In high school I was in a design program called CyberARTS, and it was divided into both traditional and technology based design classes. During my four years there I began to explore the Adobe suite and my interest for digital media grew. I was so upset last year, which was my first year out of high school, because I had decided to listen to my parents and go into Management like they wanted - I thought I had left digital media classes behind forever. That year was not the greatest, and I decided that it was time to take control of my life and applied for RTA. 

After being accepted I was so thrilled to find out that there was a class in first year, first semester, dedicated to learning design principles and using the programs that I had fallen in love with in high school.  It was a dream come true and a huge blast of nostalgia. Because I had come into the program with some background knowledge of how to use the Adobe Suite, this semester I focused on absorbing information from the lectures about design, typography, and the changing world of media. I learned a lot more about the theories and behind the scenes work of the industry, and it made me even more interested in possibly pursuing a career in a related field. 

I was surprised to learn that through RTA we can even major in Digital Media. I won't lie, I love television production as well, but I didn't even know that I had this option when coming in to the program. Now that this new door has opened I'm very inclined to see where it can take me - digital media is fascinating and ever changing and I would love to work in the industry. After learning how to use After Effects properly I became especially interested. Who knows, maybe I could still work in television but design the graphics for them? 

I thought it was great having the lecture and the lab divided so that the information I learned from lecture could be applied during a leisurely two hour block in which to work on whatever project we had assigned. I think that my sense of design has improved a little this semester, but I've always been a strong supporter of 'practice makes perfect' and I think the more active I am working with design the better I will get - all the more reason for me to keep taking digital media. 

Whatever field I decide to major in, I think it's important to have at least a basic concept of design, typography, and honestly - how to use Photoshop. This class definitely did that, and I think the knowledge I learned will be carried through and help me greatly. 

I'm thankful to have taken such a fun class, that turned out to be incredibly useful as well. 

When it comes to interactivity in web media, I'd like to make the argument that nearly everything successful in today's Western society, on the web, has some kind of interactive aspect to it. 

We've gone past the point where just looking at something is enough, if we like something we aren't satisfied with knowing that anymore - we need other people to know it too. Facebook added a like button, tumblr runs off of like buttons, and comments have been enabled on almost everything on the internet. Do we really have so much to say that we need to have the option to vent our angst ridden feelings to the world? That seems what Youtube has become. 

Youtube is a great example of interactivity and fan culture on the web. Youtube 'celebrities' were once regular people, but through gathering millions of subscribers they have build an online fan base that even the most famous movie stars can't boast about. Although many people complain about it, including myself, the written comments on Youtube have created an entirely new form of blog on its own. People may begin by discussing things relevant to the video but it will stem off and turn into a debate about religion. 

The connection Youtubers have with their audience is uncanny. From a single video  tens and even hundreds of succeeding videos are often made in response to it, to parody it, or just to get a few views to see if fame can be challenged and won. 

The growing interaction of everything on the internet has left us with short attention spans - always wanting to be engaged with something more all the time. Websites such as The Ugly Dance and others similar offer the audience to create something of their own in return for some of their time in order to showcase a product. It's becoming so easy to integrate marketing and advertising in once ordinary things, and because we as a society are so starved to have some bit of 'social' interaction we will just at the chance. 

I love how far much the web has grown, and how involved everyone has become in it - and I am by no means advocating that we should go backwards and forget how far we've come, but I think that people should be wary and more careful of how they are using the interactive features, and try to better the world with them. In the United States they are currently undergoing one of the fiercest battles against control of the internet, and unless the users of these interactive platforms take a stand, the web as we know it could change drastically in the next decade. 

We value being able to express our opinions, create and share content and interact with people from all over the world - but in order to keep this and progress we need to keep our internet safe and free. Watch this video and spread the word to any Americans that you may know!

Mr. Nobody is futurist science fiction drama that is set in a future where human beings are immortal. The story follows last mortal human being, Nemo, trying to recount his life. He remembers multiple past lives, however, and throughout the movie the psychiatrist who accompanies him is trying to figure out what was Nemo's actual past. It is an existentialist themed movie, very color oriented and stylized, and also very clean cut.

