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.