Category Archives: M. Anderson

Logo Animation

Posted on by
Click here to watch the full animation!

For the final project, I wanted to create an animation that represented screenwriting or typewriters. My publishing company I created in the first project was centered around book-to-screen adaptations so I tried to pay homage to both the film and writing aesthetics.

I made some major changes from my initial logo. Although it was already very stripped down, I wanted to make it feel more cohesive, and include a more prominent illustrative element. I did this by taking inspiration from the silhouette of an old typewriter, sketching out the upper part of the carriage and the radial area where all of the keys feed into. This felt like the perfect way to include elements of the machine without recreating it entirely.

I also changed the original font. I had previously used courier, as it is the industry standard for screenwriting, but it felt a little clunky and cliche. I changed this to a simpler serif that I still felt represented that typewriter-feel without straying too far from courier.

This project was a lot of fun as I’ve been wanting to get into working with After Effects for years. After all of the exercises we did leading up to it, I felt a little more familiar with the program and some of its main features. I came into this class with zero experience with animation and I’m glad I was able to make some progress in the program.

Retro Technology – Conceptual Illustration

Posted on by

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.

Influence: Herbert Matter & the Swiss Style

Posted on by

Herbert Matter was born in Engelberg, Switzerland in 1907. Throughout his life he studied painting in Geneva and Paris before returning to Zurich to work for Swiss National Tourist Office. This is where his most well known work was created. His travel posters went on to earn him many awards and bring him many opportunities to showcase his talent in the design world.

When looking through the design books in class, I was immediately drawn to the Swiss style. The deep contrasts, simplicity, and pops of color stood out to me as truly effective posters. Most importantly, the use of photomontage solidified Swiss style as my choice. I’ve cycled through lots of different arts and crafts in my life, but scrapbooking or creating digital collages has always been my favorite. Once I saw Matter’s work, I knew he would be my choice.

As seen above, Matter typically finds a way to highlight the blue sky or traces of blue in his work. In creating my poster, I looked for a way to incorporate this, but ultimately it didn’t feel natural to my design. Instead I looked towards his usage of color pops, black and white photography, and bold diagonal type.

The most difficult part of this process was trying to recreate his style of photography. There is a almost a film-strip like grain over the pictures, sometimes making it confusing as to whether they are illustrations or highly edited images. I played around with many different combinations of filters and image adjustments before I felt like I had achieved close to his balance between image and illustration.

The most enjoyable part of this process was the creating the composition. Once I had my imagery and everything was filtered, I got to play around with his use of diagonal lines and recoloring parts of the images to create his signature pops of color. I knew I wanted to include some of the red-orange I had seen in his work, but I otherwise tried to keep the color palette stay true to the event. Although his work might seem a bit surreal, his colors are still natural to the images, just a bit more saturated at times.

Overall, I truly enjoyed my time working in the Swiss style. Although the posters may seem simple, there is a lot of work that happens on each individual image before they can be arranged. The effortless quality of Herbert Matter’s work comes from his deep knowledge of structure, color, and composition, as well as a love for his home country that is steeped into every poster.