Tag: Art125A 2D Design

  • Lighter by yung pueblo book cover redesign

    Lighter by yung pueblo book cover redesign

    For our final project in CCSF Art125A 2D Design with Claire Brees, we redesigned some cover for some other art media. For example, movie posters, album covers, book covers. I chose lighter by yung pueblo.

    Observations

    Very silly busy. Too many book quotes in the back. Long quote on cover. Sticker.

    Then there’s a lot of simple stuff. Plain yellow which is eye catching but not very interesting once I pull it off the shelf. Says very little about the content. Text design is simple, supposed to be less intimidating I think to imply that meditation is simple.

    Things to take advantage of:

    • Figure Ground reversal
    • Color
    • Direction
    • Movement
    • Organization

    Brainstorm

    I want to make a gradient from purple to red to yellow, bottom to top. This will be a visual movement of getting “lighter”.

    Lighter font should be much lighter weight, maybe of it floating away? Could be a bunch of balloons lifting you up

    Figure of a meditation person in the middle, legs crossed

    Shadow cast by the meditator is full of words like ANXIETY, BLAME, JUDGEMENT, RUMINATION, AMBIGUITY, FEAR, STRESS, TENSION, DEPRESSION, GRIEF, PAIN, LOSS

    Sketch

    First Iteration

    Feedback from group and profa.

    Lighter letters for words

    Dark yellows

    Blues are too close to the blues.  Maybe mix them.

    Lighter is not readable

    Quote in front could easily go o

    To the back

    Make more gradient for yellow?

    Pile of words and letters is pretty cool.  Color is less readable.

    Hard geometry is counter to the text and image which is soft and yielding.  Uneven.  Maybe more radial.  Harsh and sharp.

    Bring in another image for the back?

    Iteration 2

    1. What did you learn from the first iteration and take forward into the second? The text was not readable. It felt very geometric and rigid, which is not zen. The pile of words is interesting but the idea doesn’t really come across clearly.
    2. What did you change in the second iteration? Why? How does this more clearly relate to your intended message? Instead of geometric lines, I decided to make a mountain-scape gradient to give a more natural feel, like retreating into the mountains to meditate, which is what the author did. I also altered the colors on the text to have a backdrop and sit between two background colors to make almost a figure-ground illusion to make the text look like it’s actually lifting up from the page, pushing the “lighter” feeling.
    3. What are the most successful aspects of your second iteration (in terms of communication). I think it’s far more readable and feels much more fluid. I’m feeling pretty good about the design overall, though I want to tweak the colors a bit.
    4. What are the least successful aspects of your second iteration? (in terms of communication). I completely removed the pile of words and want to re-incorporate it. I also feel like the back cover feels a bit empty. Maybe that’s a good thing, but it currently feels a bit unintentional.

    Iteration 3

    Here I lightened some yellows, centered the back text more, and added “…” ellipses to imply continuation.

    Overall, I’m happy but found the yellow to be too light. I worked on my piece at night so “True Tone” in my iPad made the yellow much more yellow.

    Final Submission

    Made the body more yellow saturated. Overall, I’m very happy!

    1. Discuss your choice of artwork to redesign – your response to the original design, and your relationship to the content (music, book, movie, etc) I chose the book cover for lighter by yung pueblo. I found the book kind of fun to read and I love the messaging of the book. It drew my attention because of it’s bright yellow color, it felt dominant, flashy, and interesting. However, the book cover did not really sell me on what it was about. It felt too simple to the point where it doesn’t convey enough to interest me.
    2. What aspect of the content are you trying to communicate with your design? I want to emphasize that the book is about meditation, self-love, and improving your own mental health. I want to keep the simplistic design because the book is very straight forward and the approaches in the book are easy to apply.
    3. How do your final design choices support your intended communication? (design choices = design elements and principles, ie color, image, value, balance, unity, hierarchy etc). I kept the strong yellow tones because it is what initially pulled my attention. I simplified the design elements to just be the title, author, a meditating person, and a gradual organic gradient going from a dark purple to a light yellow to symbolize a journey from darkness to lightness. I matched the design across the front, back, and spine so that the reader is lead across the whole book cover, rather than just one aspect of it. I added a lot more dark values (purple and black) to contrast against and emphasize the lighter yellows, making it feel even brighter and “lighter” than before.
    4. What did you learn from the iterative process and what were the most significant changes you made? The biggest change I made was to embrace a more organic and less geometric feel. Meditation is about relaxing, releasing rigidity, and going with the flow. Organic line shapes are much more fluid than geometric and was an amazing leap forward in my design. My biggest difficulty was making things readable while having fun with colors and I found I really just needed to keep playing around with them over and over again to find something I’m happy with.
    5. What do you find most successful about your final design? I’m very happy with how I kept the design very simple. I tried to incorporate a lot more information than before: self-love, meditation, enlightenment, etc. But I was able to actually simplify the design and remove much of the clutter from the page.
  • Design Analysis in Real Life

