Social Poster

Object as a Mark

Great Mind in Design

Patterns

Modularity and Grid

Layers

Type and Hierarchy Summary

When considering type and hierarchy within a layout or project, it is important to consider color, contrast, scale in conjunction with the placement of the information. In the video, she emphasized using borders, lines, and color to help guide the reader's eye through the content you are presenting. Designers directly influence the media and public, and therefore, are the creators of culture. The way that information is presented is so crucial to our society and how we receive that information.

Larger font or bold lettering can direct the reader's eye there first thus emphasizing a title or important information that the designers feels that the reader should be most aware of. The organization of your layout is also important when creating a cohesive hierarchy. In the video, she mentioned many ways you can do this, whether you have a small amount of information or a lot of text, using varying colors to depict groups or categories allows the reader to flow through the information with ease.

Hierarchy

Heber - Calligraphy Summary

Heber showed us his passion of lettering and how he has made it into his full-time job, not just as a graphic designer, but also as a lettering artist and craftsman. He uses a lot of his hands-on creativity through lettering to influence his work at Visual Asylum. He began his design career at City College and eventually transferred to SDSU. He believes the quality of staff and expectations of the City College program are what really gave him the boost he needed to further pursue his career in design.

With lettering and calligraphy being Heber's passion, he has many interesting and exploratory tools that he uses when creating his art. He inspired me to pick up a couple new tools to continue exploring my creativity with typography and lettering outside of the classroom. Heber emphasized that his commitment to his craft and time spent expanding his creativity directly relates to his success in his projects in Graphic Design.

Border Play

Amor + Keisuke Summary

Amor and Keisuke began their design career in the Graphic Design program at City College and used that foundation to obtain full ride scholarships to the Art Center. While attending the Art Center, they had the opportunity to work on some very impressive projects that allowed them to further their creative and critical thinking skills more than they ever imagined. Through their own tenacity and ability to act on advantageous opportunities, they were among the first students to go on an international internship program with the Art Center in Germany, were recruited as undergraduate students to be apart of a graduate research project for the inventors of the Snapchat face recognition technology, and also were able to live in Europe for a year and a half working on various design projects for such organizations such as Volkswagon and MetaDesign.

Amor and Keisuke demonstrate what can be achieved if you have a passion for what you are doing, a focused work ethic, a desire to learn everyday and push yourself as far as you can, in addition to creating and finding opportunities and acting on them. They also exemplify the importance of having a solid foundation when embarking on a challenging design career, which they believe the program at City College gave them.

Positive/Negative

Grouping Modes

Seeing Color

Jim Krause Summary

Jim Krause is an exceptional designer that is well-versed in using color to his advantage in his work. He explained that all color consists of three components - hue, saturation, and value. Although all three are very important in depicting emotion through color, value is the most important as the other two components would not exist without the value of a color. He showed many helpful examples of how to use color to create different branding, logos, color illustrations, etc.

I thought that his tricks with using the color guide to be extremely helpful when thinking about my future design career. Jim's favorite color design style is to use split complimentary, which means that he likes to select a color then use the near colors of its complimentary color. This technique allows for the designs to remain visually distinctive and interesting but also complimentary so it still has some relevance to each other.

Jim also went into a technique for color which I found especially interesting. He recommended finding classic works of art that you admire based on their color scheme, and using the color guide tools to create your own color swatches based on the color scheme of that original piece of artwork. I am looking forward to trying that technique in my own work. Overall, I found Jim's color advice to be very interesting and useful when thinking of applying it to my own work.

Interaction of Color

Color Wheel

Typographic Texture

Physical Texture

Marian Bantjes Summary

Marian Bantjes is a very successful graphic designer, both in the commercial sphere as well as her own personal creations. She is a true inspiration of someone who really honed in on her craft and her originality over years of working hard at it. She is at the point now in her career where she is really able to expand her creativity and push her own boundaries. As a contributor in the film said, "she is demonstrating that design can be personal". She always does the unexpected but in a beautiful way. Her designs were inspiring in that you can tell she takes of pride in her work.

Her project with the Valentine's Day cards using the old Christmas cards was beautiful. As she put it, it was an idea that turned into pleasantly aesthetic surprise. The details of the cards and the cut outs were creative, beautiful, and timeless looking. Marian uses a wide variety of materials in her projects, including drawing and scanning into illustrator, that adds to her overall creative expansion. 

Her colleagues referred to Marian as fundamentally understanding the creativity of each project and that is why she was so successful. The amount of knowledge she has and time she put into it showed through her understanding of concepts exceptionally well.