I wanted to embody all of these principles in my After Effects teaser trailer for the movie. Because the movie is set in the distant future, I decided that I wanted to stick to something very vector looking and clean cut, but I didn't want to lose the color that I heavily associate with the movie. Nemo's past starts in the late 50's/60's and continues on with three different women, and the main colors used are warm reds and yellows. This is why I chose the circles to be these shades. As well, because of the mysterious mood of the movie, I chose a harmony from a song a friend of mine recorded to play over the short animation. It is very folky, and almost mystical in a religious way. I tried to make the camera within the animation move to the rhythm of the song to make it integrated more and have the viewers eyes and ears follow the movements.

The reason I chose using blossoming circles was because when I think of a circle I imagine a continuum. Circles are never-ending and never-beginning all in once. They symbolize the essence of Mr. Nobody perfectly. Nemo doesn't know who he is, where he came from, how his life began and where it went. He is lost in his bast and the rest of the world will lose theirs as well as their lives are lived for eternity. The circle of life is not completed on either side in the movie, and by creating so many I wanted to symbolize this.

I did this by creating two circles and offsetting them in time and made them both scale up from zero to one hundred percent over time as well. I also eased in the key frames using the curves to make the transition more gradual and fluid. I then precomposed the two circles and began to layer them over top of each other, always offsetting them in the time line so that they would start at different times. I then created another precomposition and kept doing this until I was happy with the variety that I had achieved.

I added the text at the end so that the viewer would understand what movie the teaser was made for, and I applied a few effects to, again, symblize themes within the movie. I applied an effect that played with the characters of the word 'Mr Nobody' and went through a series of different letters before it stopped on the final word. I also made the word desintegrate at the end by using another text effect.

The variety of characters was meant to represent Nemo's different lives and pasts, and him not knowing who he is. The desintegration of the word was also meant to symbolize the unknown, as well as Nemo being a mortal who will have to face death and dissapear into nothingness. I also faded the main light that followed the title sequence at the end of the clip and blurred out the background to make it seem like the scene was being extinguished instead of everything fading to black. I wanted the viewer to still be able to see the outline of things after the animation was over.

I had a lot of fun learning how to use After Effects and using basic effects to create a much larger 3D project. I learned how to animate shapes with different speeds, how to apply different effects, work in 3D space with lights and cameras, how to precompose, and link layers together. I am very pleased with the final product and think that I conveyed the message I was trying to get across very well.

The circle of life may be a phrase used a lot, but it provided me with some very valid inspiration.

After Effects is turning out to be incredibly interesting. 

I've opened up the program in the past and have been daunted by all the effects and presets and menus and just all around huge variety of options, but after watching a few tutorials I began to feel like I've been using After Effects for years. I watched the entire basic training on Video CoPilot as well as many tutorials that I found on vimeo, and this set me up perfectly to begin working on my own. 

I've been very inspired with After Effects work in the past, but I've always been a bit confused (in terms of my own work) about what I would actually be capable of making within the program. After seeing videos like Above Everything Else my expectations were unreasonably high and were definitely not going to be met. I ended up learning that After Effects is as much of a program that you can create content in, as one that you can also edit and alter already made content within as well. 

This seems a lot more reasonable for me, and although I still have no real idea what I'm going to be doing for my teaser trailer, I find comfort in knowing that I can work with footage/Photoshop layers/and if I'm getting really crazy, 3D objects created in programs like Cinema 4D (I probably won't bother learning how to use yet another program yet though, haha). 

A video like Apache which is a music video for a song by Danger Beach, is simple yet incredibly effective. I'm sure whatever layers were used were created and edited within a program like Photoshop or Illustrator, and then the piece was animated in After Effects. It's amazing what kind of results you can get by simply integrating a few basic tools. 

I can't wait until that idea hits me and I begin actually working on my teaser, because I'm honestly so fascinated with this program. After discovering how uniquely versatile After Effects is I may even consider majoring in Digital Media so that I can work with it in the future. 

