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.

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.

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.

For my design, I decided it should be informative, yet also simplistic and pleasing to look at. To accomplish this, I chose easy-to-identify images for the front of the carton, simply explaining the apple flavor of the creamer. I also chose an aesthetically-pleasant color palette to use for the background so that no particular color would pop quite as well as the coffee cup and the apple on the front, and keep the type-on-a-circle graphics from blending into the whiteish colors on the background. I also kept the Elmhurst logo from being too light or too dark, as I thought there should be a happy medium within the disparity.