Day 3: The Process!

Day three of designing every day! So today I got a request from an old and close friend to design a tattoo for  her. I figured this would be a good chance to go through and work on my design process. It's a meta concern but everything I've read about being a good designer says to really work on your overall process of design. I wanted to toss some images up of the process from sketch to photoshop to vector edit. I admit that with the crazy hustle of today (wednesday who knew) that I didn't get much more than a few concept sketches and the final sketch approval and a start on the vector art. What she wanted was

"A tilted halo circling a phoenix feather"

With loose guidelines like that I had a lot of sketching to do, I eventually came up with:

I uploaded the sketch into Raven and started blocking out the shapes as vector images:

 During the whole process I was IMing back and forth with her and discussing details. She liked the initial sketch but wanted to spin the feather counter-clockwise a bit. Also we discussed colors etc. After Blocking the images out I did some test coloring to see if it was going in the right direction. I've heard horror stories about clients coming in with a million revisions that seem to come from left field, so I wanted my process to include as much communication as possible with any prospective clients. By the endo f the whole affair I had the following image.

After that I cleared out the coloring information and exported the image to a raster editor. I want to take some time and get some cool coloring and shading things going and I have a few brushes that I've imported specifically for designing tattoos that mimic what ink can do on skin. So now I'm onto painting the image. Technically this is the second design I've done today since early this morning I also designed and painted an image of Hotei. Since that was done for fun I didn't include it in full here but the image us up on my deviant art site. (( Image of Hotei on my DA page ))

Personal CnC: I had some issues with getting the halo nice and even in the vector editor and the right hand corner of it still irks me. Im going to edit that in the Raster version (since it's a tattoo that shouldn't matter too much) but I've still got a ways to go with my vector editing.


Cheers all

-Brand

Day 2: Iconic

Figuring out a good challenge for myself today prooved to be  challenge. At first I thought I'd go with the suggestion of making snapshots of web pages in photoshop, but upon doing the research I found that project slightly more ambitious than I'm ready  for. I certainly want to work up to 8 hours of work to create a finished base page. So Instead I decided that a good first challenge would be to attempt to create icons for a webpage that would act as links to well known sites, but I could only use colors and shapes to convey the destination website.

I was able to get through only two icons in one day (hopefully this will improve) but my knowledge of vector editing has increased and I've been able to start thinking in vector instead of raster, which is going to help a lot when I need to make good looking graphics. So below are the two icons I was able to kick out. I feel like I did a fairly good job of getting across what website they represented, though the second one posed more of a challenge since it's primary icon is an "f". I got around that part of the challenge by reducing the letter to it's basic shapes and paring it down until it formed a shape that was only vaguely recognizable as a letter.

So there's day two. Plenty of stuff learned! Also I really recommend playing with the Aviary.com tools, esp if you  are a broke artist and can't afford the full Adobe suite of tools.

Step 1: Create a Blog

Welcome!

     So to kick things off, I am a 30 year old artists/musician/nerd who has recently found himself unemployed. Taking stock of things has reminded me how much I've always wanted to be a graphic designer, and so with that in mind I'm taking steps toward that goal. I wanted to create a blog to keep track of that progress and have something to keep myself and others informed about the process that I'm going through to achieve my goal.

     One of the primary uses of this blog is going to be the coordination and cataloging of various "daily design challenges" that I'm going to put myself through over the course of the spring and summer, in preparation for returning to college in the fall to begin pursuit of a degree in graphic design. I welcome comments and criticisms as well as Ideas for design challenges, since simply challenging myself is less apt to force me out of my comfort zone, and one of the best ways to become better at something is exploring past that point.

     Today's challenge has been creating a blog (success), and making it reflect my individual aesthetic. I'm a HUGE fan of layouts and color schemes that play with value and wanted my blog to reflect that. Communicating effectively within a limited range of colors is a skill I feel that is going to be important to develop as a designer. With it's use of grays and blacks , as well as various levels of transparency that allow for layering; the main toolkit that's included in blogger.com is really good at making some of the work in this respect really easy, and has yielded a pretty neat looking blog after tinkering with it for 40 mins or so.

     Fonts were another consideration. I'm really partial to old style serif fonts, primarily because of my love of the printed word. Sans-serif is generally considered a preferred font for online publication (and in future design challenges you'll see a lot of sans-serif when I'm working on online materials) , but since this is my personal design blog I wanted it to say something about me. The choice of the more fanciful old-style font for the title was meant to compliment the background image; which I feel looks sort of like a Damasque wallpaper, and imply a sort of timeless elegance with a gritty noir sort of filter applied over it.

     So for now we kick off the Blogging of my preparation for design school, the building of a portfolio, and my steps on the road to becoming a professional in a field I actually care a great deal about. I welcome comments to this first post and suggestions for design challenges.

-Brand


EDIT: Due to overwhelming requests to change the blog to a sans-serif (and since being able to accept criticism and adjust is important to being a successful designer) we now present to you a new font! Droid Sans! Droid Sans is a humanist sans serif typeface designed by Steve Matteson, Type Director of Ascender Corp. Droid Sans was designed with an upright stress, open forms and a neutral, yet friendly appearance. Droid Sans was optimized for user interfaces and to be comfortable for reading on a mobile handset in menus, web browser and other screen text.