å Tuesday, September 1st, 2015

Why I’m Interested 
Growing up, I have always been a creative person, when I was in the third grade, my two friends  and I decided that when we grow up we are going to own an art studio together. As we got older we all drifted into our different interests, but mine continued to be the arts. I was never good at drawing, so for a period in my life I stopped creating. When I got to high school I was introduced to a whole new kind of art, Graphic Design. During the course of my high school years I found my passion in Graphic Design.
What I’m Interested In
My areas of interest is publication design and advertising design. I find these two areas to be the most appealing to myself because these are two very publicized fields in graphic design. I love being able to come up with my own ideas and bringing them to life. I plan to double major in Marketing so that way I will have the skills of a graphic designer and an advertiser. I want to be a designer for an advertising team. Advertising is very important in our economy, not many people realize that. Every advertisement that is put out into the world is a reflection of its company. It is the designers job to bring life to the advertisement and make it stand out. Publication design has a mix of things  I like to do. I enjoy photography, I like taking the pictures, editing, and seeing the end results. Publication design gives you so many options on things you can do, I love creating ideas and giving something an identity and showing my personality in my work.

I like looking at the cover of magazines because I feel like they always set the tone of what the magazine is going to be based on.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what I want to do with my life. Last year, I thought I wanted to be a cosmetologist, and this year I thought I wanted to continue doing graphic design like I did in high school. But now that it’s here, and I’m at college and have so many opportunities to change what I want to do with my life, I don’t know what I want anymore. That being said, I guess that I will just use this class to improve my skills in graphic design that I already have required in my four years of high school. Maybe in the end, I’ll graduate with a degree in graphic design, or maybe I’ll graduate with something completely different. Either way, this class will help me improve the knowledge I already have on the subject.

Brand and Identity Design
In high school, I mostly created logos for local businesses. We also made business cards and letter headers, etc, to go along with them. It was probably one of my favorite part of graphic design, most likely because I got the most practice with it. Logos have such a large impact on our society, and every large business wants to have their brand become huge, so designing logos are a very important part of graphic design. You know what brand something is when you see their logo, such as McDonalds, Facebook, Twitter, Wal-Mart, Target, etc.

I love the fact that something as simple as the Apple logo is so easily distinguished…

…yet at the same time you can see the Starbucks (or even the Patriots logo) logo and automatically realize what the brand is.

Advertising Design
Along with identity design in high school, we also created advertisements for local band concerts or plays happening in the area. In sophomore year, I created a poster for a festival that happens every year in Peterborough, NH called Children and the Arts, and it was chosen to be printed out and posted all over the state of New Hampshire and some of New England. My senior year, I created a poster for a school concert called Sail Away, and that was picked and placed all around our community.

One of my all time favorite ads is the old iPod ads that Apple has ever had. It’s simple but effective, and they put out multiple of them when they first came out.

Not to mention how we wouldn’t be the way we were today if it weren’t for advertisements like one of the most famous WWII propaganda posters, We Can Do It.

Designing the Future

I have always been intrigued with graphic design. Growing up in a house full of my mothers typography books and magazines filled with funky advertisements. I have always been very captivated by how simple a logo might look, but how much hidden meaning is behind it. One might say the ad looks boring or too plain, but one has to connect to the product and realize the meaning of the company and what they are trying to portray. Graphic design is a big passion of mine and I hope pursue it in the future.
The perfect job would be either working in type design or advertisement. Those two fields, although very different, would be the dream jobs. Type design is a very hard field, but extremely rewarding. Building your own font would be tiring, frustrating, but exhilarating all at once. Every letter would have to be hand drawn and perfect. This would lead to many errors and recreations, but what is not exhausting in graphic design? Being able to put your own style into your work and showing the world your creation and your mind would be something unexplainable.

Advertising Design is another area I am interested in. Combining type and image into one piece might look so simple on a page of a magazine, but has taken designers long and hard work to produce. I would love to learn how to combine the two and make a magazine, billboard, or sticker come to life. This area has a lot to do with marketing, selling the product. As a advertisement designer you have to learn what the people what and what makes them want to buy your product. Although I hate Mcdonalds, they do know how to market the shit out of their product. They combined the right colors, pictures, catchy tagline, and logo to capture their customers attention. I would be fit for this job, because I am a hard-worker, like the challenge, and love some competition.

http://kbtcreative.com/

I have always been interested in art. I grew up always doodling all over everything I possibly could and I always found satisfaction in creating something aesthetically pleasing. As I got older, I kind of grew out of doodling everywhere and in high school, I took a few graphic design classes that really caught my interest. As my drawing skills seem not to be as keen as they used to, I found great interest in the digital arts. Areas of graphic design that interest me are advertising, publication, and collateral design. All of these areas are meant to get a clear concise message across, but not always in the most obvious way and usually pretty quickly. I like how these fields use psychology to catch the reader’s eye and embed a message into the reader’s mind. Knowing how the human brain sees and conceives different shapes and colors and being able to utilize that really intrigues me.