Maybe (: 

Typography is a huge deal - if you don't believe me check out Hoefler & Frere-Jones. You can purchase four font packages for only $499.00! What a steal. Holy crap when did letters get so expensive? Ever since they started looking so good, I guess.

“The brief was to go into the pound shop and pick out something that seemed dull and completely re think the packaging of it. The idea is that the elastic band in the middle squeezes in the box and the strong the band, the most the box is squeezed.”

I think that the typography used on the packaging of these boxes of elastic bands is extremely effective. It takes a boring idea of packaging elastic bands, which frankly I can't even think what that packaging would even look like, and made it interesting. The amount the box is squeezed in directly relates to how strong the elastic bands are, and the typography for each box gets more stretched as well. It's a very fun design that sticks to one colour and bold vintage style serifed fonts. Everyone needs elastic bands at some point, but the typography here is clearly aimed at a younger demographic that would choose something for its design rather than purpose. 

The concept is clever because the type of elastic band is advertised in the middle, and that is the word that is getting stretched to varying degrees. It is also a very clean design with all the words ending at the same points, and the different fonts are similar enough that they add variety but still look like they are a part of the same family. I would buy this product.


Designed by Ric Bixter

"The new label maintains a balance of filigree, iconography, and special typographic elements, in black and white with a touch of silver."

I'm a huge fan of typography associated with various kinds of alcohol - I think that it's incredibly classy and this redesigned Jack Daniels liquor label is no excuse. (It's a layed out version of what would regularly be wrapped around the bottle, click on the caption to get other views) The Jack Daniel's font is bold and recognizable and working with white against black for the centre of the bottle, frames against two sides with raised stripes. The typography coupled with the shape of the bottle achieves a distinctly chiseled and masculine feel and is absolutely perfect in representing the drink 140 years after its begining. 


By Behance Network

Unlike most of the typography that I usually post which is print based (I'm a sucker for anything print), this struck me  as very witty and interesting as well. To be fair it is also technically 'print' but it is an ad that is featured outdoors in Australia. I love that typography was used non-traditionally here, in that fon't were carved out of the ice to make the words for the ad. 

The ad is clever, has great coloring, and conveys the message very well to its audience. My only complain would be that I think this particular version of the ad (there are a few others as well) has a bit too much head room at the top. That's just my personal opinion though, and I am by no means a professional designer. 


By Clemenger BBDO

Fleet Foxes, Helpless Blues, The Shine/An Argument

This video is amazing in so many ways, I get excited just thinking about it. I guess it helps that I'm a huge Fleet Foxes enthusiast, own all their CDs, posters, and was in the 7th row of their concert this past summer, but there's something special about this After Effects Motion Graphics Video. 

The blurry/foggy effect that is present throughout the whole video as well as the darkened edges of the video are incredibly effective in setting a mood for the video. As well, the warm colours that are used in the first part of the song - The Shrine - embody a very warm, earthy feel. 

I loved the combination of textures and rough cutout shapes to make the characters, and the integration with them and the glowing eerie background. The visualizations and musical transitions flowed so well with the music that when watched full screen with headphones on it's like being in an actual cinematic experience, and the emotions that the songs brings out of the viewer are so genuine. 

I never would have imagined this to be the face behind this song, but after seeing it I can't imagine anything else. The characters, the way they move and shift so fluidly yet with a clear 'puppeteering effect' is both incredibly eerie and childlike all in one. The first impression that I got at 2:38 when the creatures are revealed was the children's book Where the Wild Things Are. The song seems to cross borders on all plains - being both modern yet medieval at the same time, and the video does the same thing in playing with our sense of being. Where are we when watching this video? Why is this happening? The song on it's own isn't this dramatic yet coupled with the video it reveals so much hidden meaning. 

I love this Motion Graphic exactly for that. Not only is it beautifully made but it evokes emotion and thought from the viewer. It's interesting, intriguing, and multi dimensional. 

