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.

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.

In coding this webpage, I learned the importance of using a .css file to manage the style of a webpage in a concise, compact form that doesn’t directly relate to the .HTML file I was working on.

I found that replacing the information bound within the HTML file’s “chicken beaks” was the easiest part, and it helped me recall that these angle brackets help the HTML file create elements that a user can include in their program. I even added a new article so that I can fill out my educational information in the resume.

I found it troubling to find the coloration tags in the .css file, and I knew that these hex codes would change the overall color of my resume web page. They weren’t well-highlighted and I had a hard time finding them, but I suppose the difficulty of navigation is learning how to not be lost.

My submission could’ve stood to be more colorful, as compared with the color palette I had chosen. That being said, I don’t think the .css file was very liberal in terms of modification since I would’ve chosen different colors for the header texts in different sections. Perhaps the next variation of the project could also accommodate for that extra burst of creativity in students.

Knowing that a lot of graphic designers are commissioned or hired to design websites for people with the money to pay, I think these skills will come in handy for a part-time job or internship, creating websites for those who take up my offers.

I think the slideshow in the project folder helped me the most since it had a nice exemplar process that I could follow along with and check through my live previews in Brackets at the same time.

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.

Here it is! My Project 1 in all its spookiness!

With this project, I learned the means of using an artboard, where I can save lots of material on different panels and groups of shapes for easy reference and removing the need to tab back and forth between collections of images. I found it easy to work with these artboards, and I found it very fun to use the selection tools in order to eliminate some of the unnecessary white space that was included in some images. Printing and saving the card to a PDF were the most challenging parts, as I first found it confusing that Photoshop only saved one artboard to a PDF at first, and then printing the PDF didn’t allow the use of RGB, which made my card look sad and poorly-saturated. In the future, I think I should print from home where I have that luxury.

I don’t have any recommendations for updating this assignment for future classes.

In the future, I will consider artboards more frequently. It helps when I find greater value in constructing greeting cards instead of buying them.

The Wikipedia article on Print Design inspired me to do more with the text, even though I really ended up considering pre-made shapes and fonts. It was still inspiring, and it made me consider multicolored text in the same lines and colors that correspond to the schemes and themes of the pictures I included with the card.