If you need a ridiculous quote that also makes a concerning amount of sense, InspiroBot is your…bot. I used a picture of water to contradict a quote about air (to breathe), but also that contains Earth, which is in itself a contradiction because Earth is mostly water. I just like the font. Thought it matched well. I almost went with something overly fancy and cursive, but I thought that would take away from the point of the assignment by making it about what the words look like instead of what they say.

Not really… Looks can be deceiving. When our program went to Oxford to spend the week, we had somewhat of a rough week. It was still a good experience, but Oxford has a sense and feeling about it that is unlike any place I have ever been. It is very cold and studious. It is a secluded, pretentious area where only Oxford IDs get you student discounts, and even though we had Oxford “IDs” and room keys, everyone knew that we were not Oxford students. It has the resemblance of Hogwarts, but not as much of the mysticism.

For my third Design Assignment, I did the Contradiction Creation (2.5 stars). I thought it was a funny idea for an assignment. I love sarcasm and making fun of things. Oxford is seen as this old, historic, mystical, pretentious school, so I thought it was a funny idea to add the quote I came up with to a beautiful picture of Oxford. It is presented as this old school that looks like Hogwarts, but at the end of the day, it is a hard, stressful school environment with no magic. It may look like Hogwarts, but there is nothing magical about the feeling of being in Oxford. I thought it would be fun to poke fun at the reputation Oxford has. Don’t get me wrong; Oxford is an amazing university, but it is an intense place to study, not a fun, magical get-away. Some people get blinded by the beautiful, old buildings and forget how much work goes on in them.

To create this image, I uploaded a picture I took while in Oxford to GIMP and then added the text. I changed the font to make it look more elegant and made it white because I liked the white on the blue background. I moved around the text until I liked its placement. Then, I took a screenshot of the image.

Who doesn’t love uninspirational quotes with a pretty background.

Mindy Kailing is such a queen so I felt like I had to honor one of her hilarious quotes with this assignment. I personally love looking at uninspirational quotes online. I think they are hilarious. My favorites are always the ones with text that’s a little bit harder to read so you think some middle schooler found a gorgeous picture and put some inspirational quote on it to try and make themselves seem cooler, but when you read the text you realize you have been trolled. I think that this was one of the harder assignments to create. I wanted to choose a print that was still legible just had a first glance. Then I also looked through four hundred quotes from Mindy Kailing. I looked at many different websites until I found the perfect quote. I felt like the quote I found also paired well with my favorite photo.

The quote is “There is no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me up to see it.” -Mindy Kailing. I find this quote so relatable and so funny. I am not one you want to wake up before I am ready to get out of bed for the day. I found this quote and knew it was the perfect quote for my uninspirational quote poster.

Then I had to find a picture for this poster. I used a sun set picture I took a while ago, but I think it still works. I feel like this is one of the most inspirational pictures I have ever taken so I decided that I would just have to use this one for my back ground. I made it on Canva which is super easy and user friendly. I use it all the time.

I really hope that people have to read it a second time. I hope that they are as confused by it as I want them to be. I hope that at first glance you think it’s just like any other inspirational poster you would see hanging in a teachers room.

For this design assignment, Contradiction Creation (2 1/2 stars), I wanted to take an apocalyptic and creepy Big Brother state approach. I wanted these contradictory text and image pairings to seem almost like propaganda while also showing the “truth” of the situation. I simply used stock images and PS to add the text, coming up with the words myself.

For the first one, I thought it would be hilarious to have a message about kindness while showing people fighting. Add kids who wouldn’t understand the irony and you have comedy (and propaganda) gold.

The second one I kept up with the same creepy overseen society theme by finding a picture of a man on the ground to show the “kind” way the Big Brother state deals with those who don’t follow the rules.

A big concern for this task was sizing. Because they’re propaganda like images, I had hoped to be able to make them similar sizes. However, the second picture was much smaller and ended up looking odd next to the first one. If I had been able to find an image that worked better, I would have gone for it! In the future I think I would put the images on backgrounds so they’re the same template but the pictures can be smaller or larger.

