Still, need to post this…:

BIG THANKS TO THU HANG AND JEREMIAH FOR THEIR CONTRIBUTION TO THE FINAL ASSIGNMENT!

The description of our story book will be in the design document. Here I’m only talking about what we feel while doing this final assignment.

I pretty like the story. It has a small “twist”: monsters are not always that much evil like they are always poitrayed, and the hero doesn’t need to always use violence to save the princess. By “negotiating”, Tom even make Sissy become an dedicating artist, a “useful member of the society” Sissy turns out to be a really cute character, doesn’t it? Everyone I asked loved it, cute Sissy

Another idea of the story that I liked is the ending. Well, fairy things are often believed to be unrealistic. However, by leaving the ending like that, we would like to encourage children’s imagination, encouraging them to believe in good things. It’s a nice dream, but its images may be found somewhere, here and there in our real life. Isn’t it beautiful?

By doing this assignment, we did learn a lot about using Illustrator well, got upset with it quite a lot, but the result is not bad. I love the characters.

I also want to add shadow, and shading for every objects to create the depth for the pictures, but it’s too time consuming and we didn’t have time. So I just add shading for important objects and characters in important pictures, use gradient for some other objects, and leave the rest in flat colors

I somehow love the color of this book, colorful and fresh I think it suits the kids.

For the layout, firstly we just simply do the pictures at the top and put the text at the bottom. But then Mr Reddy said that it’ll be too separate then we put the text inside the pictures with a box with low opacity and put some bubble talk , too

I’ll put here some of our pictures:

Old design:

And this is the later one, big improvement, right? Changed the color, edit the character, add some cute things…

I and my classmate Hang have surfed through many design website and forum to find a good design that we can recognize some of the principles discussed in class. Finally we found this poster:

We choose this design since it’s pretty clear, straight forward and effective in sending out message. The color is also strong and meaning ful (black, white and red remind of death, danger, scary things)

For bad design, firstly I wanted to choose this banner at Science canteen:

The banner violated the principles of figure and ground (most obvious violation). And all the effects of the fonts and background are also irrelevant. However, we didn’t choose it, for we couldnt get a clearer image of it.

Therefore we changed to this poster, also another poster in NUS campus:

The most obvious problem of this poster is that the background is even more eye-catching than the main figure, with lots of colors and all of those colors are very strong. The poster also showed no clear structure, no grouping, no main focus.

In the class, our tutor said that Holi is the festival of color. However, personally i think that we may have other ways to express the feeling of the festival, rather than trying to put every color in the background and catch attention from the viewer even more than the main foreground. For example, a poster with the thee “messy” doesn’t mean that everything has to be so messy, that no one can recognize anything. There are most basic principles that every design should follow.

For the text… well… call me stubborn girl, but I pretty like the text, I mean the way I organized it to be narrow down and point to the main figure…. Therefore, I have my reason to keep it.

I tried adding more trees on the back to create the feeling of “depth”, but it seems a bit messy and complicated, then I removed them. (right click on the image, choose “view image” to see full view )

so.. at the end, I only changed the font, re-arranged the text a bit, that’s all

In my view, this card looks peaceful and cute at the same time. The main color is pink/purple in different shades.  Colors are mainly gentle, tender, and light, which make the view feel peace, sweetness, and… love.

The most and the only outstanding color is red, which is used to make the hearts stand out. The background is also pink/purple, with a bit of yellow at the corner (I used gradient) to create the feeling of “light”

You fold the card at the middle.

About the butterfly and the flower… well , told you that I’m obsessed with them right? And I really don’t want to give up that idea ( therefore, I try this sketch:

I also come up with a new idea, but I think this one is difficult to focus on the using color itself… because this card focus on wording and idea… it mainly used words and even figures to express the meaning, but not color. Therefore I won’t choose it. Maybe I will leave it for future use, who knows:

So I ‘ve decided, I will do the butterfly and the flower one. Let’s see what I can do with it

For the first idea, I didn’t do any sketch. I thought of this ideas when I was on the bus, and when I come home I just open up my computer and try it on Photoshop right away.

Firstly, it’s like this:

I think it was quite cool… actually I want to leave the background as white, really really do… but when I ask my classmate whether I should do the white background, they all said that I shouldn’t =(( I think white background may bring the red color out, but it may be too simple, and may remind people of Christmas, not Love.

One more problem whit this is that  I don’t know how to fold the card… if it’s horizontal, it’s a bit weird (well, I think so )

Then I come up with a new design. Initially, this one also had no sketch, I was just playing around with brushes in Illustrator and come up with it :

wow, I think it was really good, though I left the background white. FYI, I loveeeeeeeee white background. Simple, yet effective in making the main figure stand out. I really really love it. And one more thing, I love butterflies and flowers too . I’m obsessed with it.Really.

But (again) my classmates didn’t like this, they liked that my first design (the one with many heart-shapes)  and said that I used colors effectively in that design…

Well, really?

The first one:

This yellow “circle” at their hands are draw views’ attention to what they are doing

In this picture, motion blur was added to create the feeling of movement.

- NM2208 is really stressful. Not only because you have to submit assignment every week, but you also have to present about your assignment. The problem is that you will have to show people your work, and see how good their works are, compared to yours looking at my assignment among those beautiful ones…hmmm… why cant I be more creative?

- Something to ask: where do you print with glossy paper? Printing in YIH is really expensive =(

About my assignment: well-worn theme: Save green.

I tried to follow the rules discussed in class. White is the main color, to make the “repetition”, then the green leaf and the main subject is another color – green- to make the “contrast” and draw attention to them. I wanna draw attention to the leaf, making the feeling like it’s “the last leaf”, then we have to save “greeness” as soon as possible =p

Then the text I tried to make it narrow down, like an arrow which points to the white tree…

I like the logo hehe, how about you?

- Something about this assignment: the dead tree is in NUS campus, on the road behind Central lib… I saw it some time ago, then when I had to do this assignment, I came and took a picture of it. But, it’s extremelyyyyyyyyyy difficult to remove out all the background as you can see here. My eyes hurt a lot =( hope you like it

This is the original picture of the tree: