The New Borders

As our final project, we had to place our logo into real life, and here is my Border's logo on the building.

The hardest part of doing this was trying to get the logo to look like it belonged and wasn't too shiny.  Another hard part of this was to work over the old Borders logo. This is the result of my work.

Border's: Books, Music, and A Cafe

In class, we had to make stationary, a business card, and an envelope for the store whose logo we had chosen to redo. Since my choice was Borders, I went ahead with designing. Starting off with the business card made it easier when moving on to the envelope and stationary.

Problems that I had with this project were where I should place things, what to leave out on the designs and what to keep, and finally, how to keep everything looking like the same type of font and style (for example making sure things weren't to squish-ified or stretch-ified). After those problems were solved, the designs were made. Above, you can see the final product of my designs.

The Redesigning of Logos

In the most recent project that we worked on, we had to take an existing logo and redesign it. The company who's logo I chose to remake was Borders.

The first logo you see, the one on top, is Borders original logo. The logo below that for Borders, is the one that I redesigned. Some difficulties that I had to work past for this is getting all of the images that I drew to be either clean-cut, or slightly rough on the edges which I didn't fully get. I believe that for this project I did a fairly good job, because I'm proud of the way that it turned out.

For my personal logo that we will be making, I was thinking about writing my name and then surrounding it with things I like, such as books, dogs, my family as well as in some of my favorite colors like blue and green.

Which is the original? Which is not?

In this project, we had to find a symbol that represented a company and the one that I chose was Domino's Pizza. Using Adobe Illustrator, we had to recreate the whole thing. For the whole time, I used the pen tool, which in the beginning was a little hard to use, but as time went on it got a bit easier, even though my words and letters are not as neatly cut as the originals. It also was not as hard as I thought it would be, because first off we were allowed we were allowed to use the original as a template and the pen tool got easier with more practice. Also, getting the colors to change was not as hard as I thought it would be, because all we had to do was change the background color.

All in all, I feel that my remake turned out well even if the letters could be cleaner cut and the colors are different shades than the originals.

For this project, my group had to redesign what the signs on the recycling boxes looked like. The first sign will be placed on the boxes where you would recycle cans, bottles, aluminum, etc. and the second one would be for paper products.

During this project, we started off with trial and error without much of a base plan. We quickly found out though that in order to make a product that would at least look semi-decent we had to make a general idea for what we wanted.

As we made the aluminum, plastic signs, we cut up old cans and labels that we had found, arranged them as a collage, scanned that into a computer and made that the background. From there we made a daisy which we placed in the corners and then took the silver inside of one of the cans, scanned it in and placed it behind all of our words.

For the sign for paper products, we did around the same procedure except for our collage we used ripped up newspaper and magazines to make a collage and then went on to take plain white paper and use that as the background for the writing so that we could see what had been written.

I believe that our finished product looks very nice, and I like the way it turned out. Also, I think that from doing this project, I learned more of how to work as a group, combine people's interests and make a finished product from many different ideas.

In this project, we were given a group of bad ads and had to choose one of them to remake. Above is how I chose to remake the ad and below is the original.

While remaking the ad, I had to take into account the colors that I was using, and how I chose to set everything up. With the colors, I had to make sure that nothing would clash or blend too much with the background color. I also had to make sure that the eagle would not draw to much attention away from the words with its black border. After choosing colors that I wanted to use, I had to decide on the arrangement that I felt would best suit this ad. I also had to decide what pattern I wanted to utilize to make your eyed follow the ad in the correct order and that attention was drawn to the more important piece of information rather than the non-important.

I feel that I completed the task relatively well and that the ad turned out alright. In this project I had to use both InDesign and PhotoShop to make a completed piece. In my opinion I did the arranging, color-scheming, and attention drawing of this piece of work well.

This Editor's Letter was a recreation of an original Editor's Letter that I made in InDesign. It was a lot more different than just playing around with InDesign due to the fact that we had a goal in mind this time. I started out with putting a background in, and then I moved on to trying to create the little shapes. After that was done, I had to correctly arrange all of the pictures and the writing. After that was done we saved it as a .jpeg! 

The challenges that I faced while doing this was to try and make the pictures and writing the correct size, shape and how to fit them around each other in the right way. I think that for my first real time on InDesign, that I did well.

That was my miraculous, trying expedition on InDesign this time around!