I created each of these graphics you see explicitly using primitives – triangles, circles, boxes, rounded boxes, and stars.

The metaphor is “Love is war”. I used the comic book-halftone aesthetic, something which I’m quite fond of and seemed to really fit with this design.

The write-up below was done for a 2D graphics class, originally featuring a much earlier version of the design. It exists here for posterity.

The title banner will feature a bit more of a curved over appearance of depth, as you can see from the rough mock-up. The general lines of the streets will feature a sort of depth effect as seen there, giving them a sort of look of floating in front of the rest of the document. This will be true of all elements in this design, including the compass, which will be in the lower left corner of the image with a serif typeface using stencil-like cuts between the serifs of the letters. (I’m not sure of the exact way to word this, but it’s common in a lot of modern serif fonts.) The top of the compass will be accentuated with a fleur de lis design.

Underneath the banner will be a tree pattern which comes underneath the title banner and up to near the edge of the lake. I’m still going to experiment some with fonts for the street names, but I’m thinking an uppercase sans serif. I might back down on that and go with a serif font if it conflicts with the design, though; we’ll see how legible it is once the final design comes together.

In addition, the legend will go in the bottom center of the design, in the empty area where the street runs across. I’ll put more trees in that area, with a square box going across.

The biggest things going forward are cleaning up some rough edges – most notably on the lakeside – and adding the street names, as well as the aforementioned tree elements which will be added to many clear areas of the design.

The background on each side of the carton are designed using a custom 60’s inspired pattern. The front of the packaging will feature a pie slice with a retro-inspired crosshatch, and a title in the same font as the custom oat creamer logo reading “APPLE PIE SPICE”.

However, I was having some notable scaling issues with the graphic – when it’s reduced in size, for some reason it gets strange artifacts. Here’s a demonstration to show what I mean:

If anyone knows how to fix this, let me know. The blue box on the back of the container will have a product description, as well as another image in the lower corner to reiterate the general theme.

The first side panel will feature the circular designs accompanied by either a white or black stripe, off of which will be similar text blurbs to the official product describing its individual aspects. I don’t think I’ll use the hemp cream one – that seems like a bizarre thing to advertise putting in your oat milk – but I’ll put the “plant-based” aspect on the front cover as the third circle.

Finally, the last side will feature nutrition and ingredient info. Again, similar to the official package, though I’ll likely do some tweaks to it for legibility on the sharply-detailed background. I’m also considering expanding the points on the design up into the edges of the box – again, opinions are appreciated on that.

1. Different cameras produce different results.

If you take two photos with different devices of the same image, you would initially expect that you would find the images to be for the most part identical.

However, that simply isn’t the case. Different cameras have different strengths and weaknesses, and working with each is an important piece of the puzzle. For instance, my parent’s wonderful Canon DSLR looks great in majestic, outdoor vistas, but under low light conditions, its colors look yellow and unrealistic, characteristics which might have to be tuned in a photo editor before using the image professionally.

In comparison, the image has far more blotchy grain on the iPhone 6, which leads its images to look more smeary as a result. This is caused by multiple issues – most notably, the iPhone camera has some significant post processing done to all images taken on the device. It also doesn’t feature the same adjustment abilities as the Canon camera, with a flatter lens which lacks the ability to do the kind of depth-of-field tricks you can with the Canon.

2. Work as close to the source as you can.

The idea of generational loss might sound like an old problem – in an era of digital things, it seems so easy to just download a copy of something and have a lossless duplicate of the future. But even with all of the technology we have today, there is often still a difficulty in finding the highest quality sources for a project.

Certain images, however, will have minimal losses when scanned. Generally, image objects (read: text or art documents) will not lose significant fidelity if scanned under optimal conditions, as their contents are essentially put together in lines or curves.

Also, be aware that a damaged image will be harder to recover information from, as it will require more work to get it in a completed state. Magazine images are notoriously riddled with these issues, requiring heavy processing to look decent in a digital format. (To name a few processes: descreening, despeckling, crease/damage/dust removal, color correction, noise reduction, and (in the case of extensive damage) segment perspective warp and correction. Here’s an example of almost all these issues in this 80’s aestheticized Sears catalog:

This image is a redesign of a bad chart, one which at first might not seem too bad but gets worse the longer you stare at it.

The first thing you’ll probably notice is that each of these companies are represented by their logos, and that those logos vary in size. However, these variations in size tell you basically nothing whatsoever about the chart itself, and therefore the values of each are explained by captions. Each of these also forcibly explains that they are “BILLION IN SALES”, something which not only could be unified by just putting a label on it, but also by not just randomly sticking the GDP of Afghanistan in the middle of your chart comparing fast food earnings.

The second thing is that the McDonalds logo is absurdly stretched, and whoever the designer was had the brilliant idea to stick it on the top left corner for no apparent reason whatsoever. This also interferes with the graphic of Afghanistan, which for some bizarre reason they half-covered with the other fast food logos. This makes the label for its GDP appear in the middle of the McDonalds M, which is a bizarre design decision overall.

There are quite a few odd decisions with those labels, honestly. For instance, why was it decided that the label for the vertical axis would appear in the middle of the work? Even if they were working with limited design space, rotating this text and putting it on the outer edge of the page would barely reduce the viewing area and still be legible.

Also, why is the Afghanistan GDP boxed? No other object is boxed except for the scale. At best, it’s redundant – the “BILLION IN SALES” text mentioned earlier already separates them – but at worst, it causes the unnecessary appearance of correlation with the (also unnecessary) “Billions of $” label. (Confusingly, this also appears in the middle of the chart, despite it being a label on the vertical axis. There is no connection between it and the other aspects of the chart, and it all in all just becomes more confusing.

But most problematic of all is that there is no consistency between the labels. Each zigs and zags wildly across the page, with no rhyme or reason in terms of height or structure. My chart attempts to make this information more legible, by adjusting the formatting of much of the work and making it far more legible.

While keeping the stylistic usage of the logos, it now follows a much more traditional bar chart. All of the logos have either been manually adapted to fit this new format or recreated from scratch using their original designs, like as is the case with the Burger King logo. The graph is also far more clear and legible, being obvious what it is depicting and demonstrating a clear point with its values.

However, to keep it in line with the original design, I had to integrate the usage of the Afghanistan GDP. In doing so, I considered what its real purpose was in the design – all it really proved is that the GDP of the country was smaller than the value of the largest companies.

Logically, then, I thought it must be there to provide a sort of scale comparison – but in doing that, it only really needs to compare to McDonalds, as all the other major players are tiny values in comparison.

That, in part, was the idea behind using a vertical bar graph like this – the idea really needs its own section when displaying the information, and as such it utilized a larger bar graph which displayed it.

In addition, both to give precise values and to give the strict data presented in the original graph, each bar is labeled with its exact value in billions of dollars. All of the labels in these graphics also use the font Antonio, a classy sans serif face which has a very professional edge.