This was the quickest assignment I have ever done, but it was still some fun.

The assignment was to take a title of a well-known book and re-design the cover to suggest something entirely different.

I looked at the best-selling books on Amazon to get an idea. Then I figured, why not make something Nicholas Sparks has done into something really dark and not romantic?

So I took The Notebook.

I took the original cover from his website:

But there really wasn’t any point in saving any of it. So I positioned a picture of Light on top of the bottom image, then erased the top. Then I used Optimus Princeps font from dafont.com to make the title cover text.

I then decided to do something with a similar name: Death Note.

This is what I came up with:

I started this assignment with high expectations. I was going to make a movie poster into something animated.

Making a poster even more epic? Definitely going to be good.

I researched some posters of movies that came out this year on IMdB.

After browsing around for awhile, I picked two posters that I thought would be easy, but also could be animated in a way that makes sense.

For the Prometheus one, I had planned on making her flashlight turn on and off, sort of like how it happened in the movie.

For Zero Dark Thirty, using the poster for inspiration, I would put a gif behind the words.

I started with the Zero Dark Thirty poster first.

The Steps

First, I needed to remove her photo from behind the words.

I figured the easiest way to do this was to use the background eraser.  I tried using the Quick Selection Tool to select the inside of each letter, but when the letters had black marks on the inside of the letter (like the “O”), it took the entire letter out.

So, I was stuck with using the Background Eraser. And boy was that hard.

The blue areas were easy. Her face and hair and dark shirt on the other hand… took me an hour. I wanted to preserve the quality of the lettering, so I had to be super careful with the Tolerance level.

After getting most of the photo behind the lettering gone, I had to go back in and use the Erase Block to get the darker spots that even Tolerance couldn’t help.

I ended up with this.

The checkered part is the transparency.

Then, Adobe fought back. It crashed and left me staring at my computer in complete dismay.

I let it do its thing and just waited until I felt my computer could try to open Photoshop again.

I tweeted while I waited.

Photoshop just crashed on me when I tried to make my movie poster gif. 2 hours gone. UGH. #ds106 #gonnagocrynow

— Brooke Parker (@bparker5) February 21, 2013

Finally, I got up the courage to click on the shortcut on my desktop and wished with everything in me that it would come back. If I knew how to speak whale, I may have sounded a lot more like Dory.

Photoshop said it had recovered something!

YESYESYES.

Alas, it didn’t recover everything. I had lost about an hour’s worth of work.

I didn’t feel like going through it all again, though. So, I sucked it up and kept going with what it had recovered.

Making it into a GIF

I downloaded the trailer for Zero Dark Thirty with Fastest YouTube Downloader. Then I used MPEG Streamclip to trim it down and make a gif out of part of the trailer.

I then opened that gif in Photoshop.

I had no idea how to put the top image on top of the gif, though.

My only idea was to increase the Canvas size of the gif to the height of the poster. Then I copied the poster onto the gif and put it as a top layer.

That was it!

Ta da!

After making it into a gif, I realized you can’t even tell that I didn’t go back through and clean up the transparency.

To continue on my 15 star design assignment quest, I completed a poster redesign called DS106 Propaganda Posters from the ds106 Assignment Bank.  This 3 star rated assignment called to take a propaganda poster and tweek it to publicize ds106.

I found the poster I wanted to use via Google from ww2propagandaposters.com.  Below is the original poster:

I opened the poster in Picasa and retouched the text under Americans.  I only wanted to change the word “fight” to “blog”, but instead of trying to match the font perfectly, I took out the entire line and rewrote it in as close a font as I could find. I also enhanced the colours to modernize it.  Et voilà!

For my final design assignment for the week I decided to do the two star assignment that has you create an icon to describe yourself. As the picture they had Mickey Mouse’s ears, which made me a little sad because I wanted to do Minnie with a tiara (I just love her). So I decided to take a new approach and look at the things that really mean something to me. First of all my family is everything. I love them more than they will ever know and I’m so glad that they will always have my back. So, I wanted to put two things in my icon to represent them, a heart and a four leaf clover (we always have the luck of the Irish, plus I am superstitious like crazy). So I decided, why not make the four leaf clover be my base and put something in each leaf? Brilliant, I know.

So that’s exactly what I did. I opened up paint and set a drew of a four-leaf clover to be my background. I then drew in a heart (for family and love), Mickey Mouse (for believing in my dreams), an apple (because my passion is teaching and that is what I want to be when I grow up, trust me it is not because I like apples (unless they are covered in sugar)), and finally math symbols (since math is the first thing I was ever truly passionate about). I believe that these things all represent who I am as a person and who I want to be as well, so it’s the perfect icon for me! I was proud because I drew all of this freely, which is impressive considering my lack of artistic abilities. Here was my final result:

Thanks for reading!

Princess Karissa