    Design Analysis in Real Life

    1. I really like the heavy saturated colors that almost fill the whole page that highlights the heavy bold title of the book. It feels like strong messaging. The colors are vibrant and uplifting as are the words “Be A Revolution”. Looking closely, the font is pretty sharp, all the curved shapes are actually a series of angled lines, almost like it was cut out of metal. Even the repeated letters have a lot of little variation: the hole in the “O” is rotated, the height of the “E” changes. The “I” and “L” wiggles around. I really don’t like
    2. The cover expresses a warmth and uplifting message about the contents in the book through the colors. The messaging is positive, but the layout of the title vs the subtitle is really confusing. The title line-breaks on “Revolution” and sprinkles two subtitles in-between. It reads really awkwardly, forcing you to look up and down and up and down. I think this was intentional to represent “oppression”, where one short but loud message overtakes a much longer but quieter one.
    3. Using the above discussion criteria (principles, elements) discuss how specific aspects of the design communicate feeling, mood, content appropriate to the content it is illustrating.

    I picked up “Be a Revolution” by Ijeoma Oluo from SFPL and absolutely hate the cover for so many reasons. First, lets’ talk about the stuff the library put on top of the book . They covered the author’s name with the barcode sticker and like 1/4 of the title with the “Lucky Day” sticker. The title and the author are the two biggest pieces of information on this cover and they’re both obscured.

    If we just focus on what the cover says, it’s a really weird reading. The focus is “BE A REVO LUTION” in big bold font highlighted with various bright, vibrant, slightly de-saturated colors. First, the text itself reads kind of weird because “revolution” is broken up into two lines, but after you process that, you realize that there’s a subtitle woven in between the lines: “how everyday people are fighting oppression and changing the world – and how you can, too.” I found this to be really unreadable because the different parts of the sentence is broken up by the big loud title. However, I almost feel this is intentional. It feels like the representation of oppression, where a few big loud words override the narrative but the longer, more detailed subtitle gets buried in the noise.

    I also think the design for the highlight on the title really interesting. The text goes the whole line height, leaving no highlight color on the top or bottom. However, the highlight stretches nearly the full width of the cover. It almost gives the title a heavier feel, like a stack of bricks when you also compare it to the thin full width subtitle text that separates the lines. By stretching the color to the full width, it becomes consistent with the width of the subtitles.