I love to sketch. I primarily draw people but I also love experimenting with fluid designs, things that aren't really anything but become meaningful after I'm finished with them. After drawing the main design featured in my poster, I spent some time analyzing it, choosing what it looked like and could be used for. I finally decided that what it looked like was a stream of billowing smoke, as if it was coming out of a chimney somewhere. That's how I came up with the idea for my Contemporary Arts Festival of London poster. I used the 'contemporary' design to represent an every day thing in an interesting way. In a way it's almost as if it's an art piece in itself that it being showcasted via poster for the event.

I'm sure that there is an actual Contemporary Arts Festival that goes on in London, however for the sake of the project I made up the name, date and website. 

I began by scanning my drawing into Photoshop, where I had to adjust the levels so that the background was more white and there were no shadows and the design itself stood out a little more. I then opened the image in Illustrator and live traced it so that it got rid of the texture in the background and made the lines more uniform and fluid. I copied this new image back into Photoshop, and worked with it from there. The smaller designs I decided to add later because I felt that the poster was a little empty with just the design in the middle. I processed them the same way I did for the first design.

After deciding on a colour palette and filling in most of the free space within the design (I left some out to give it a 'do it yourself colouring book sort of feel', I chose a font that I thought fit the theme and added inner shadows to it. I also added a faint drop shadow to the main design. Lastly I added a gradient map to the entire image to give the project a more uniform blend of colours (and I just love how they look).

The overall process wasn't overly complicated for me, although it was definitely time consuming. My biggest issue came from the fact that after I was completely finished with the project, exported it and changed it to 100 dpi (I like working with 300) that I realized I had gotten the canvas size wrong. I had been working on an 8x11 image the entire time when it was supposed to be 8x10. I had to go back into Photoshop, resize and re-edit all my spacing, sizing and even skew the design a bit. I was afraid of losing quality so I had to take various steps to prevent it from degrading. In the end I think it turned out really well and I'm happy with the results. 

Contemporary Art, in my mind, is loud and bold and doesn't hide. I think I represented that well in my poster, and got the message across with well placed typography.

Lovely Package | Curating the Very Best Packaging Design


Packaging matters. A lot. Especially when it comes to food. 


I know that I'd much rather glide into a Pusateri's to browse their selection of aged balsamic vinaigrette than do my usual shuffle through No Frills and pick up the cheapest No Name brand, with a yellow that might as well be screaming 'deer crossing ahead'. I like picking up a jar of relish and seeing how every single word must have taken hours to place, the font carefully chosen and the colours adjusted just right - so that the company could justify asking $29.99 for 15 fl. oz. 

Everyone falls into the trap though, and if it weren't such an expensive one I wouldn't call it a trap - because good packaging is something that I think should be a lot more abundant. Is it so much to ask that Helvetica font be used instead of Comic Sans? I don't understand how Comic Sans still has a market. 

Websites like Lovely Package showcase the very best in packaging design, and I spend hours browsing through pictures of products that I may never even be able to afford. Eye candy for those of us who are forced to buy President's Choice (although they recently launched a high end Black Label line of products that resemble Pusateri's designs very much).

Good food packaging makes me feel okay about eating certain things, and more often than not if a company has spent the extra buck on packaging you know that their product has probably had more time put into it as well. We all know that isn't always the case - Stabucks for instance - but their coffee is arguably still tastier than Tim Hortons, and their packaging design is crisper. Direct correlation? I'd like to think so. 


It frustrates me that good design isn't more abundant. There are so many resources out in there  in the world, not even the physical world, Google. There are even websites devoted to breaking down the fonts used for various products. A common trend I've recently noticed is 'no serif, no problem', and I admit I'll fallen for it as well, having recently downloaded all fifty different kinds of Helvetica. 


I guess the point of my Lovely Packaging rant is that I wish that beautiful things were more affordable, either that or great designers were hired everywhere. But I guess the reason there is such a difference between good and bad design is why we can appreciate the good anyway. I'll just continue to admire the simple delight that is nice packaging...and typography. 

This poster design for the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a great example of two of the CRAP principles. Alignment and repetition are used very effectively in order to achieve a the effect of a united road. It's eye catching and due to the fluidity and continuity of the lines, it draws the eye all over the page so that the details can also be enjoyed.

