Deceptive

Here's the part where you guess why this flower is deceptive.
I dare you!

Oh alright I can't stand the whining: it's not a flower, it's a glass paperweight.
The Sheridan glassblowing classes had a glass sale, and I couldn't pass this lovely up. Whoever made it (they couldn't tell me who, exactly, was responsible) blew paint into the glass as it was firing. It actually looks a lot like a Morning Glory. And those imperfections - the bubbes - are actually what made me really like it. They ended up looking like water drops.

This was fun to photograph - a lot like those beads from way back in first year.
Only because this was such high quality glass it didn't show any secondary coloring like the beads did.

Comfort? Who needs it!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY KAT!

Congrats!
You're 19! Which, I might add, is moderately terrifying.

Interactivity Design 2 - Project 1

This was a short project. Take a photo of something industrial, make sure it's long enough to make you scroll sideways across the web page, but not long enough that it makes you scroll down.
Cover said image with a pattern you derive from the image itself.

The idea was to make the viewer want to scroll sideways to see the rest of the image.
Since this isn't in a web page format right now you don't get to scroll.
No scroll for you.

Research in Design - Food Project

For Research in Design, one of my lecture courses this year, our final project was to research anything we wanted about: FOOD.
How great a topic is that, anyway?
Other than the fact that it made every last person in the class hungry every minute they were working on it.

I chose cake, because let's face it: I REALLY like cake.
We had to collect our own photos, too. Which meant I got to take a lovely jaunt down Eglington Avenue (an all day jaunt I might ad) to find bakeries and anywhere else that sold cake. Thanks to working at the Delta, I even had wedding cake photos to use.

This is the final print product. It's a teeny little book: only 7 inches long by 5 inches high.
I was also fancy/lazy and did French folding for the pages (that's where you only print on one side of the paper, and just fold it over)

I've also included some of my favorite photos.

Communication Design 1 - Project 3

For once, for ONCE, I love a project outcome from this class.
How do you spell relief?
APPARENTLY you spell it "create a brochure convincing people to donate to a cause"

That's literally all we were instructed to do.
Technically it's supposed to appeal to an older audience, but I feel like mine will work for anyone with female relatives. Maybe that's my ego talking. But the ol' ego hasn't had a chance to stretch it's legs for a while, so I'm just going to let it run rampant for a bit.

Specifications for the project changed a bit because of the strike.
The brochure itself is 8 inches high, 16 inches long. Before the strike messed up our lives we were also supposed to create an envelope for it, as if it was a direct mail piece (you know - those flyers you get in the mail all the time, asking you to donate, or informing you of events you might be interested in)
Class resumption meant less time to get critiques on the project, and hence the scrapping of the envelope.

This one folds a little differently than conventional brochures.
It's kind of like a scroll. The back pages are all folded into one another, and hidden under the cover. It's supposed to entice you to turn the next page. Um...
It's a lot more effective in person. Haha.
Photos and the actual file can only do it so much justice.

It's on nice silky paper, too.
Which is lovely. I got tired of having to print on card stock (I can't seem to mount anything on thinner paper to illustration board without ripping it to shreds... hmmmm...)


I have to really thank Jessica Truscott for this. It's her stock image that I used.
It's actually surprisingly difficult to find GOOD portraits of emotions. Most of them are too over-the-top for my tastes. So props! I love your stock!

Information Design 1 - Project 2

I decided not to bother posting project 1 from this class. It's just a very simple bar graph.

Information design revolves around us learning how to graph data effectively, so that the people looking at what we make understand quickly what we're trying to show. For Project 1 we were given a choice of 3 topics: paper consumption, coffee consumption, or calorie consumption, and had to make a simple graph. We weren't even allowed to look for our own data. You used the data sheets Brian provided, and picked what data out of it that you wanted.
Project 2 got a little more in-depth.
We HAD to involve time as the main subject, and still use one of the three above choices. This time it was up to us to decide how to go about graphing (we weren't limited like on the first project to simple bar, pie, or line graphs) and whether or not we wanted to get more information.

This is what I did. Peak times of day for coffee consumption in Canada.

Alternate Alice Backgrounds

When I was making my type 2 poster with "Alice in Wonderland" as the catchphrase I had a number of different possibilities for backgrounds.
I took a couple big sheets of white paper and dumped gold or blue ink down them, but the scanned images were really wrinkled and gross (the water warped the paper, and it refused to scan flat - much less let me touch it up without ruining the look of the ink)

Instead of fighting with it I used a million filters in my art programs, and these 3 are what happened. My personal favorite, which was sadly too busy to use, is the grainy black one.

Communication Design 1 - Project 2

Finally. FINALLY I can get rid of it.
3 months later, after surviving the strike that delayed this class, I get to pass off this project and never look at it again. I learned to hate it with a fiery passion over the break. It seems like every time I looked at it I found one more thing to change. One more thing to rethink. One more TINY detail that Maria might not like.
I'm fairly certain I lost my mind.

I won't even get into the issues I had PRINTING it...!

The idea of the project was to create a fake, four page, layout for the New York Times Magazine - to make it as if our projects were one of the featured articles in an issue. As a topic we used the same topic as project one (mine happened to be eating disorders)
We had certain criteria to follow: the same page sizes as the magazine (9.5 inches x 11.5 inches), the folios (page numbers) in the same place, use one of the many choices of underlying grids used in the actual magazine, have a minimum of 3 images, and at least 2 graphs, charts, or tables.

PHEW.
In the end: yes I do actually like it now. I will never, ever, love it like some of my other projects.

The color in the images is muted. Printed it's actually closer to Olive green.
I had to change the percentage of yellow in the colors so it would print properly.

Hoarfrost

Always with the early morning drawing inspirations...!
If only this could happen at reasonable hours.

I got tired of pretty ice queens with white hair.
Decided to go with the creepy, frostbitten, redhead.
She's growing on me!

Typography 3 - Project 2

Ahh. Another project done.
For our second Type 3 project we had to get down and dirty with typefaces and start combining pieces of different ones together. There were some VERY crazy combinations happening.
The idea was to experiment, look at what you'd come up with for shapes and individual letters, and pick a short phrase that suited the letters themselves (we had a 3 word minimum for ours).
If your type was sharp-looking and pointy, maybe the phrase would be about knives.

Mine happened to remind me of fairy tales, and it's just downright weird looking. So I picked the best weird fairy tale I could think of: Alice in Wonderland.

The computer isn't doing the colors for this baby justice.
Printed out the background is much more vibrant (but still more muted than the letters so they didn't get lost on the paper), as is the pink.

Major pain in the neck for this project: outlining "Wonderland" in the hot pink. I went crosseyed for a while, and had to take a nap. What happens when you combine chunks of shapes together in illustrator (the program I used to do this) is that they REMEMBER their shape - even when you link them to a new one. The auto-outline option, which is normally really handy, outlined each separate piece and made for some ugly little issues.

Fonts combined to make these: Helvetica Neue Regular, Baskerville Italic