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A figure study on cardboard using charcoal, conte crayon, and pastels that I drew my senior year of high school.
So for some reason, I’m just now realizing that I’ve never written a post on this blog about my classes or professors. To be honest, there’s not much to say – and I don’t mean that in a negative way at all. Academic excellence in my classes, professors, and fellow classmates is something inbuilt in the Hopkins community and something that I take for granted. What’s remarkable about a school like Hopkins – and what is perhaps the reason why many of you applied and/or go here – is its ability to take something extraordinary, to take the best and brightest from high schools all over the world , and make it commonplace. My class schedule is probably as unique and rigorous as that of the person sitting next to me (…hi Julia). In any given semester, I’m usually taking some combination of a few English and Sociology courses, an occasional obligatory distribution requirement, a random 300-level course that I’ve somehow convinced myself to take on the grounds that “it sounds really interesting” despite having no background knowledge on the subject (Note: this never ends well), and/or another random easy elective course to balance out my schedule.
One such course that I’m taking this semester is called Visual Rhetoric with Professor Charlotte O’Donnell. Visual Rhetoric is a rudimentary graphic design course (no previous experience required) that integrates communications, marketing, and business principles to teach students not only how to recognize but also create the visual narratives and images that saturate our everyday lives – such as advertising campaigns, logos, letterheads, and more.
While I’ve taken countless classes as an English major that have pushed me to be a more proficient writer and speaker, this is the first class that has pushed me to become more visually literate in a pragmatic way. Charlotte, our professor, wants us to treat visual design assignments in the same way that composition classes treat other language-based assignments – as problems that require articulate and precise solutions. And as the semester draws to a close, I feel like I’m leaving with analytical as well as tangible and marketable skills that have a direct application in the real world. I’ve learned how to use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to play with typography, color, composition, etc. and create a design portfolio to showcase my new skills:
1. Icon – The icon assignment was our first project and (as evidenced by the picture below) my first time using Adobe Illustrator. Charlotte gave us extremely strict parameters to work with: we had to design an icon based on a five-pointed star for a pet supply store, an airline, or a cell phone company. The icon had to be designed with straight lines only and in black and white. The logomark also had to reproduce easily at very large/small scales – we had to scale it down to fit into a half inch square to see if the icon could be used in a variety of places (anywhere from a billboard to a small embroidered logo on a t-shirt) .
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Star icon for a cell phone company
Although we were limited to using straight lines, I wanted to play with perspective and inject some dynamism into an otherwise static star. I tried to make the intersecting diagonal lines evocative of a cell phone tower to fit the needs of the client.
2. Logotype – This logotype assignment had to integrate the initials of our first, middle, and last names and some kind of curved shape. We were limited to three typefaces, but were allowed to incorporate an additional color if we wanted to. In class, we looked at highly iconic and recognizable logotypes, such as the Nike checkmark or Chanel’s overlapping “C’s.”
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My logotype in the shape of an infinity symbol
I really struggled with this assignment – partly because I was still learning how to use Adobe Illustrator, and also because the only time I deal with my initials is when I can monogram anything and everything with them (What? I’m from Virginia).
3. Poster – Our third assignment was to create a poster to advertise the class itself to Hopkins undergrads. We were limited to using our own original artwork created in Adobe Illustrator and had to utilize some sort of “frame within a frame.”
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Inverted colors – white on blue version.
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Coral version
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Orange and yellow ombre version
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Turquoise version
For the poster, I chose a fingerprint as my main illustration – I thought it would emphasize the “Business, Science, and Industry” facet of the course as well as its creative side in learning to capture your own identity and ideas in a series of visuals. My personal goal was to create something bold and eye-catching to reflect the nature of the course while allowing the design to be flexible and easily reproducible in a variety of colors. There are actually two versions of my final design – the ones on the left have the course description integrated into the fingerprint itself, while the ones on the right have the text lined at the bottom for better readability.
4. Storyboard – The storyboard assignment was our first project done primarily in Adobe Photoshop using photographs that we took ourselves. We designed a storyboard to advertise a product (no bigger than 6″ x 6″ x 6″) of our choosing to create a seamless story about the product. The photographs needed to reveal some sort of change in the main product over time and create dramatic action to grab the viewer’s attention. The professor encouraged us to work a full story arc towards a climax or decisive moment during which the viewers would see our product in a new and surprising way. In the industry, a storyboard would ideally provide a starting off point for a T.V. commercial to sell the product.
Because the extent of my photography experience is using Instagram and snapchatting ugly selfies of myself, I asked my friend Joy to help me shoot my product using her DSLR. Charlotte wanted us to photograph our product on an all-white background, and (as you can see in frames 2-4) I struggled a bit with lighting. However, I’m really pleased with the way my storyboard came out – I love drinking Naked Juice, and noticed that most advertisements for the drink weren’t really targeted at a young demographic, which was surprising because the brand is really popular among college students. I wanted to present the product in a youthful light – and what’s more youthful and energetic than getting naked?! (Kidding! Sort of.) I figured the slightly scandalous frames would entice viewers at the very least to keep watching, and the play on the product name at the end would be as refreshing as the drink itself.
5. Brochure – For this brochure assignment, our client was the State of Maryland and the goal was to redesign a truly heinous brochure on gang violence prevention while keeping all of the original text. The professor limited us to using one image, taken from the public domain (meaning that there are no ownership/copyright restrictions in re-using the image, which could prove tricky for a state government department that doesn’t necessarily have the funds to purchase stock photos) and we had to repeat that image in the brochure at least 5 different times. In addition to the image restriction, we were also limited to using only two type families (or two fonts).
Quite frankly, the original brochure was ugly as sin. It was overloaded with text and although gang prevention is an exceptionally pertinent problem in the city of Baltimore, realistically nobody would read the brochure – let alone pick it up – if it didn’t present the information in a new way. I chose a bullethole as my repeated image, and chose red, cream, and teal blue as accent colors to grab the reader’s attention. Because there was so much information that I had to include in the brochure, I wanted to think of more creative ways to present the text. I took cues from the circular shape of the bullethole, contrasting arched text with linear elements to create a visually interesting brochure.