    1. I think the design of this cover is really fun! It pretty much just splits the cover into four rooms that all have something really weird going on, and you’re not really sure what any of it means. They’re all different colors but they’re all pastel. They’re all weird, but together, they are consistently weird. At the top, there’s a staircase that leads you downwards to follow the title text.
    2. What does this design communicate to you? I think this book is gonna be a real roller coaster of weirdness. Just based on the cover, I have no idea what the topic of the book will be, but it’ll probably be wacky and funny. The pastel colors are bright and vibrant, giving a fun feel, like we’re going to walk through an amusement park full of carnies and props. Beyond that, I think the design is really lacking in conveying what the book is about. After reading the book, they’re trying to invoke the idea that you can remember things better by visualizing walking through different rooms with weird memorable stuff in them. But if you don’t know that, the cover makes no sense.
    3. I think the font is kind of basic. It’s an all-caps sans-serif font that flows well with the room but visually does not really add much. It follows the staircase down so the rooms read with the title. The title itself is kind of like the visuals of the room: what does moonwalking with einstein even mean? It’s as wacky as the rooms we’re looking at! But, from a design perspective, I don’t think they really add much and there’s plenty room for improvement.
    1. This is a very dense poster with very little white space, but it really doesn’t feel very crowded to me because it’s very well organized, keeping decoration and information separate. The color palette is pretty warm, mostly red with some yellows, greens, and white and consistently used between decorations and text. The highlight red and yellow are distributed everywhere making me look all over the poster from trinket to trinket.
    2. I really like how the poster looks like a plant shelf, or maybe a bookcase you would find in some random Victorian flat in SF, covered in vases, plants, monsteras, and trinkets, giving the vibe that Outside Lands is in someone’s living room. There’s a strong emphasis on nature and SF themes; the bison/buffalo who live in GGP, a mini Golden Gate Bridge, the windmills, and Ranger Dave are all local symbols living in this intersection. Just like the festival, this poster highlights the best of San Francisco’s food, drinks, music, art, and nature.
    3. I love the title text “Outside Lands” because it reminds me of those giant archways when you enter an amusement park that could say “Disneyland” or “Great America”. I also love that it’s kind of incorporated into the plants, that it blends in, just like how the festival fits neatly into the park with all it’s trees and pathways. The text of the lineup could probably be a bit better. It’s a lineup and each name fits into the shelf but there’s a lot of names so it quickly gets away. I really like how they alternate the colors of the names using the same colors for the design adding to unity and readability. Overall, it’s a great design given how much they needed to include.
  • Color Design Project

    Color Design Project

    I started with a black, white, and gray design based around letters. That’s a re-design of a previous project on destructuring text.

    Based on the black and white design, I just started painting based on colors!

    1. complementary with red green, four colors with yellow red blue violet, and neutrals with a redish-brown, mustard-yellow, and a dark-violet.

    2. Because the base of my design is letter shapes, I wanted to emphasize those shapes through color. I tried to use lighter colors for the letter shapes and darker colors for the “background”. For the four color image with yellow, I found the yellow to be almost distractingly bright, so I used very little of it as an accent in lines that move the eye around the piece. In general, I tried to have high contrast between neighboring colors to prevent them from bleeding into each other to increase readability. Either the colors are complementary, or the tint was extreme.

  • Techniques for painting with acrylic

    Acrylic is basically glue and pigment. If it’s left exposed to air, it’ll dry hard. You can peel it off but not off clothes. Store brushes and tools in water. Add retardant to prevent drying. Leave in a pile rather than smeared to prevent drying.

    Colors like yellow, orange, and yellow-green can be almost transparent. Remember, colors at the top of the wheel are “lighter” in value and tend to be more transparent. Magenta and blue can be kind of light too because they are student grade.

    • Paint in layers. Let it dry a bit, then paint over it again.
    • Paint in one direction (not back and forth, not in circles, this can cause streaking and “pull” the paint off the paper)
    • Add a little bit of white to the light yellow. It’s not enough to notice the tint, but enough to add pigment to the paint so it’s not transparent.
    • A wet brush with water will make the paint more transparent, so make sure to wipe off excess water from the brush.

    When painting edges:

    • Use low tack tape. Artist tape can be too high tack. Pull off while wet. Only press down on edge that you will paint, not the other edge.
    • Use a flat brush and draw the edge. You can also tap the edge (stippling) or drag the edge. The round brush will make an organic line.

    For outlines in graphite / pencil

    • Use very light graphite
    • Erase if it’s too dark, and make sure to brush off all the eraser dust
    • Clean your eraser by cutting off the dirty bits, or by rubbing it on sand paper, otherwise it can smear the graphite
    • Recommend Hi poly eraser (white) over the pink papermate because it’s softer and cleaner.

    Acrylic paint darkens when it dries, just a little.

