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Designing for Print

I design the sports pages five days a week for Cal Poly’s student-run newspaper, the Mustang Daily, and it is printed with an on-campus offset web press, also run by students in the Graphic Communication department. Frankly, this is not the highest quality of printing, for a couple reasons. First, it is a newspaper, which is meant to be read once and then (hopefully) recycled. Second, this shorter-run printing is done by students on an older press, which sacrifices some quality (compared to, for example, The New York Times). After designing more than fifty layouts for the Mustang Daily, I am beginning to see what works and looks good…and what doesn’t.

Photo Composition Basics

I have a digital point-and-shoot camera, so I am fairly limited with creative options for photography. However, photo composition is something that anyone, including myself, can learn about and apply to their photography. Here are some basics I picked up from my Digital Photography class last year, and were discussed in Get the Most from your Digital Camera by Simon Joinson.

Illustrator Graffiti Type Effect

Using Illustrator, I was working on some ideas for a brochure at my Campus Dining job today and decided to do a “graffiti-style” look. Using basic tools, I came up with a type effect that I thought turned out pretty neat. Here’s how I did it.

The finished result of my graffiti type effect.

Design Process – Drumline Shirt

I have been in marching band since ninth grade, and I joined drumline my junior year of high school. I just completed my fifth year of being involved in drumline. In all my years of drumline, I had never gotten a chance to wear a drumline shirt until this past season at Cal Poly. While it had been spoken of in the past, it never formulated into an actual plan. This time, I decided I would take the challenge of designing the shirt, and the members were all very excited about it. They told me that they wanted it to say “We bang harder” on it. I have noticed that innuendo is a very common strategy for club/organization t-shirts at college. For the record, drumline consists of about 25 people, and last season we had a record number of four girls out of that total, including me. So it is essentially a group of very rambunctious college-aged male drummers.

The front and back sides of the shirt I designed.

That is what I had to keep in mind when designing a shirt that these guys would wear. I chose Illustrator as my tool, because I thought that would produce graphics that would be easier for the screen printing company to replicate. In the beginning phase of my thought process, I knew I wanted it to say “We bang harder” on the front, and “Cal Poly Drumline” on the back. I decided I would go with a grungy-looking font (I used Cracked). Also, the group seemed to agree that we should use green and gold (the school colors). I thought a black shirt would really make those light colors stand out boldly. In the shower one day, I suddenly had the idea of using a pair of drumsticks in the place of the “A” in “bang”. I got a picture of drumsticks off of Google Images and used it as a template in Illustrator. I traced it by hand with the pen tool. This was before I knew about Live Trace, by the way. For the back, I decided to go with music-related symbols. I downloaded a free font off dafont.com that consisted of musical elements. I picked a character that had music notes on a staff, converted it to paths, and extended each line individually to meet with the letters of “Cal Poly Drumline”. After giving many soft and hard proofs to members of the drumline and perfecting it to their liking, I submitted the design to a local screen printing company.

Everyone was really excited to receive the t-shirts, and it was great seeing all of them wearing the shirt I designed at a rehearsal for a football game halftime show. Because I used two colors and both sides of the shirt, it was a costly investment. I ordered more than I needed to make the shirts individually cheaper, but that left me with a lot of extra shirts. I sold them for fifteen dollars each and still have about six shirts left. Hopefully I will sell more shirts when the drumline gets new members. I learned a lot throughout the whole process; not only the design aspect, but the business aspect when dealing with the screen printing company.

Typographic Poster

I am a beginner with Photoshop, so I refer to online tutorials very often to learn about different tools and photo effects. Today I stumbled across a tutorial by Chris Spooner for making a modern, trendy typographic poster using a simple word or phrase and scaling it to different sizes while fitting it together like a puzzle on a 45 degree grid. I thought it was a really cool effect and I loved how the layers blended together.

For the background color, I used a picture of a waterlily in a pond from sxc.hu (which I applied a dramatic Gaussian Blur to), and for the texture, I picked one from the website recommended by Chris, Bittbox.com (an image of concrete, which I applied a Soft Light blend to). The longest part was definitely filling in my name (I chose Impact for the typeface). But once I was finished, I was definitely pleased with the result and I learned a little more about Photoshop layering and blending!

The final result of the tutorial I referred to.

PASSIONS logo: Design Process

This is the full color version of the logo without text.

This logo that I made about two weeks ago is for a friend that founded a program for older students (in high school and college) to run extracurricular activities they are passionate about for younger children. The older students would enjoy incentives such as community service hours (required by many schools) while the children would get a chance to participate in a variety of activities with an excellent role model.

I stumbled across the idea of creating a big person accompanying a small person, because that is the essence of the program. Using simple shapes and the pathfinder tools in Illustrator, I made a human form, which I copied and scaled down. I decided it would be effective to have the shapes overlapping to symbolize the two age groups coming together. A heart was added to show the passion in the older student. I opted for a red and yellow color scheme because red represents passion and yellow represents youth, among other things. Although I would rather have had the small person yellow, I ultimately thought that the heart must be red.

I finished the project by making a version of the logo with “PASSIONS” underneath, substituting a heart for the “O” for a consistent theme. I made black and white versions of both for multipurposing.

I am happy with the end result; I think it looks very clean and speaks the message of what the program is about.

Greetings!

Here goes my very first blog. After using Twitter for a couple weeks, I began to realize how many designers had a blog. I follow a few designers on Twitter, read their blogs, and was really impressed with how informative they were. And then I learned about WordPress. I started seeing that word everywhere, and I had no idea what it was. I started worrying that I was missing something important as a designer, and started researching. I eventually found out it was a blogging service, and I could get one for free. At first, I didn’t think I had anything to blog about and decided to put it off until later. But why? I’m sure I will come up with many ideas for blogs and the whole process will make me a better writer, a better designer, and more involved in the design community.

I picked out my WordPress theme from the lot they had on site and uploaded a picture of me for the header, which was a little difficult due to the strange proportions. Maybe one day I will be able to make my own “theme” for my blog with CSS. I can’t wait to take the web design class so I can get started on my portfolio and maybe get some freelance projects. When I was in middle school I taught myself HTML and designed my own websites (quite basic, however). The most advanced HTML I learned was DIV frames. I haven’t practiced much since those days, and I never really learned CSS.

Anyway, what knowledge I lack in web design I make up for in print design. I know InDesign very well. I have been reading books on InDesign and applying what I learn to my pages for the Mustang Daily (Cal Poly’s student-run newspaper). I look forward to learning more about web design because it is so important and prevalent today.