Research for Designer Profile

Research on Designer Profile

Fonts
The research I have done on fonts for headings is though searching the web for Photoshop tutorials. I went and looked around Photoshop Tutorials that teaches you how to make your own fonts in Photoshop. I tried some of them to see what kinds of different fonts would be good for my Designer Profile.

Link to website I researched on fonts: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/50-great-photoshop-text-effect-tutorials-part-ii/w.hongkiat.com/blog/50-great-photoshop-text-effect-tutorials-part-ii/

Here are some of the fonts that I look around into on that website:

Page layouts:
I went and searched on the web on magazine page layouts to see what kind of page layouts are in magazines and get ideas for the type of page layout for my Designer profile.

Links to website I looked in: http://www.layersmagazine.com/magazine

Another Magazine I looked into is the Tawa College’s own magazine: Tawahi. I went and looked through the magazines page layouts, the interview and the overview write-ups. Mostly from that magazine I started to get ideas on the page layout I was planning to use.

Effects:
The research into effects for Designer profile was done by doing tutorials located in I:\Computing\Y11DIT\Term1. There were 11 Photoshop tutorials that showed you how to do effects in different creative ways. From doing some of the 11 Photoshop tutorials, they showed how to approach what effects would be suitable for my designer profile.

Some of the ones I used were the Retro Comic effect and tutorials that showed you how to do manipulating layer effects.

Websites for Photoshop Tutorials I looked into:

http://www.photoshopcafe.com/
http://www.entheosweb.com/photoshop/default.asp
http://www.graphictutorials.net/
http://www.computerarts.co.uk/tutorials/2d__and__photoshop
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/41-nicest-photoshop-photo-effects-photoshop-tutorials/

Background:
I went to the website: http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/design/photoshop-tutorials-wallpaper/ to see what approach I should go for when considering to make background in Photoshop. This website was great for giving you ideas for what kind of style you would go for in a background design.

The two designs that gave me an idea on approaching a background design:

Researching text:
The research I’ve done on the text that was going to go on the designer profile was doing the interview. The interview would be the exact ideas and text that would relate to the designer.

Doing Background:
I first opened a plain A4 background paper and added a cloud effect that I knew how to do from the ‘3D Cliff text’ tutorial onto the page. Next I added a wind effect to it and repeated it about 8 times. I sharpen it and change the colour from black and white to blue by using the hue/saturation effects. Basically I did my background by using the ‘3D cliff text’ tutorial but this time instead of doing it on text; I did it on a background. Next I applied an ocean ripple effect. The end result is the background I have now.

Font: At home, I just found a nice font from the internet and use it for my heading font.

Page layout: Page layout was decided by looking at various wallpapers and conceptual structure tree diagrams. I decided to use this idea and made a similar page layout as a tree diagram by using the rectangle tool box and line tool to achieve the results. I had the line come out from the centre and ended up connecting to a box. Inside that box would have something relating to that person. To make it more visually appealing, I decided to make the boxes transparent so it would blend in well with background by changing the opacity to around 60 to 70%.

Images: Images were resized according to the box sizes. All images will be edited in Photoshop CS4.

Text: Text was added around the spaces were it wouldn’t hide the images. Text for the designer profile was separately documented in Word and transferred into InDesign.

Interview questions and answers

Interview with TJ

What’s your favourite design?
Impossible staircase by M.C Escher

Do you play a sport which one?
Tennis, Badminton

What music do you like?
Industrial pop, modern rock (e.g. Coldplay)

My hobbies and books, movies etc
(Star wars nerd)

What’s your favourite font?
(Bradley hand itc)

What are your hobbies?
I like playing video games (RPGer), play chess and make computer art (very badly).

What inspires you to design?

I love looking coming up with new ideas and all, but the thing I really like most is interpreting briefs and trying to put my ideas into effect, I want to try and get better at being able to take ideas from my head and putting it into a document.The better people understand my ideas, the better I’ve done.Overall, I would like to improve my program skills and getting better interpreting skills for other’s work.

Designer profile finished

Evaluation - Designer Profile

What I have learned
I have learned how to use Adobe Design Products because of this project - I am grasping how to become a confident Photoshop CS4 & InDesign user as I had time in this project to test and try out these software. Starting this project - I knew little about how to make a design in Photoshop CS4 and importing into InDesign. Now as I am finished from this project - I can now say that I can use Photoshop CS4 and InDeisgn more confidently that before.

Does my Designer Profile meet my brief?
Yes, my design has meet the brief that I set out to do. The designer I did it on agrees on the quality of it and says its adequate enough for a designer profile. Whats good about it is that it has a unique page layout that displays the designer's interest though images differently rather than having a basic page document with text all in one place and images all on the sides. Looks more spacious with the page layout I chose for this designer profile - mimics a mind map with text all over the place to represent the designer. By manipulating a basic mind map style with text in order to achieve my propose - I thus achieve my brief effectively at the same time.

Bad Things about this design of the designer profile
Text was a major problem in this page layout - mainly because you had to fit in the spaces around the mind map styled page layout. Text is probably only the thing on the profile that maybe hard to read - But I tried to counter this by using different font colours in order for the text to be readable. (Black/White)

Counters / changes along the way
The heading font - I intentionally wanted to use '3D Cliff ' text but decided to use a more simpler font that's more easier to use than making the text in Photoshop CS4/ I had changed my page layout once as the first intentioned page layout was too basic and looked like a document. So I changed it to a different page layout and decided to go from there. This page layout was more creative and spacious than my original page layout. You can see this in my thumbnail sketches and said why some of them weren't good. The big second A4 sketch is my final concept sketch for my designer profile.

Importing evertything into InDesign

After finally making everything in Photoshop CS4 and typed up the interview in separate Word Documents, I started to put together my images and text into one InDesign Document. I make a new A4 Document in InDesign and started placing everything on the page and on the way - added some effects and tweaked the images a little bit as they came though into InDesign. I am nearly finished placing everything into InDesign - just finalising the document.

Backgorund Drafts

I have drawn up four thumbnails of the layouts I would use for the profile. I have drafted out one of the thumbnails in A4 format as this is the one I have chosen. The first one is a simple layout which is boring as doesn't fills the specifications of a interesting page layout. I chose the second one because its looks unique and different from a plain page layout design I would ususally use for a document. The third one is more of a webpage layout design, so I did not used that page layout. Its still the same concept as the first thumbnail. The fourth page layout is landscape with text and images placed spaciously aroudn the page - this landscape format would of been good for me, as there is lots of space to place things but I still did not chose it because I found it awkward having a landscape page layout on a magazine. Most pages are potrait so that is why I chose the second thumbnail, because its has a mixture of a unique page layout in potrait orientation.

Chess Art Work

I have found some very nice Chess Artwork that would go well with my Designer profile. The site is :http://fantasyartdesign.com/

I have chosen one of the four chess design artworks there. I am allowed to use them for my personal use only if I include the above website in my link references for my bibilography at the write up evaluation by the end of this project.