Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Dock Redesign

I also redesigned the icons in my dock! A graphic designer, Jessica Hische, redesigned hers and inspired me to recreate mine. I loved how hers were all circles to make the dock much cleaner, but I wanted to add in a little more personality and different colors. So I made my own in illustrator! Here are all the different versions I made. There are some I like on here that I didn't use... maybe I'll change them again next year.


Here's my dock right now!


My Handwriting Typeface

I spent the afternoon making my handwriting into a working typeface! I scanned in a paragraph of text I had written and then organized the letters into groups in Illustrator.



Here are all the versions of each letter that I had to choose from:



Then I made them all bigger so I could see which ones I liked best:



And narrowed it down to my favorites:


Then I imported the illustrator letters into a TypeTool, resized each letter, and adjusted the spacing (which wasn't so hard since all my letters touch when I am writing anyways.)


Here's the full set!



Sunday, December 12, 2010

Fish Market Sketchbook

This is my sketchbook I made for the Process Fish Market show during the November First Friday gallery hop.









Friday, December 10, 2010

Vertices: Printing Press

We got to go and see the printing press, Chamberlee, that was printing the copies of Vertices that we designed for Duke University. I somewhat knew the printing process, but seeing it in person and watching them do it was fascinating! I really thought it was controlled completely by computers, but it really has a lot to do with one person using his aesthetic eye to get the perfect print. It really is a human craft, not just a bunch of machines!


First they transfer our designs onto metal plates. (This is the editors page that I designed!)


The top page there is the test print they showed us a week ago as a color check so that we could approve the colors. The printer prints another test the day of the print job (the page on the table below).


A close up of the test print.


Then he uses his magnifier to look at the text and images (which are just thousands of dots of CMYK), to make sure they are lining up properly and the colors are consistent with the color check!


Then, just based on the printers own eye, he punches a bunch of buttons to adjust the colors and alignment. This blew my mind that it is just this one man making everything perfect. I always thought they just sent it through the machine and a computer made it perfect. I like it better this way. It really is a craft.




Then, when the printer is happy with the test print, he starts the machine to print all 500 copies of that one printer spread. Each page goes through each one of those sections which each applies a different color of ink to the page (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black).


This is the beginning of the process where the machine grabs each sheet of blank paper and feeds it into the machine.




Then the metal sheet with the image on it is rolled over the ink roller, applying ink to the metal image, which is then applied to the paper.


After going through each CMYK section, the page pops out here, which has some sort of dust particles which dries the ink quickly.


Then they are spit out one after another on a stack until you've got all 500 of that printer spread! The whole process is then repeated for every printer spread (about 20).


Then the excess is all cut off.


And falls into this pile of scraps.


And then the spreads are folded and sent down the line.




And then they go through this machine to get staple-bound. And that is the end of the process! We should be getting to see the final product this week and I will post pictures of the final journal!



There's one of my spreads!



Screen Printing with Activate!





Sunday, December 5, 2010

End of Semester: Final Studio Presentation

End of Semester: Final Studio Website Screenshots

These are screenshots from my final website design for our electric vehicle awareness campaign, Activate. The final file is a SWF file made in Flash CS4, and is fully clickable, and functional but does not live on the web. There are many moving images/type and rollover features (such as the timeline lighting up different colors to show the years on the side of the building in the history section) that sadly cannot be seen in these screenshots.