I like to incorporate other things I learn, for instance psychology, into my designs. As a person that is usually pretty creative yet concise, I like to express several ideas with as few images as possible, usually combining ideas to create one unique design. I could see myself doing logo design, for its small and simplistic nature, but on the other hand, I could also see myself designing posters for the next KSC Spring concert with a lot of important information on it. I enjoy designing things that are eye-catching at first glance and make you want to actually stop and look at it.

This logo is interesting because I learned that these two colors together psychologically make people hungry for breakfast food, which ultimately is the purpose of this ad. 

I like the power that this ad conveys with the lighting and overall idea that even the Hulk needs a Band-Aid sometimes.

MAJORING IN GRAPHIC DESIGN

Austin Drouin

I grew up in a small town in Maine, its population just barely over seven hundred people. The towns only recreational area was the local Walmart, so as you could imagine, I spent a large majority of my time home. My father had always been an incredible artist, whether it be drawing with pencils and pen or designing websites for all the local companies. One of my most dearest memories was him drawing little portraits of me with weird faces; as an attempt to make me laugh or line drawings that I could color in on my own. While I didn’t realize it then, it is now clear to me that the purpose of those little drawings and art in general was to inspire not only me, but a society as a whole.

Now that I’m older and have a greater appreciation and respect for the arts around me, I realized that, I too could be the source of inspiration for millions of people around me. As I begin to research the broadness of this major, I’m realizing even now how relatively easy it is to have my art and my passion out in the public, or on screens, alike. If one day this career allows me to inspire many people to act and think in the right way, I will know that I have changed the world, even in the slightest, and my greatest dreams will have come true.

One day I hope to be using the skills and techniques that I have obtained here at Keene State College, at the large scale animation and film company, Pixar. There I hope to inspire the large mass of youth through the screen to become an inspiration, just as my father had done for me.

AREAS I WISH TO PURSUE

#1. Motion Design

Why Graphic Design?
I was never really subconsciously interested in graphic design until I started to look more and more at advertisements. Then I started to look at logos, and cartoons, and then one day it just clicked. I have always had a passion for business and marketing and anything in that field. All through out high school I loved every aspect of business but then when I came to Keene State and experienced the management program all of freshman year I realized that this was not the right career choice. I decided I wanted something very specific. I realized I wanted to create advertisements and put my ideas out into the world. Never would have I thought of becoming a Graphic Design major but here I am loving every single minute of it. I finally found something that I love that will also help me in the right direction of the career path I have chosen. Two areas of graphic design that interests me are the advertisement design aspect and also publication design.

Advertisement Agency
I want to work in an advertisement agency in which their ads really make consumers stop and really thinking about the ad. My favorite advertisement that I constantly think about is the one with about handicapped people and Mt.Everest. It is such a simple concept put into a place that would not usually be found there (ads tend to be on walls, billboards, etc.) and it truly makes you think. Every day we see hundreds of advertisements and we don’t even know it. We also believe that we don’t fall for them but we do every single day. Advertisements fulfill our lives and control our way of living whether we know it or not and I just think it’s so incredibly fascinating. Another advertisement that I find very clever is the one for Schick razors. The creators of the advertisement really take an everyday/ordinary feature or concept and really think outside the box with it. It’s truly amazing to look at all the different advertisements in the world and really see how other people think.

Publication Design
Publication design is such a sensitive topic to talk about. Like advertisements, we fall into publication design and subconsciously change our way of living. That being said, I believe publication design is such a delicate issue in where it can be used in a odd way. For an example, photoshopping can be such a sensitive topic in where the designer is unappreciative of the bodies that are given to them. Why hire these people to model for your magazine and put them on the front cover if you’re just going to photoshop their bodies? Publication design I believe is being more and more questioned and aware in which I have yet to decide if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Graphic Design has also been a huge part of my life since I was in middle school. I always looked at the world differently knowing the extenuating process people go through to make what seemed like the simplest things. Two particular types of design that I enjoy are printing/packaging design and advertising.