The use of proximity is very effective with the placement of the title of the movie, Big Fish. It is centered, draws the eye in and is done in a very avant garde style that can instantly be recognized with the movie. What I don't particularly like about this poster, however, is the alignment of the words at the bottom and top.They don't seem to work with the 3-D title and are very randomly spaced. Maybe the designer thought that the title of the movie was fancy enough, but I would have placed the other words differently and perhaps added an inner drop shadow. 

The use of contrast in this image is incredibly effective. The viewers eyes are immediately and soley directed at the woman in the photograph. There is also a misrepresentation here, which will also intrigue the viewer. On first look you wouldn't think that this photo would be for Vick's, however once the tagline is read the Ad becomes witty and even more enjoyable.

                   

The use of repetition and alignment are effective in this vintage poster for the upcoming ABBA movie due to the name of the movie being repeated throughout the length of the poster. The designer made the repetition interesting by adding pictures of the band and varying the color, but always keeping to a color scheme so there's the poster is uniform.  I love the vintage feel and the use of black and white photos against  large colourful letters. 

I'm an older sister to a not-quite-so-technologically-savvy teenager who has recently begun to discover the wonder that is the internet. Unfortunately for her I refuse to be cool about the whole thing and have to make sure that 'no sketchy business is going down'. My issue - that I don't trust anyone but myself when it comes to information being distributed on the internet. My sister, and I'm sure many other people, are (in my humble opinion) much too lax about the information they distribute about themselves on the internet. I'm a member of dozens of websites like everyone but I've begun to be a bit more conservative about what I actually put on them. 

On Facebook, for instance, I have my privacy settings almost of maximum. I realize this won't keep everyone out so I simply omit other things that my friends, who aren't as crazy as me, share freely. I don't like the fact that anything I decide to put on the internet will be there - forever. This doesn't stop me from joining various information sharing websites such as twitter, tumblr, flickr, google+, etsy, and last.fm. I'm not going to cut down on my 'web experience' just because I know that certain information will be retained. 

I already knew that the Facebook was recording my every move, but I'll admit the lecture brought other websites and even daily activities to my attention. There isn't any way around using the internet, so my digital identity has been carefully constructed so that I still feel safe, but share just enough to make myself an interesting google search. Go ahead, try it for yourself. 

This is a Photoshop Tutorial that I completed in class - A Postcard for Las Vegas

Ever since I discovered the beauty of independent film making and podcasting, back in 2005, I've been fascinated with the production of various media. Four Eyed Monsters, a low budget film made by two novices (Aaron Crumley and Susan Buice) caught my eye and I was fascinated by how much raw emotion their work carried across to me. At that point in time I had never been exposed to a form of media that was reaching out to its audience other than by traditional means. They were, ingeniously, releasing podcasts that showed the progress of the movie as well as chunks of Aaron and Susan's life. The videos were never completely straightforward and left me guessing whether what I had watched was fiction or reality. They felt so homemade and always started with an introduction from both Aaron and Susan, yet they were so perfectly stylized it was like watching a super exclusive television show that only so many people knew about. I had such respect for their leap into the future and going beyond anything that had been done before that I began to think that my own love for art and design was justified and perhaps I could make a career of it.


Before then I had never produced anything on the computer apart from a few terrible PowerPoints and a Windows Movie Maker disaster. After opening my eyes to the wonders that "real people" could produce via camera and editing, I couldn't stop searching for more kinds of media. I discovered other video podcasts and various comedy groups that made "shorts" and began following them religiously. Now I'm obsessed with many graphic design artists and illustrators as well as filmmakers. Photography is another long time passion of mine and I recently invested in a Canon EOS 60D - I have never prized anything more.


My fascinatation with digital media continues to grow as it morphs into a larger entity every single year. What started with two video podcasters who were trying to reach an online audience that was not yet there has now expanded to millions of users watching and creating content worldwide. It is so important to be aware of all these changes because nobody wants to get left behind. The future is now, and it's with digital media.