For this assignment, I again had a hard time choosing only one song or lyric! I have so many favorite writers and lyricists, so I decided to choose whatever came to mind immediately when I thought of a line that moves me emotionally.

The song “The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot” by the band Brand New has this lovely lyric toward the end of the piece. The song starts out fairly depressing, discussing the loss of a relationship, but the final verse touches on the narrator’s positive feelings toward their lover that will remain despite their breakup. It speaks to the lasting power of love and is so romantic.

I created this piece in Pixlr editor and added text in PowerPoint. I will put up a tutorial soon!

For my final design assignment I did “Lyric Typography Poster” (3.5 stars). I did “American Kids” by Kenny Chesney. In case you haven’t been able to tell by this point, I really like that song. It also has some vivid words that I figured I could find good fonts and could think of cool things to do with the words for.

How I did it:

I actually used Microsoft Word for this, which is my go to in case you haven’t yet figured that out. I used word art. I actually downloaded three new fonts for this project from dafont.com. They were CF Jack Story, USA Flag, and Baby Blocks. I had to mess around with the different text effects until I found ones that looked like what I wanted. For the “Jesus” (supposed to look like a cross) I had to make the middle “S” separate from the rest of the word so that I could make it bigger and stretch it out until it looked like a cross. The blue and jean are supposed to look like a pair of pants and I had to mess with their effects and change the tapering so that it looked similar to pants. The rest of them are just the fonts. But I wanted to put them together in a way so that it flowed and it was fairly condensed and I am pretty happy with how it turned out!

3 1/2 stars

You never really notice how melodramatic your favorite songs are until you have to take the lyrics out of context.

I had an obnoxiously hard time selecting a song for the lyric typography assignment, because everything I found was either depressing or overly emotional, which is not exactly my vibe. Finally, I settled on my favorite song of all time, “Everlasting Light” by The Black Keys.

The second I figured out the song, I knew I wanted a “light” themed design, and that I would use yellow and white for the color scheme. I pulled the lightbulb from The Noun Project, and got the idea for the font after seeing it on D106-er Amanda’s old blog logo.

I talked in a previous post about how I really like minimal design, and I think this definitely falls under that category. I know I talked a big game about the Scotland post card, but this is hands down my favorite creation yet this week. Part of me wants to print it out and put it on my wall!

I really love graphic design- it’s something I’ve been doing for awhile, and I love getting a chance to stretch my design muscles some more!

For the Lyric Typography Poster assignment (worth 3.5 stars), I made a lyric poster with lyrics from Fall Out Boy’s “Young Volcanoes.” I used different fonts from Fonts2u.com to portray the different lines, such as a roman font about Rome. I put this all together in photoshop with the different fonts and the volcano clip art.

For my first design assignment, I chose the lyric typography poster.  I basically had to design a poster with the song lyrics of my choosing using typography.

This was a lot harder to do than I ever imagined! I didn’t know any program to use to help me do this so I spent some time Googling some editing and design websites. I finally found PicMonkey, which worked perfectly. I think the site is actually for photo editing, but I used the “design” feature and started with a blank canvas and just never added a picture.  There are all kinds of basic editing and design tools to create whatever you want.  I started by changing the canvas color and adding what they call an “overlay”, which is the pinkish colored flower shape.  They have LOTS of different shapes and overlays to choose from.  Overall, I tried to keep with colors that emitted an uplifting vibe because I feel like that’s what the lyrics are all about.  After that, I added the text from one of my favorite songs – “It’s a Great Day to be Alive” by Travis Tritt.  I kept most of the words in a simple, black font. I chose to change the color of the words “alive” and “shining” to add a little more emphasis to them because I felt like they were a couple of the most meaningful and positive words in the lines of the song. I also changed them to a different font and made them bigger than the rest of the words.  All of this can be done when adding the text to your image! There are a lot of other features this site provides – like borders, images, textures, themes, and photo editing. I highly recommend it!

As for my song choice, it took my awhile to finally decide on a song. I am a big country music fan so there were a lot of options! I wanted to use a lyric from a specific song that always stands out to me every time I hear it on the radio, but I couldn’t (and still can’t) for the life of me remember what song it is! So frustrating, but I’ll probably hear the song now that I’m done with this assignment. Anyways, Travis Tritt’s song was a very acceptable second option. You can listen to his song here in case you have never heard it before. I love this song because it’s so positive and sends a message about being grateful just to be alive.  It serves as a reminder to me that things are never as bad as they seem and I should be (and am) grateful for every single day I have.