DS106 Week 4 – Design: A Sansing Sprint

Inspired by my Slaughterhouse IV bunkmate Chad Sansing, I composed a Design Assignment Sprint. I spent a lot of time in tinkering in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, which always leaves me wishing I could do more than I actually can.

Originally, I was eager to do the Minimalist Travel Poster Based on a Movie. The samples were so good. I was inspired. As I was thinking of places, I grew a little ironic and thought I would use the TARDIS from Doctor Who. While not exactly a travel destination, in and of itself, it is definitely a means to travel anywhere. That put me on a bit of a Doctor Who kick as I began playing around with different images.

I started working in Illustrator on the Minimalist Television/Movie Poster idea, working in simple block colors and trying to get essentially silhouette like blocks. To do this I snagged an full front image of the TARDIS from the web and used it to trace a series of rectangular shapes on another layer. Most of the work was using shapes occasionally switching to the pen tool for the mullions in the windows. Once I got the top third of it looking good, I was happy since I already had a layout idea.

Doctor Who Television Poster

For this piece, I wanted to keep things limited to as few colors as I could. The obvious color was the TARDIS blue, which required a little trial and error, because I wanted something a little greener with a distinctly unmistakable quality. Then I opted for a dark grey, not absolute black for the background, mostly because I thought it softened the contrast nicely.

It was at this point that I thought it would be kind of slick to have the light atop blazing. That just required some quick work with the one tool. Then I screened the opacity to make it actually look more like light projecting.

I considered adding some clever text, like “It’s bigger on the inside” or “Will take you anywhere in time and space,” but then scrapped the idea, liking the stark look like the example. Plus, I wanted it to be instantly obvious what the show was, but present in an interesting way.

From there, I completed my partial TARDIS in Illustrator so that I had a good block image of the whole thing from the front. I considered using a slightly turned view, with two visible sides, for the Travel Poster. However, that was going to be a whole lot more work, considering all multiplicity of angles that would be involved. I am sure that if I had more skills it would have been a lot faster and easier, but I am still working at that.

As you can see, I actually built a simplified Illustrator version of the poster, almost like a sketch. It also gave me a lot of the raw material that I would need to use in Photoshop. So, I kind of completed this assignment twice, as seems to be a habit of mine. It’s good practice, so I don’t mind so much.

TARDIS Travel Poster (sketch)

Once I had the completed Illustrator version, I started porting items over into Photoshop. For the Travel Poster, I wanted to have a much richer, textured quality than the stark version of the Television Poster look. To achieve the look, I started playing around with spray brush settings to splatter and dirty up the TARDIS image, which I dropped in as a primary layer. I also wanted there to be a sort of thematic visual continuity that echoed the stars.

TARDIS Travel Poster

For the background, I actually did a quick Google search for “cosmos,” grabbing a simple star-filled image. I imported it into Photoshop, stripped it of color, and tiled the image across the entire background layer. Once I had the starry look, I went back to the TARDIS and touched it up a little so that it didn’t disappear into the background. These two layers served as the primary components of the image.

This piece was definitely going to incorporate text, and I definitely took my inspiration from the Star Wars example. I tried to keep the font as clean and simple as I could, going with a sans serif like the Police Box lettering. The Police Box font was just Myriad Pro, which looked near perfect. Yet for the poster lettering at the bottom I chose Franklin Gothic Medium. It has a bolder and beefier look for the larger size I needed. I made sure that the spacing for both lines of text matched up in terms of length and used a simple horizontal line to break the text up clearly.

After pasting them from Illustrator into Photoshop, I used the wand tool to select all the letters by color so that I could use the same brush technique to splatter the letter fill. I switched between an orange and red, warmer colors to compliment the TARDIS blue I used. The coloring is even inspired by the recent show logo that was used for the newer series. The logo got a TARDIS-like makeover since Matt Smith took over the role.

One minor issue I toyed with was messing about with the background behind the lettering a little. I am not sure that it made that much difference, but I was trying to diffuse the starts and lettering some.

The last thing I did was throw off the symmetry, tilt the TARDIS to the right and arbitrary amount. I thought it was funny, in a supremely nerdy way to set the arbitrary amount at pi, 3.14.