In high school I took a graphic design & printing class that really got me into wanting to know more about the different types of printing such as, screen printing, offset printing, digital printing, letterpress printing, and many more. We printed almost everything in that class and it was a great experience and also a really fun time. Our teacher would also bring in examples of packaging or prints that helped show the different printing styles in action. The example below is a picture a butterfly that is broken down into 4 color processes or cmyk, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black that are used when running an offset printing press.

Offset Printing Example Of CMYK

Advertising on the other hand is a huge interest to me because an advertisement helps show the creative ability of a company while also promoting themselves inside that design. Advertisements take a lot of brain storming and different creative minds in order to create something original that appeals to target audiences. A lot of hard work and thought has to go into each advertisement to help keep it relevant to the company or product while also helping it pop or stand out. The example below is an awesome advertisement that I believe stands out very well and helps get the message out.

Billboard

Why I’m Here
I have always been one to sketch and create many ideas and visions that came into mind. I love creating stories and designs for characters, places, machinery and entities alike. This only grew with my rapidly accelerating interest in table-top gaming. Whenever I learn a new game, or watch a new playtest, I feel compelled to add my own rules and characters; I feel an urge to start drawing out ideas and how these rules may look on the table. I have come to Graphic Design to gain the skills which will grant me the ability to work and rework my overflowing bucket of ideas.

Kev Walker M.T.G. Card Design 

Table-Top Game Design 

Going Further in Design
As far as a second interest, I find myself enthralled with album art and have been guilty of choosing albums based on the design of the cover. As much as many “beauty idealists” may want to argue, humans are an aesthetically driven, impulsive, species. You almost don’t have a choice to judge a book by its cover, it is instinctual to have a prepared decision on a person or product purely by what you see in the first 10 seconds. I find it important for this reason for album art to capture its viewer in a trance of musically assisted aesthetic pleasure. The album should embody the perceptual concepts of the music. There are some legendary album designs out there and they certainly pushed the viewer to listen.

Phil Hartman Legendary Album Cover Design

Introduction:
Going into this class knowing absolutely nothing about graphic design; thinking that it only entailed drawing shapes. Once I finished reading this article I feel that I have a much better understanding for what the field of graphic design truly demands!

Publication Graphic Design:
After reading through a few other graphic design categories, publication design captured my attention.  In this category you seem to be constantly having the challenge of coming up with new ideas that require you to meet the standards of books, newspapers, and magazines. Within this particular category you will defiantly not be bored at work, which would be ideal for someone who can get bored easily! This category will have you constantly doing something to meet the needs of your ideas. The whole idea of publication is to draw the consumer in, The Cosmopolitan Magazine does just that, by attracting females. Being exposed to new forms of communications through publications would be something that interests me!

Advertising Graphic Design:
Continuing through the article I fell upon advertising design, and how advertising designers have to market to consumers. Theses, adverting designers have a different perspective that they need to incorporate into their design to meet demands of their customers. I never even thought about how the designers are trying to make their product appeal to us. This category caught my attention because the customers wants are constantly changing, requiring the designer to continue to improve and change their designs based on their customers. As I try and think of an advertisting design that interests me would have to be Essie Nail Polish, it is the second link at the bottom of the page. This appealed to me because looking to major in management and could possibly have a job that would require me to have a mindset of a graphic designer!

Cosmopolitan Magazine: The colors on the page are bright however they seem to really compliment each other and drag the eyes all over the page.

Essie Advertisement: I find that all Essie designs are complex, the transparency of the white background and the white objects are interesting to look at.

As a little kid wanting to be a skateboarder when I grew up, I was exposed to lots of interesting logos and brand designs. I remember picking out skateboards and every time it was always about how sweet the design on the back of the board was. As I grew up I started to take interest in street art which stemmed from skateboarding. Promoting a name or idea by writing it a million times in cities was fascinating and led me to want to be a graphic designer.

Street “Branding”

Typography
I’m interested in type. The way a certain font can effect how a message is conveyed is incredible. In street art all artists have their own style and its incredible how almost no one writes their name in the same style. Its exciting to see all of the variations on an alphabet and figure out how they impact the feeling of what is being said. You can tell if someone had written something while they were angry or happy.

Hand Drawn Fonts

Branding
Similar to typography, a branding is a way for something to be identified and the options are endless. I love how a design can effect the way a company is perceived by the public. Its also incredible how we are almost brainwashed into recognizing logos instantly and I’d like to be a part of that brainwashing. To be a designer behind one of the biggest brands in the world would be a dream come true and in my mind come with some sort of anonymous fame to the public.

Evolution of a Brand