in the future through a more detailed explanation of Premiere Pro and its features. I was lucky because I’ve already used the software, and others like it, but I can imagine that nobody could come off without some difficulty.

Given my fascination with tracking video effects and properly-synthesized musical fades, I can use software – either Premiere Pro or something else – with this knowledge to have some semblance of what my limitations are, trim them out, and see the possibilities. I’m very happy when making films and I feel pretty encouraged to see what I can do.

I learned that although modeling, importing, and positioning are important in properly developing a Unity game, there are moments that coding has a significant part of how a game will react to the player, such as a coin being collected.

I found it easy to apply textures to the terrain and to materials for different objects, such as the coin and the walls. Even for elements, such as those aforementioned, it was intriguing to find that materials and textures don’t share the same features, so creating new materials from textures was especially rewarding.

I found it challenging to stay focused amidst the exaggerated time that it took for the program to import assets into the editor so that I could build the game. It feels like I can still find ways to speed up the process since it wasn’t pushing my computer very hard at all to do very little.

I feel like the play area walls were too disjointed and rough-looking, though I guess that’s to be expected of an imperfect system as such and with an inexperienced author like myself.

The assignment could be improved for the next class with more emphasis on engaging with multiple collectibles as a personalized option instead of one that we need to build from scratch or from an already-existing code. I understand that C# is an easy language but it still takes time to program.

I might apply this knowledge in a future scenario to familiarize myself more intimately with the tools at my disposal. I liked Unity but to do so much in so little time leaves me to wonder what it would be like if such an assignment was sprung upon me while I was beginning my career.

I found that the in-class screencast was very helpful, despite the missing parts about deleting malfunctioning scripts and code. I was easily able to understand the different tools that I was given and I’m glad I could fabricate such a simple, yet intricate project.