For this assignment I had to create a graphic that was designed for a certain feeling or theme. For my graphics (I made 3) I decided I wanted it to kind of have a “End of the world propaganda” theme. I created these graphics to be ironic, like the assignment said, but to also have that “the world is ending” vibe that is sort of ironic. I wanted to create social media posts that could also be sort of used as posters that could be hung up around town about the world ending. These graphics I made were obviously supposed to be funny, but also I feel like these would be Retweeted during the time of the apocalypse if the world was actually ending because they are meant to be like ironically funny. I had a lot of fun with this assignment because it really made me think outside the box and kind of play a joke on the memes that sometimes go around these day. Check them out!

Design Assignment: Contradiction Creation

For one of my assignment banks I chose Contradiction Creation where I was asked to take an image that conveys a feeling and then overlay text that is totally contradictory to the image’s feeling. I love to go to the mountains because it is just so quiet and peaceful, so that is the theme I chose for the background. I then placed overtop text with a kind of snappy/mean/funny feeling to it. You would expect a peaceful inspirational saying but instead you get one telling you to stop acting like you know everything, because clearly you don’t. I enjoyed this assignment because I think contradictory images are hilarious. This was really hard to do because I found so many quotes that were funny and it was hard to pick just one!

I actually used Powerpoint to add the text to the image because it was quick and familiar to me.

Credit to:

Quote: https://goo.gl/images/XkisE4

Photo: https://goo.gl/images/cz2Jj3

This is my second design assignment of the week. In this assignment we had to take a picture that conveys a certain feeling or theme and then add text to contradict the picture’s overall feeling or theme. I chose this assignment because I thought it would fun to take a nice inspirational picture and completely change the meaning of the picture just by adding a caption. I also wanted to stick to the theme that I have used in a lot of my blog posts already by incorporating sports into this assignment.

Almost everyone has heard the quote by the best hockey player of all time, Wayne Gretzky, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” This quote means that you shouldn’t be afraid to shoot because if you don’t take the opportunity to then it is basically the same as missing the shot. I contradicted him by adding the text “You miss 100% of the shots you take.” I was able to completely change his quote just by taking out one word. I change the quote from being motivational to anti-motivational. When someone first sees this picture, they would be expecting to read the original quote, but then through further examination, they will realize that the quote is actually very anti-motivational. I was also able to change the the number 100% to a different color, text, and text size to emphasize that it is 100% of or every single shot they take.

Assignment: Contradiction Creation

Stars: 3

I created this text on aviary.com.

Step 1: Click to add a photo.

Step 2: Click the right arrow and click on the text button.

Step 3: Enter text and resize, move, and change the color to make it look perfect.

Step 4: Click apply in the top right and then save to save the picture.

Feeling good about life today? I was too, until I decided to craft a demoralizing poster. It got a little darker than I thought it would with this assignment. I chose it because the preview image for the assignment appealed to me, in terms of design; it felt minimalist but powerful, with the words simply laid over the image for the viewer to take in. I wanted to see if I could create something with impact like that.

For this assignment, I used the website Fotor. Fotor has been really useful in a number of my assignments for this class, mostly daily creates. I could have used GIMP for this, but chose instead to use something I was already familiar with to put text over an image.

I like using their ‘Design’ feature for this class, since I feel that it gives me more freedom over editing the image in a way that fits the purpose of this class. For this assignment, I picked the ‘Card’ option.

The image I chose to start with was a photo I’d taken of a field last year:

I imported the image onto Fotor so that I could then edit and add text over it.

With this assignment, I wanted to take a really peaceful and beautiful scene of a field of flowers, and give the viewer some sort of existential dread while looking at it. Thus, I added the phrase “All of this will be dead someday.” Extremely morbid, but hey, if it fits the assignment…

To add the text, I went to the menu to the left of the screen and selected the ‘Text’ icon. Fotor gives you three options: heading, subheading, and body text.

Since I would only be adding one caption to this photo, I chose the heading option. Fotor then added a text box over my image that I could move and edit as I wished.

I then typed my caption into the text box, and made the text white so that it could be seen more easily. I also changed the font from ‘Abril Fatfact’ to ‘Antonio’, since I liked the way that it lined up over the image better.

And with that, my depressing image was complete. I saved it as a .png file, renamed it, and thought for a long while about how our time on this earth is limited.

Thanks for reading!

Guidelines for this assignment can be found here.