Monthly Archives: December 2024

Conceptual Illustration – Personal

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For this project, I decided to design for the personal article choice that is about connecting with those we have lost through technology, specifically social media.

At the beginning of my design process, I first gained inspiration by creating a design inspiration board on Pinterest where I gained insight into how I wanted my piece to look, which was collage-style. I was also really inspired by pieces Professor Layton showed in class that had a collage aesthetic, as shown below.

Illustration by Mike McQuade for POLITICO
Illustration by Mike McQuade for POLITICO

I wanted to bring in a “hand-made” quality to my conceptual illustration. For this, I first sketched out an idea for my piece, which involved hands reaching out from phones to touch one another. The idea for this sprung from wanting to highlight the importance technology has had on keeping connections close for those that are far away or may have passed and you want to continue to remember and commemorate in your life. I searched on many websites to find stock images and decided on hands that are sticking their pointer finger out to each other to indicate that they are reaching out to each other. They are coming out of phones because it symbolizes how even though they may not be near they can still connect through technology. It was difficult for me to decide what else to do to the conceptual image once I had the basic hands and phones down. I ultimately decided to add circles and rectangles around the image to give it more of a collage and “scrapbook” feel as though someone was putting stickers all over the page. Aesthetically to me, it felt right. I chose greens and blues for the colors in this piece because I felt they were calming and also represented Earth-like colors to me, which I wanted to draw upon because the piece highlights how you can connect with others on technology, even if from across the world!

For the title, I actually sturggled for a while as I found it difficult to come up with a name that would bring together the whole piece. I landed on Humanity Behind Tech because in the piece, the author Nick Bilton dicusses how he usually writes about the negatives of technology and how this piece actually dicussed a positve which I thought “Humanity Behind Tech” would be fitting because this time he gets to finally highlight a psotive of techbology, an aspect of it that brings people together.

For the whole layout, I ultimately decided to go simple to save space for the words and to unite the conceptual image of the piece with a more simplistic layout that gave space to the main imagery.

Overall, I enjoyed making this piece and found that it pushed me out of my comfort zone, as I don’t make many magazine spreads. Next time, I would spend more time on the overall layout of the piece and put more effort into the imagery on the second spread.

Sunset Publishing Animation

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Click the play button to watch the animation.

For this project, we were told to make an 10-second animation using our project 1 logo. My publishing company is called Sunset Publishing, channelling calm and serene feelings. Because my design resembled a book and a sunset, I wanted the design to open up as if it was a book opening up, but when it opens, it reveals the sunset. Using Professor Layton’s advice, I changed the blue to a darker shade and made “publishing” in all caps. This was created via After Effects.

I had a fun time working in After Effects to create this animation because it was fun discovering all of the different things you can do with this program. Other than the other exercises in class that we completed, this was the first time I had used AE and it definitely took a second to get used to it. I feel that Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator are all sort of similar when it comes to their interfaces, but AE was completely different.

Overall, I am very proud of what I was able to create via AE even though I was not super familiar with the program. I had fun choosing sound effects that I thought would correlate with the theme of the publishing company and its mission that I wrote for the first project. Graphic Design 2 has been a super fun and rewarding class and I loved using my creativity to turn in some amazing projects. I am excited to show them off on my portfolio!

Conceptual Illustration – Personal

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Click to see a PDF of my full design!

For this project, I designed a conceptual illustration for the “Personal” story. This story is about how social media’s personal touch outweighs its downsides. It highlights examples where social media has helped people to feel connected to loved ones who have passed away. The story conveys the message that although these people are no longer with us physically, social media helps keep their memories alive in the digital world. I wanted my conceptual illustration to convey this same message.

I began my creative process for this project by sketching different conceptual images that all convey the message of the story. I eventually decided on this image of a social post of a family on a laptop. I felt it effectively illustrated the idea of connection via social media with loved ones who have passed. In this family photo, I added a halo above the father and also pixelated him while leaving the mother and son unpixelated. I made these design decisions to convey that the father had passed away, but social media kept his spirit alive and connected to his wife and son.

Next, I decided on the headline Connected Through Loss. I felt it effectively reflects the story’s message while also grabbing the attention of the reader. Lastly, I formatted the layout of these magazine spreads. I used blue colors from my illustration throughout both magazine spreads so that everything in the article was visually tied together. Additionally, I feel like blue can be related to heaven, and therefore relates to this story about social media connecting people with those who have passed on.

Overall, I am happy with my final design for Project 3. Designing a conceptual illustration is more challenging than many other graphic design projects I have worked on. I felt that it encouraged me to push my creativity even further than usual, however, I had fun working on it and am proud of the way it turned out.

Retro Technology – Conceptual Illustration

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For this project, I chose to illustrate the “Old Tech” story. The article explained how technology is always advancing, and yet some older pieces stick around long after they’ve become obsolete.

The most difficult part of this process was deciding how to represent the technology best. The concept of revival or resurgence was challenging to design without feeling too cliche or overly illustrated. After lots of trial and error, I landed on the idea regrowth, shown through plant imagery. This seemed like a simple but effective way to illustrate old objects finding new life. I also decided to focus the deck on Generation Z as I felt it was the most important part of the article. Yes, these pieces of tech have stuck around with the generations that used to use them, but it’s the new generation who are causing the resurgence, thus making them most important to the story.

This is the first spread, click the image to see both in full.

When working on this spread, I was so grateful for the large amount of good quality photographs of the technology. This lead me to focus on photos as opposed to full illustrations for my concept. I wanted to highlight the technology existing in a modern space, and high quality photographs felt like the best way to do so.