    When loading up a brush:

    • Use a brush that has been hydrated, but wiped off. Moist but not soaked. Definitely not bone dry.
    • Load up half way up the bristles. Should be even across the bristles to avoid globing.
    • Load up both sides.
  • Playing with colors

    Playing with colors

    I’ve always struggled with differentiating colored because I interpret them differently. I’m red green color blind, as are about 9% of men or 1% of women. I’ve struggled with all the little different colors throughout the spectrum and how to actually label them. But working on building these colors out of the primaries really helped me move past the labels and see how they’re composed and where they actually sit on the wheel. I love it! colors are just colors and no longer a losing game of labels.

  • Destructuring Text

    Destructuring Text

    Make a design using text as an element, but not for information.

    1 what attracted you to the text you chose to use for this project, and why (what is your inspiration or starting point of the design)? It’s my name: Mark! I just kept playing with those letters, seeing how they could fit together.

    2 how did you create visual unity? Limited to only black construction paper and news paper as materials. I used white-space only as an accent. The shapes were all either geometric or curvilinear.

    3 how did you create or introduce visual contrast? (not just value contrast). I used various levels of figured ground reversal, aligning various A’s to either by made of newspaper or of black construction paper. The newspaper has a natural orientation for reading and I changed that up between different letter shapes to imply a change in orientation. The top half is almost all curvilinear and the bottom is all geometric but many shapes are in-between.

    4 what was the most challenging aspect of this project? It was really hard to be creative with what shapes can form letters. I was very stuck in the traditional letter shapes and had to be inspired by graffiti in my neighborhood to see how I could see letters in a non-traditional way, more as shapes or implied shapes.

    5 what do you consider the most successful aspects of your finished design? (please bespecific!) I was extremely happy with the A at the bottom of my work. Specifically, I loved how I overlapped different sheets of newspaper to imply a stroke on the left. I also really liked how the hole in the A is a non-traditional shape and that the white highlight on the right breaks the shape a bit.

    The folds in the girls dress of Once Upon a Book by Grace Lin inspired me to cut the newspaper to imply folds and edges.
  • Intuitive Colors

    Intuitive Colors

    We worked in class with some basic intuition of colors. This was our first time using colors in this class so we had some good foundation on design, but never with color. Lots of fun! Lots of cool designs all around.

  • Working with Textures

    Working with Textures

    For our 2-D design class, we started working with textures, trying to incorporate them into our designs. Three of us brought in a bunch of pictures and materials to cut out into a design and this is what we came up with.

    Final submission
    Work in progress
  • Figure-Ground Reversal with Black, White, and Gray

    Figure-Ground Reversal with Black, White, and Gray

    This project continues the figure-ground reversal project, but with a third color. I really struggled with this project, trying to combine organic lines in a three color layering that would evoke figure-ground reversal. I fell back to Claire Brees’ advice to fall back to a grid, and made a grid of black, white and gray.

    I found it easier to force figure-ground reversal by drawing large areas of my canvas in the different colors as the ground, then painting the other colors on top as the figure.

    After playing around a lot, I started noticing some areas would align really well, creating implicit lines that I could bring into intentionality.

    I also noticed drawing on the iPad with a fat finger and a large pen size lead to very organic lines and curves. While they were all still in a grid, they were wavy, or rounded on the ends, or pointy with a little bit of slop. I decided to embrace this sloppiness and cut my construction paper layers to match the digital style.

    If you look at the different corners, I think you can see the maps of Donkey Kong laying around 🙂

  • Figure-Ground Reversal with Black and White

    Figure-Ground Reversal with Black and White

    For my 2D design class, we needed to make a design that focused on “figure/ground reversal”. The black and the white have to reverse as to which is on top or the shapes of focus. You should be able to look around the design and wonder, “is this black on white, or white on black?”

    I chose to use organic shapes because my previous works have been very geometric. I rely on grids, structures, and sharp lines a lot and it reflects my analytical and structured lifestyle and way of thinking. I took art classes at CCSF specifically to explore my creative and free side of life and part of that is to embrace a more organic, flowing style. I want to be okay with the discomfort of a more fluid and organic structure. This lead me to create a radial of blobby shapes!

    Also see Part 2 of this project!