Maker Faire was awesome! so many things to see, almost needed two days to see it all. You can see all of the Maker Faire photos on Flicker, just follow this LINK. And yes, we saw Adam Savage!

Then I graduated. All of my family and some friends came up to see the ceremony. The ceremony its self was a bit long, but the key note speaker was pretty good. Even though it was on the morning the weather felt really hot! See more photos HERE!

Last but not least is Fanime. I didn’t take as many photos as I normally do, probably because I just wanted to enjoy the con. There were plenty of really good cosplayers. Tim got his wall scroll and I got m  BAAU Down book making us quite happy! Check out just a tad more photos HERE.

I did want to show you my last project for graphic design class. This was my first attempt to using flash. The class had the option to use either photoshop or flash to animate at 15 second animation. I gave photoshop a chance since it looked easier to use but the tweening was crappy and the animation as a whole was choppy.  I learned flash in an evening watching video tutorial on youtube. I was much happier with flash it ran much smoother. Converting it it gif was another problem on its own.

So what is going to happen after I graduate? Tim and I are moving back back to Visalia. Some people here (SJ) don’t understand why we are moving back to what they believe is a middle of nowhere town. But to us its not a middle of nowhere town. We have our family and support system there; it is so much cheaper and we able to afford the living coasts; we have connections to help us find the jobs we need; and it is home to us. I believe that we will be so much happier once we move back and start over in a different place.

We found a cute apartment that is a triplex that looks like house. Its secluded and quite, which its the noise that bothers us the most in San Jose. It has  a dishwasher, central air, back yard, and hook up for a washer and dryer. There are two bedrooms, a large kitchen and living room. We couldn’t be more excited to move to a bigger and better place for over 25% less in costs.

Right now I have to worry about getting everything packed and organized in a small space. I had to give up my desk for 2 weeks to make room for boxes. I need to get everything organized for this upcoming weekend with graduation ceremony and Fanime. And finally making sure we have everything in place and ready to go when we move in the beginning of June.

Taken this morning after waking up. I’m still groggy. Done with a high iso and it came out good and added to the feeling of waking up.

I had this song in mind when taking the photos:

Just turned in yesterday, here is my second project of the semester for graphic design. It is an A6 envelope size folded like this:

Now on to next project of making a 3d object with the same theme. We’ll see how it turns out!

Update: sent out graduation invitations yesterday. Makes it feel so official. I need to start looking around for a job/internship!

ps please don’t steal my work, copyright Megan Berry.

Renewable Energy Content Map 11×17″

Renewable Energy Poster 15×20″

Here are my final versions for the first project in graphic design 105 this semester. I don’t mean to brag but I got an A on both! This will be the last time you see these two, promise. Now its time to work on project 2: brochure.

Tonight I was messing around with photoshop and illustrator and I thought I’d share what I was up to. Above is the final result of tonight and I’m quite pleased with it. I’ve never done any illustrations like this, I always try to make the images look too realistic when working from a photo. Maybe this was easier because I was working with a photo of my self. The closest I got to the flat illustration look it this.

Here’s the progression of experiments that I worked on tonight:

Original photo: heavily rotated and a bit cropped (mostly on the sides)

Version 1: messing around with cropping and filters in photoshop. The main things I wanted for this image was to get the color in the scarf to come out, get the green in my eyes to pop and the color of my glasses to be more prominent.

Version 2: About the same as above but in black with a background color, still experimenting. Tim called this on a Andy Warhol Megan. It’s interesting, but I wasn’t content with it.

New cropped photo: it’s still from the original photo, but it has been edited a bit more. I like the highly saturated and contrasting look to this photo. I changed to crop because I felt like the scarf was working in the illustrations and I liked emphasizing the curls on the left.

Version 3: The more I look at this version, the more I like it. Out of all the photoshop experiments I like this on the best. I made the previous photo black and white; messed with the dodging and burning to get the hair the way I want it; and messed with filters.

Now you know what I do with my “college Friday night” a but dorky, I know. But once I get a streak of inspiration to do something I need to use it as much as I can, you never know when another will come your way. I love the result I got tonight (first image)! I find it interesting that I worked with photos of myself and not someone else. I’m such a narcissist!

I hope you enjoyed the blog post, sorry its a bit long at least there are pretty pictures.

Renewable energy poster version 3, at the rough critique last time the teacher wanted vertical instead horizontal. This causes a problem because that means the rings need to be larger and for it to remain the same font size I need a lot more copy, good news there is a ton of info on the wind energy. I have the font size going from 7pt to 12pt I don’t want go any smaller or larger than that; the teacher describes it as a poster for the monster truck rally, aka heavy handed.

This project is due next Tuesday, been pushed back (yay!) I need to, get copy for the poster, clean up the lines, make sure it’s all lined up the way I want it, and work on the content map ( little unsure of how I want to fix the graphics, because I like the way it is now.

Again you will have to look at the poster at full size to get all of the detail in the text.

p.s. Which colors do you like better in the previous poster where it’s darker or this one where is a bit lighter?

So here is my second option for the poster assignment on renewable energy. The teacher likes this concept better than the gas masked earth so I thought I would try it out. I like the color scheme, I might change the orange to red if it look to traffic cone like. The out going circles seem to be a bit awkward, maybe I can mess with those. It looks better when you blow up the image to full size (20×15). This isn’t due for another week, but still get to see what he says tomorrow.

This is the second part of project one, a poster on renewable energy. I was trying a different approach and concept, we’ll see if the prof will like it tomorrow.  Is it too strong?  Oh, and this is a rough too, not done yet. I’m willing to take suggestions on this, or options for different text. Thanks!

Its the start of a new semester, and hopefully they last, this also means a set of new graphic design projects all having to deal with renewable energy. The first project is a combination of two items a content map and a poster. This is my version of a content map on renewable energy. Its still a rough so don’t judge. There are so many different content maps out there and mine are not anything like them.

I was planing on redoing it after seeing everyone’s version and how they are graph like and organized different, but it ended up the teach liked it! Yay! Still a lot of work to go and 3 poster roughs due Tuesday.

ps sorry for crappy version of image