Once I had all the images together, I had to tackle fitting them together with the story. The story was shorter than I had expected, leaving me with more room for the side bar and quotes. After lots of rearranging, I found a balance between the sidebar information and the copy that felt even.

The minimal style of this spread felt like the best way to keep the technology as the focus. There was an iteration of this project that had leaves crawling all around and through the story and sidebar, but in the end it was too busy, and I felt that it took away from the intricacies of the old technology.

This is the second spread, click the image to see both in full.

The color scheme lent itself to the spread easily. Although the light blue and green may not seem like an obvious choice for a technology spread, it worked perfectly with idea of regrowth and resurgence, and was easy to weave through both spreads.

Overall, I truly enjoyed this project. I have spent time working with layouts in past magazine and yearbook work and I was excited to work with it again. A lot of the design work I do now is purely social media based, so it was refreshing to get so much space to work with.

Personal Touch

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Click the image to see a full PDF version.

For this project, I wanted to create a visually compelling conceptual image that had never been done before. I thought of drawing a hand touching a phone from a bird’s eye angle, I thought of creating a collage of social media icons on top of an iPhone, but eventually I concluded I needed to incorporate a fingerprint into my image. This is why I chose to do my final idea, the icons masked into a drawn fingerprint.

Out of all the projects completed this semester, this was definitely the most difficult. I created clipping masks for each icon, and then had to piece them together on top of the fingerprint illustration. Every illustration was hand draw by me using the pen tool. It was frustrating at first to figure out why my clipping masks weren’t working, but eventually, after much trial and error, I succeeded.

Due to the contents of the article, plus the illustration, I decided to title this article “Personal Touch” as a callback to the fingerprint being the mark you leave after touching something, and after touching a mobile phone, your screen has visible fingerprints on it. I rewrote the deck to something I found more intriguing than the one we were given. The new deck I came up with was “Despite its flaws, social media’s ability to connect personally holds greater value” which I think does a great job of introducing the article’s topic and relates to the image.

The main color I chose to incorporate was blue. I did this because when I think of a color that is trusting and represents stability. Blue is commonly linked to trust, security, and reliability, making it an ideal color to highlight the value of authentic and personal connections on social media. Another idea with blue is that a lot of social media icons incorporate the color blue in some way, showcasing a subtle recall of popular brands such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. By only using the color blue, the colorful social media icons in the fingerprint stand out.

Overall, I am incredibly proud of my work for project 3. I think my conceptual visual was innovative, clever, and intriguing. I am very proud to be able to showcase this on my portfolio site and show others.

Conceptual

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For this project, I designed a magazine spread for an article about the personal connectedness that we feel due to social media. For the core idea, I created the social media heart icon but used an illustration of “heart hands” instead of an actual heart. I used similar text and social media-related iconography throughout the composition to create a sense of interconnectedness and relation.

Opening Spread
Spread

Project 3 – Conceptual

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For this conceptual Illustration Project, we were tasked with designing a magazine layout inspired by one of three article options. These projects allowed us to flex our creative muscles, blending design, typography, and illustration to tell compelling visual stories. From the nostalgic charm of “Old Tech” to the innovative tale of an AI robot wasting telemarketers’ time, these projects pushed our conceptual thinking and illustrative abilities.

 AI’s Tangle with Telemarketers: A Futuristic Metaphor

When reading through the different stories, I found the 3rd one the most interesting. It is based on a story about a robot that is designed to waste telemarketers’ time. My challenge was to visually balance some of the humor, but still have it be more serious looking. The design steered clear of overly cartoon depictions, opting instead for sleek, modern aesthetics. Staying strong with the concept, I decided to add a phone that appears with the caller ID being “Spam” and being answered by what looks like a robotic hand. I decided to add a little bit of a texture and more of the context of coding as the background, to simulate the idea of being programmed. 

A robot hand, crafted with smooth, lifelike machinery, became the focal point, holding a blocky, easy to distinguish, modern day iphone. The telemarketer, not shown, but mainly due to the simple idea of us not ever seeing them either. 

The layout incorporated a basic and simple typography, but mainly due to the detail of the illustrations being more important. I added the background code to add texture so it would not stand as a straight white page, but also to add some depth. On the second page, quotes from the article were magnified to draw readers’ attention, complemented by a big hand reaching for a robot hand, similar to the ‘Creation of Adam’ art piece by Michelangelo. Overall, based on my want to keep it simple and detailed, I think that it turned out great.

Animation

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Click on image to download and view animation

Completing this project was both frustrating and rewarding at the same time. At first, I was struggling with how i wanted my animation, and how to achieve it. I was overcomplicating it. Once i took a step back and simplified it, I was bale to see success and progress. After every frame that properly animated I would celebrate and smile. Seeing the end result was so rewarding to know all my hard work had paid off.

Concept Project

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Click for full PDF of the spread

I chose the personal article for this assignment because I felt more connected to it when reading it. I loved how I was immediately able to visualize a cover page concept. I went with this design because our emotions are complex just like technology is. We have a love hate relationship with our machines and they are the heart of our world.

Influence Poster

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Ava Schneider Influence Poster
Click the image to be able to view it!

My Influence was Cipe Pineless who was a graphic designer for magazines such as Seventeen, Glamour, Vanity and many more. I love her work and how she creates a cover that is both enticing but realistic. I took her cover that was a reflection of a beach picture and used that to create this poster. I loved the simplicity of it while also being able to have the picture speak for you.