Original DS 106 Assignment: Design A License Plate (3 1/2 stars)

Avery is on her way to the finale! One thing they don’t tell you is that you need to make you’re own way there… I get the whole investing in yourself thing, but have you seen gas prices? Plus thats 15 HOUR drive. Avery has to get in her 2000 Toyota Four Runner and hit the road hoping she makes it.

Step 1: Look for wear to generate a license plate. Since I wanted this to be accessible to everyone as possible I focused on making this through a free website. The best website I found is this license plate maker.

Step 2: Edit, while there are instructions on the website, the different filters are pretty easy to figure out. You can change the state (for Avery we obviously so chose Texas) as well as the year. The year pertains to the standard license plate that was generated.

Step 3: Share! Yup, it was that easy. It only allows you to save as a JPG to your computer for sharing.

From reading around on this site, it looks like it’s an independently run site which is why there’s limitations on design (not a bad thing) and also what makes it so user friendly.

Assignment: Design A License Plate
Design your own license plate! You can use an online site, alter a preexisting photo, or make your own from scratch. Make the license plate describe either your or a character. Your license plate design should have two part to it: designing the background for the plate and designing the font. Be creative with it. 

This assignment wasn’t that time consuming mostly because I already made this background for my website, which I took off and now it’s my icon. But, I really didn’t want to waste this ‘art’. Making it was fun and enjoyable but the most difficult part was finding the pictures that would go well with everything. I do have some criticisms of my own like it being too colorful and the cat not sitting correctly on the car but oh well I think it’s cute overall. I also wanted to keep the license plate minimalistic by adding the font simple, bold and on top, this is because I want the cat and car to stay as the focal point.

HOW IT WORKS:
1.) Use Gimp to merge all three images together
a.) Background
b.) Car
c.) Cat
2.) All images had their own layer to prevent any mistakes!
3.) I put the Cat Layer on top, over the car layer and the background was below everything.
4.) I then made the car more transparent, slightly less to the cat as well.
5.) I then went to buildasign.com and copied/pasted it to this blog post!

For this assignment from the assignment bank I chose to design my own license plate. I wanted to make this 80’s themed to fit our overall class them. As you can tell this is not your average license plate. Instead of a bright or pearly white as the background I decided to use a more antique looking dirty cream color. I also chose this design and the orange because I feel that it creates an older looking feel. For this specific assignment I used a website that already existed to create a license plate. You can get to the website using this link. It is fairly easy to do and you can start from scratch or build upon existing templates.

Design your own license plate! You can use an online site, alter a preexisting photo, or make your own from scratch. Make the license plate describe either your or a character. Your license plate design should have two part to it: designing the background for the plate and designing the font. Be creative with it. 

Assignment Bank- Design Assignments

Who does this nutty license plate belong to? None other than Agent Sammy “Skippy” Squirrel!

This was my second design assignment this week relating to my secret agent character, Sammy A. Squirrel! I thought it would be fun to make a license plate, even though he probably does not drive. There are many different elements of this license plate that represent the character. First of all, the plate is “Skippy” because that is his code name (read about it here!). The acorn represents that he graduated from Acorn University (and the fact that he is a squirrel). He lives in New York, so he has a New York license plate, even though it is not a traditional plate. The plate has a frame that says, “Honk if you love peanut butter,” because Sammy absolutely loves peanut butter and writes an entire section of the newspaper dedicated to the nutty spread. The trees in the background represent that he lives in a tree.

This assignment was really fun to do. I did have some difficulty trying to find the best font for the license plate. I decided to go with Courier New because it looked good, and it fits with the secret agent theme. I also could not find any templates that I liked for the license plate, so I just made this one from scratch (just using the frame!). It is not a traditional license plate, but I think it best fits this non-traditional character.

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A post shared by DIGITAL STORIES DRAKE (@digitalstoriesdrake) on Oct 5, 2018 at 3:22am PDT

I like this one a lot. It’s made using art that I made yesterday and I really like it as the background. I don’t like the font but I couldn’t find a template that let me do the letters and the background only one of the other. I had to do the background one because of the requirement of having a background.

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/design-a-license-plate/

To round out my star assignments for this week I completed the Design a License Plate assignment worth 3 1/2 stars. I thought this was a good one that I could use along with out theme with my Agent. The one issue I ran into was that my agent’s whole thing is that she is kinda boring. So the idea of a vanity plate seemed a little off but I went with it anyways. I remembered in elementary school using the Virginia DMV website to create license plates so I went back there to look at the site to see if that was still an option. When I navigated there I found they had an interactive form for creating a novelty license plate. Thats when I had an idea what if I created a license plate that could be a novelty gift to my character so it reflected how people perceive her. I started going through all the different hobby and other types of plates trying to figure out what would be a generic kind of plate that still was not the absolute standard one. While I was clicking around it hit me, when I found the heritage plate that it was perfect.

This plate used to be a generic plate that people would get (I think from what I found) but regardless it is one you frequently see on the road. It is slightly different but still sticks to standard Virginia themed imagery and is not overly flashy. Perfect got the plate down, next was to decide on the words. The act of creating a vanity plate usually is because you have something interesting you enjoy or support. Again boring is her thing but I went back through my description and thought about it paperwork came up as something she does enjoy. However being a strict person she would want everything with proper spelling so that was too long instead I went with simple “Papers.” It was to the point it expressed something she does enjoy and it makes sense. Plus in the context of agent fawn receiving the license plate as a gift from others it would make sense that paperwork would be something other people would realize she enjoys and potentially be a bit teasing as well. (Which she would not take offense to.) I’ll admit I thought this assignment was going to be much quicker than it actually took but because I wanted to try and get it to really be meaningful and not just random it took awhile. Which was good though because it gave me more time to critically think about my character!

Since we have to do 2 projects related to our special agent and I thought this one would be fun to design a plate with her name on it. I was trying to decide how to shorten it up and I decided to just take out a few vowels to make it still read the same! I sorta want this plate myself.

Stars: 3.5