Poster.

For this portfolio I will bring together some of my ideas from photoshop and illustrater to create an original film poster for an existing film.  I chose The Rocky Horror Picture Show because I thought this film would be fun to manipulate because I had the opportunity and number of ideas to focus on the characters such as Brad and Janet, Rocky, or Dr Frank n Furter. However chosing him would have been an obvious choice and tried to stay away from the obvious symbols such as legs and suspenders and the typical red lips. I noticed these were the typical features of The Rocky Horror Picuture Show posters because I looked at exisiting posters for the film.First I started off by looking at existing pictures from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In my poster I will include a title, a byline, the main image, and a quote.

An exisiting Rocky Horror poster did inspire me to come up with the concept of doing screen shots on my poster at points throughout the film and edit them in a 60's pop art style.

This existing Rocky Horror Poster then inspired me to edit the images I had found into a 60's pop art style and to develop my idea by create a montage.





To create this effect, I opened up my image into photoshop and made sure it was in RGB mode. To ensure this was the mode I went to menu-mode- RGB Colour. Next I made a duplicate layer. I then applied poster edges to my images by going to filter-artistic-poster edges. After adding the poster edges I experiemented with adjusting the brightness and contrast to emphasise certain detail in each image. The final stage to make it into the style of a 60's cartoon was to go to filter-artistic-cut out. Below are the results of this technique.

I then began to start experimenting with the allignment and proximity of images in my initial poster design by overlapping three selected images

I didn't like this poster design because it focused on something you'd expect for a Rocky Horror poster because the lips are the main focus and are well known to any Rocky Horror fan. For the development of my poster I then replaced the obvious image with an image of a character that might not be as well known as Frank n Furter or Brad and Janet. I did this because I wanted to play with the audiences expectations as to what they might see in a Rocky Horror Picture Show poster.

This poster experiments with the design principle of proximity and containment exploring the use of white and typographic spacing.  However in some cases this doesn't necessarily work aesthetically and in my case it looks rather plain for a poster. So to resolve this issue I placed an image of the castle/house from Rocky Horror in the background and changed the opacity bringing the images from the film to the front so they stand out and attract the audiences attention.

This is my finished poster, by adding the background it has improved my design showing that the use of white spacing doesn't always produce an effective design.






























                                              

Logo.

The second task to my design research portfolio was to design a logo for a fictional company or organisation from a favourite film, book, tv series or game. I chose the TV series True Blood and have designed a logo for a drink's label of the true blood beverage that features in the series.

 This was the initial idea for my true blood beverage drink. The process of this design was straight forward and involved creating the border by increasing the pt to approximately 25pt. Then using the rectangle tool in illustrator to create the border. This achieved proximity through the use of containment by using the border and also white space to group the components of the logo together.




I then developed the concept of using an image from true blood, this time using a character from the Tv series. I took the principle of contrast and manipulated this image in photoshop at first altering the light and saturation levels. I then went to layer-layer style- and thresold. The edges looked rough so next I put the image back into illustrator and used ""live trace" to smoothen out the edges. This image wasn't sucessful using this technique because the background was too busy and so the features of the characters were difficult to pick out.

 This was the most effective image using this techinique and therefore this is the image I have chosen this image to use in my logo design.










 Instead of having a white background in for my second logo design I looked at using a contrasting background and chose red. Here I also experemented with a vintage styled font and edited into an arc shape just like the other beer labels I looked at.

 

However the typography for this doesn't suit the genre of the programe but editing the text so that it was in an arc made the logo appear more like a bottle label. 

This was an experiment with with typeface and also the allignment and proximity of the logo design.

The selected font for this logo is called "cracked" in illustrator.

I then decided that the font type I was going to use was "cracked". I started to experiment by creating droplets of blood on illustrator. By only doing droplets of blood on one side went against the design principle of allignment because it looked uneven.

To create this effect in illustrator, I drew a straight line approx 6pt and then selected the pen tool to anchor at least 4 points inside the line. This is shown in the third red line towards the right hand side. The blue dots are the anchors. From adjusting these I could create the shape I wanted the droplets to be.  For example like this....

I then merged the droplets of blood onto the letters, again using anchors where it helped. I did this to make it look like the font was dripping blood. This was also apropritate for the name of the show true blood. 

Timothy Samara says that "A grin is one appraoch to organising visual information to aid communication. It is a method to help solve complex communication problems." and that "Allignment between masses and voids visually connect or separate them" For example the allignment wasn't very effective in this design and isn't aesthetically pleasing because there is a gap in the bottom right hand corner. To solve this problem I considered adding an age limit to the label to balance the proximity of components in this logo.

This is my final logo design. Through the development of my ideas, the basic prinicples of graphic design have ensured that I have created an effective and visually appealing logo.

Record Cover

The initial task of my design research portfolio was to create a logo design from a random wikipedia article from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random. My result was "Colarado Central Railroad". This would be the name of my band. I then went to http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 to get a random quote, mine was "All things must change to something new, to something strange". This would be the title of my album cover. The final step was to get a random photo from http://flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days. This was the image for my album cover which luckily went well with the name of my album. Here is my inital design.

I started out by experiementing with the diferent tools in photoshop, such as creating a drop down shadow on the text. The image I got made me wanted to create quite a dark and dramatic album cover similar to  Marrilyn Manson's album cover "Antichrist superstar". 

Immediately, it is evident that to create an ablum cover some basic design principles needed to be taken into consideration. The first principle which became apparent was allignment. This principle states that nothing should be placed on the page arbitarily. My initial album cover design follows this principle because I thought about where the text was placed in relation to other objects and therefore every item in my initial design had a visual connection with something else on the page. This also links in with the principle proximity. Proximity states that you must group related items together. The closeness of items to one another sets up their visual associateion with one another and helps produce an order to how the text is to be 'read'. For example I chose to do the band name "Colarado Central Railroad" in a bigger text size than the album's name "All things must change to something new, to something strange." so that the band's name was the main focus. However this was difficult due to the fact that the image was quite distracting. By placing both these pieces of text in corners it aids the viewers eyes to move across the image and by having several groupings in this design it helps develop a holistic feel. However I don't think the proximity and allignment is that successful in my first design.

In my second design I prefer the use of allignment and proximity. Another way of achieving proximity is through containment. This means to group items by borders or white space. The use of containment makes this design look more organised and as a result more successful as an album cover.  The reasons for the development my final album cover design was inspired by the style of Andy Warhol.

(Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol)

Below is my final design and is my chosen album cover. This design is successful because it uses the principle of repetition.  The principle of reptition states that you repeat some aspect of the design throughout the entire piece, in this case my album cover. For example, the repetition of the image and reptition of keeping it the same size. Repetition is a type of consistency that helps tie a publication together. In this design I have used a succesful combination of both reptition and containment which has helped achieve the concept I had in my head onscreen. These principles working together have made it my favourite design. 
My final outcome also demonstrates the use of the design principle contrast. This principle of contrast states that if two items are not exactly the same, then make them different. This principle makes my final design more visually interesting. For example, through selecting one image in the centre of my design and changing it to red gives the album cover contrast. As a result this has achieved my inital concept of creating a dramatic album cover.