I took this course at my previous school, the Community College of Vermont, before transferring to UNE in the fall of 2019. I learned a lot in this course and increased my comfort level with many of the standard adobe creative cloud apps such as photoshop and indesign. I got to complete projects such as create an original pamphlet/brochure for your favorite place to vacation, combining several images and filters in photoshop to create a post-apocalyptic scene that relates to climate change, and create a full book jacket for an original book idea.
“This 3 credit course is an introduction to the industry-standard software package for professional graphic designers for use in digital image manipulation, digital illustration, and page layout. Students will learn basic navigating skills within the Adobe Creative Cloud software including Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Students will learn how to select, modify, adjust, combine, and manipulate pre-existing digital images, as well as the basic method for creating new vector images from scratch. Students will then investigate how these images can be integrated with type to create a page layout.”
Now I want to share some of my favorite projects from the class!
This was the first project for the class. We had to design a post-apocalyptic scene that resulted in part from climate change. I decided to choose a quote about rising sea levels and construct a scene of New York City if sea levels rose to an extreme level from climate change. It was a challenge to blend everything to the same lighting, get the rain effect to look right, as well as scale everything as accurately as possible. It was a fun challenge! I started with just the image of the waves. I added an image of a skyscraper, the statue of liberty, the skyline in the background, birds in the sky, as well as the lightning. I also added filters for the rain and stormy look. This project basically required we create a travel brochure to a favorite vacation destination. My family has been going to Acadia for summer vacation for the past four years and we love it. I decided to use my photos from past trips as well as information from the park service websites to build a colorful and pleasing brochure. It’s hard to tell how it would be laid out when viewing two JPGs, as folded up into the brochure format is the best way to see the design, but you get the basic idea! For this assignment, we created a polygon art piece of a famous person who is no longer living. As an animal lover, I grew up watching Steve Irwin so I knew I wanted to polygonify him! It was a very tedious and time consuming project with lots of small edits and layers in photoshop, but I am very happy with the end result. This was one of the more creative projects we did this semester. Our assignment was to create a 100% original magazine cover and 2 two-page spreads. I decided to not only make my magazine about birds, but I decided to jump into a fantasy world where birds read magazines, so I made a magazine by birds for birds! So the topics were important topics that I thought birds would like to read about such as interviewing celebrity bird actors like Iago from Aladdin, or a 10 tips list like we humans like, for birds it was how to get in shape for migration! My main article for the page spreads was outdoor cats and their impact on wild bird populations. Luckily, we didnt have to actually write the article, and could use gibberish placeholder text. However, I had fun designing the layout and thinking of every little detail that makes it feel more like a bird magazine aimed at birds rather than humans. We also had to create an original advertisement to place on one of our pages and it was a blast coming up with a goofy product like glasses for birds that help them see window and avoid collisions. Our cumulative final project for this course was to design a book jacket for either an original book we made up, or redesign the book cover for an existing book. I decided to take the more in-depth route and create a book jacket for an original book. Every animal head on the book cover is from individual photos I took. I carefully cut each animal out of their photos and placed them strategically on the cover. I added the Earth element in the middle to arrange them and the title around. It was fun to write the book synopsis as well as the about the author section. I wish I was talented in story writing because I’d love to see this book actually exist!
