Book Cover Design

Bookcover:
I used the classic book Lord of the Rings and created my own style of book cover by using Photoshop and illustrator to create images and effects on the images to give it a Lord of the Rings feeling to it.

Type Figure Booklet

Type Figure:

This booklet was created with the type figures I created. By manipulating the size and orientation of the images and printing it out landscape.

My Type Assignment

 This piece has a grenade in the place of the 'A' thus showing the image in the name of what the image is.

I used a smiley face and used bitmap color mode to change the image to black and white and create a counter for the 'A' out of the white smiley face.

 I used the circular shape of the dart bard to represent the 'O' in the word Dart Board.

 By using a picture frame in this phrase I complete the sentence without actually using the word "framed"

 By using the pictures of a shell and a fish I have created a phrase without actually using words.

 By looping the bucket handle over the tail of the "G" and slightly moving the G down I have made it so that the bucket hanging is actually effecting the text.

















By using the write on a path tool I have created a curved piece of text that actually says curve.















Adobe Indesign:
Using InDesign as a layout software is a great option if you need to manipulate text to really get your message across and make some very creative layouts and texts. It would be great for making pamphlets, invitations or flyers.

InDesign Text Selection

Click:

 Cursor is placed in desired spot.

 2 Clicks:

Selects entire word

 2 Clicks and Drag:

Highlights anything below

3 Clicks:

Selects entire line

3 Clicks and drag:

Selects line and anything underneath

4 Clicks:

Selects whole paragraph

 4 Clicks and Drag:

Highlights everything below cursor

5 Clicks:

Selects everything on page

Type Figures using Adobe InDesign

Using individual text boxes and moving them around the page I created a Christmas tree using capital A's and and I

Using the same method of individual text boxes I arranged the letters to look like a mountain range which is the phrase I used.

I created a rough shape of a sword using the pen tool and then used the wrap text tool and then deleted the stroke on my sword shape giving the look of the text wrapping around a sword.

By creating a text box and putting in an emoticon and then rotating the text box to make the emoticon upright, I have created a picture that goes in a sentence.

By changing the text on my page into a raster image I was able to manipulate the pixels as if it were a normal image. therefore I used the lasso tool to select the top half of the text in such a way that it looks cracked and then slightly moved it to give it that look.

Logo Design and Layout Stages

Audience:
The target audience for my work is my class mates to let them see and critique what i have done and the skill I have applied to this piece of work.

Gestalt:
I have attempted to utilize gestalt by creating a obscure version of an aboriginal/Maori design for my logo. Maori and Aboriginal art traditionally uses gestalt anyway so just applying the basic styles and rules that they use, the gestalt aspect of my logo sorted themselves out.

Summary:
Throughout my design stages I attempted to integrate my love of fantasy games and movies by making my 'M' some sort of weapon as you can see in my thumbnails but I found it some what difficult. Another attempt I had was to put the Lombardi trophy in my 'A' which actually worked quite well and was going to be my final logo but at the last second I thought I should stick to my roots and go with a traditional style aboriginal/Maori style logo. Using gestalt in my final logo wasn't too difficult. I just had to get some inspiration from Google then let my creative juices flow and it turned out quite good.


The Bottom Line:
The technical side of the assignment was fairly straight forward however the actual creative process was quite difficult. Being so new to gestalt it took me a while to fully understand all the rules and tricks that you can use when creating a gestalt image. After much trial and error I finally landed on my design which has utilized gestalt throughout the whole logo.

Low Quality raster LOGO Reconstruction in Vecotr Format

Preperation:
I scanned this image with 600 ppi to ensure that there were a lot of pixels in the image to begin with. Scanning in Grey scale not only makes it a small file size but is logical due to the image being in grey scale.


Clean up in Photoshop:
Due to the fact that this image is in grey scale form the start you can manipulate the black and white levels to remove most of the unwanted data.


Live Trace in Illustrator:
Live tracing this image in illustrator further improved the overall quality of the image to make it one step closer to its total reconstruction.


Logo Reconstruction using Pen Tool:
 By learning to manipulate the pen tool in so many ways allowed me to trace the pix-elated batman and create a new overall shape for the logo. The pen tool was also used to create a much smoother oval shape around the logo. After filling the trace with black and deleting unwanted anchor points that were sticking out I was left with a batman symbol that resembles the actual thing. Then after filling in the oval with the classic batman yellow and using a thick black stroke for the border the result was quite good.


File Formats:
During the entire process I was saving these as "ai" files so that I could go back and manipulate them further if i made a mistake at any point.






Advice on Vector Creation:
Biggest piece of advice I can offer is to not get frustrated when doing projects like these because your always going to make mistakes but you will eventually produce the product that you envisioned it to be.

High Quality RGB Converted to Vector

Original GiF

    Original Image GiF:
    This is the original GiF that has a very small resolution that we needed to
    manipulate and make it bigger without damaging the quality of the image
    too badly.

Enlarged Vectorized GiF

Enlarged Vectorized Image:
This image has had the resolution increased to 1000 pixels, traced to high fidelity then vectorized in an attempt to re create the original image but in a larger size.

Raster RGB and INDEXED increased Resolution Quality Comparisonnde

Indexed Color (1000px)

RGB Color (1000px)

Indexed:
Leaving this image in index mode and then increasing the resolution to 1000 pixels wide does not better the quality of the image at all.












RGB:
Changing the image to RGB then increasing the image size to 1000 pixels makes then image look better than index however it still looks bad. Putting the image in Illustrator and tracing it in high fidelity makes the image look much better and as close as possible to the original GiF.

Vector File Size Comparison

High Fidelity

 High Fidelity:
This image has been traced with high fidelity therefore keeping a large amount of colors thus having a very large amount of anchor points throughout the image. Due to a lot of the color still in the image it is a much larger file. (4.9MB)

3 Color

    3 Color:
    In this image there are only three colors present due to it
    having a three color trace on it. The amount of anchor   
    points is drastically less because of lack of colors. This a
    much smaller file size due to the lack of colors. (457KB)

10 Point Stroke Line

   10 Point Stroke Line:
   This is a 10 point stroke line with only two anchor points. Due to the
   fact that there is only 2 colors this is a much smaller image size yet it is
   some how bigger than the 3 color trace image. (625KB)

Raster and Vector Converting

Apple

 Apple:
Due to the fact that the apple logo has many shades of blue I had to change the amount of colors that the vector image has to maximum. By doing this you can see very faint lines in the image which are the the color sections that i can manipulate in Illustrator.

Batman

Batman:
The batman image was a very easy image to create a vector image due to the image only having three colors. There are no noticeable changes when expanding this image.

Sony

Sony:
The sony image could not be recreated into a good looking image when converting to vector due to the fact that the original image was only 140 pixels.

Firefox

Firefox:
The firefox image is similar to the to apple logo in that there are a lot of colors to account for when converting. The faint lines are still present which represent the areas that the vector has selected.

PEN TOOL