If I count the two versions of the travel poster, that left me in need of another assignment. So I opted for more minimalism with an attempt at Iconic You.

Icon of Me

Although I have recently shaved at my daughter’s request, I generally have a beard or goatee. The goatee made for a better iconic look. Again, I used Illustrator, just some basic oval shapes and the pen tool. At this point I was getting a bit better using them. This ended up being a little more Homer-ish than I intended, but it got laughs from both my wife and daughter. My wife was the one who suggested I throw in the frown lines that are deep and seemingly permanent in my fivehead.

Messing About with Mood in Image Composites

Taking another stab at visual assignments, I opted for Switch up the Mood, mostly because I had a few photographs that I had taken with a colleague’s top-shelf digital SLR camera the other day. Consequently, shooting in RAW format, I would be able to crop with much greater ease.

In my first attempt I was really playing around with filters more than anything. I am not even sure that I really accomplished the assignment, at least how it was intended. Mood is kind of an ephemeral thing and perhaps this wasn’t the best image to use. Still, it was worth the experience of playing in Photoshop.

Four Flags Mood Composite

I started with the original image in the upper-left corner, very little adjustments made, save a few auto touch-ups correcting the color, contrast, and tone.

One of the initial problems was determining how large the final composite image would be and doing some of the basic calculations. Mat is not my strong suit, but I knew I was going to quadruple the original image size, even though I was going to do some cropping too for the additional versions of the image. This helped determine the aspect ratio that I would use in the cropped images.

At that point, I just started playing around with adjustment layers in a separate, mock-up window. In the upper-right corner, I was going for an older, darker feel with the cropped version of the two flags. So I played with the exposure settings to get darker tones and deeper contrast. I also toyed with the hue and saturation to pump up the color saturation. I even used a photo filter to enrich some of the warmer colors.

In the lower-right corner, I mostly amped up the saturation and pushed the red color as much as I could without completely distorting the image. I wanted the colors to be brighter and more vibrant, kind of overly rich reds. It was meant to be a riff of the original shot.

In the lower-left image, I had played around so much that I was kind of filtered out and wanted to drain a lot of color out of it. I didn’t really want to go black and white with a full grayscale. So I used a black and white filter, but then kept pushing out the gray until I got the stark, simple black and white look, kind of like old newspaper prints, which seemed fitting for the subject of an antique shop full of old items.

Playing around with all of the filters got a little overwhelming at some point. Without really knowing what I am doing other than trial and error, it does highlight the need to keep track of what I am doing to achieve certain effects. Otherwise, I would never be able to replicate the intended effect.

One of my original ideas was to just riff off of the red, white, and blue scheme in the flags, so I thought I would make another attempt. THe second time I simplified even further, again beginning with the original image. This time I chose to use the same cropping for the other three parts of the composite. This seemed appropriate since I was already thinking of working with three color tints.

Four Flags Mood Composite 2

This effort proved to be a lot faster and simpler. I had already been playing with the cyanotype option in the hue/saturation adjustment layer. So that produced a nice blue-tinted version. Thus, to get the red image I used the same adjustment layer with the cyanotype setting, but then adjusted the hue setting until I got the red look I wanted. The black and white image was adding the adjustment layer of the same name. Then I made a couple of minor adjustments to the contrast.

In each of these images, I had to work with each of the images on separate layers. So I would basically mock-up the look I wanted in a separate window, only to paste them into the window where the final image would be built.

In order to get all the adjustment layers and looks, I would have to flatten the mock-up version before copying and pasting into the final image window. That was a lesson re-learned for me, since I had forgotten some of those little wrinkles.

Originally, chasing some stars in the assignments, I had not at all considered doing the same assignment more than once. It just kind of worked out that way, because I don’t think I was completely satisfied with my original attempt. Also, I did want to see if I could do the red, white, and blue thing relatively easily and quickly, more as proof to myself than anything.

I know just enough about Photoshop to make me dangerous and routinely get frustrated knowing that there is definitely a way to achieve the look I have dreamt up in my head, despite not necessarily knowing which combination of options to use to make it happen.

Still, these were opportunities to explore some of the tools and options that are available. Plus, it was a great reminder of the importance of narrating the work, in part as a way of keeping track of what and how I am getting certain results, even if sometimes they are happy accidents.