Assignment #3

For my final assignment I decided to make a new book cover for a classic book from the Creative Action Network. I have been reading a lot of books recently so I felt like this would be an assignment I would really enjoy. I chose a book I have not yet read before but heard a lot about, Anne of Green Gables. I used canva to make the book cover and got inspiration for the cover by looking up images of the book/movie on google!

Assignment #2

For my second assignment I decided to make a missing persons poster for a fictional tv/movie character. In my previous assignments I have said that my favorite tv show at the moment is Golden Girls, so to carry on that theme I made a missing persons poster for Rose Nylund. I included facts about Rose from the show and include some inside jokes only people who have seen the show would understand! I used the canva website again to make this poster!

Assignment #1

For this assignment I chose to make a poster for a charity, real or made up, to inform the public. I chose the charity “Fairy Godmother Project”, which is a real charity based in Fredericksburg. I wanted to make a poster for a real charity that was close to Mary Washington and had something to do with children. I found this one that really stuck out to me because it helps parents and children who have been given cancer diagnosis. I used the website canva to make this poster and all the information on the poster came from “The Fairy Godmother Project” website.

Because of my dry humor, I did not hesitate to do the Contradiction Creation design assignment. I love motivational quotes just as much as the next person, but sometimes they can be a little (no–very) cheesy, and what better to destroy all this positivity than with a dash of pessimistic realism?

At first, I wanted to do something related to “fitspiration,” but when I saw this picture of a bird flying into the horizon, I changed directions and just scrolled through un-motivational quotes. I decided on this one because, if you think about it, it’s very true.

???????????????Do you know yosakoi?

I am not–and never will be–tired of bringing in my Japan adventures into my work. When I decided to do my third design assignment on an Event Poster, the first two things that came to mind were bhangra and yosakoi. However, the first actual event that came to mind between those two was the yosakoi festival, which is held annually every August for three days.

Yosakoi is a type of Japanese dance that’s very energetic. My explanation won’t do it any justice, but if you watch performances, you’ll see what I mean. In Akita, there’s yatose, which is an Akita-specific yosakoi variation. However, I wanted to bring light to yosakoi as a whole.

Using “Pages” on my Mac, I created a poster with a white background, and put in text (using Baoli SC font to give it more of a “festival in Japan” kind of vibe). At the top I put “Yosakoi Festival,” and I put “August 2020” and “K?chi City” at the bottom. I inserted yosakoi clipart and had the two people face each other. In the center, I wrote vertically in Japanese (in the same font) ????????which is “Yosakoi Festival.”

I did as little as possible to make it stand out and such that it doesn’t look cluttered. It might look a little plain, but I know that any added colors, text, fonts, or images would make the poster look too loud and busy.

Something interesting that I did notice as I was formatting the images and text was how “Pages” uses the grid system to keep things aligned properly. I noticed this before, but in the context of design, it stood out to me more this time.

Anyway, here’s the final product! I hope this has peaked your interest in some way!

So far, this design assignment has been the most challenging for me, and I would like to say that this is because I didn’t know how I wanted to approach it. I decided to do a Minimalist TV/Movie Poster for Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989).

What initially came to mind was using a blue gradient background with silhouettes of Ariel as a mermaid reaching up to the surface and Eric at the top whereas Ariel as a human would be sinking down and Ursula would be waiting at the bottom, but then I remembered that this was supposed to be a minimalist movie poster, and my initial idea was scrapped for having too much going on. I decided to cut out Eric and Ursula, and this was my first draft (and I decided to post it because I still kind of like how it turned out):

I downloaded silhouette pictures and removed the background and placed them on a blue gradient PowerPoint slide. Although with a few more tweaks, this could turn out better, I decided to get rid of human Ariel altogether. It just wasn’t minimalist enough for me. Then I rotated mermaid Ariel a whole 180 degrees, placed her at the bottom, enlarged the image, and rearranged the placement of the text.

Quite frankly, I’m still not sure how I feel about this. I feel like I could’ve done something different to give a better aesthetic, but this was my attempt at creating a minimalist movie poster for The Little Mermaid.

For this assignment I decided to use Canva to make a Karaoke night poster that I would see on a college campus like ours. The bright colors not only represent the 80’s but would also be to catch a student’s eye while they are quickly walking through campus. I incorporated the famous ABBA song “Dancing Queen” in the middle of the poster saying “Lets live out our 80’s dreams and be dancing queens” because lets be honest, who doesn’t want to dance to ABBA. This looks like an appealing poster that I would be interested in learning more about. Canva was a very easy website to use and I will definitely be using it again in the future!

I chose this song because it is not only my favorite song, but gives also gives a really inspiring message. Seeing this song is such a moving moment which is why it means so much to me. I also decided to choose this song because it has a lot of visual elements to it which would be fun to make into a typographical poster. This assignment brought back lots of fun childhood memories because as a kid I would draw lyrics to songs all the time (mainly One Direction and Taylor Swift haha) but it was really cool to get creative with this. I used photoshop and the text tool for all of the font. The colors directly behind the words are just the outer glow effect and the boxes were the shape tool . The other images are clip art I found on the internet. Pairing what colors to use overall depended on the overall aesthetic that I wanted to use for the poster which was happiness and summertime which is what the song means to me. That explains why I used orange, blue, yellow, and purple. Overall, I think it is cute and appealing which is what I was going for.

Now that I finally have a bit of a break in my week, I did my first design assignment, One Story / Four Icons on an 80s movie to tie it to our course theme. All of the icons are plot related, whether they pertain to a specific part of the story, the story as a whole, or a particular character. I used clipart for my icons, inserted them into PowerPoint, exported it as a PDF, and then exported it again as an image.

What 80s movie do you think I’m referring to here? Comment your thoughts below!

Spoiler Alert: This post will spoil Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War.

During my weekly deep search into the assignment bank, I came across the Missing Person assignment and thought it would be amusing to do the assignment with a fictional character.

This assignment requires you to make a missing person poster with some required information, but I decided to take a twist on the assignment and do a wanted poster instead.

As mentioned on my website and in my last blog, I just watched all of the Marvel/Avengers movies over winter break and fell in love (and got my heart broken).

My favorite movies are Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. I’ve watched them a few times since I first watched all of the movies. One of my favorite scenes is in the beginning of Infinity War when we see all of the Avengers begin to come together again, especially when Captain America comes back to help Wanda and Vision since he has been in hiding.

So, for this assignment, I decided to make a wanted poster for Captain America post-Civil War.

I started off making the poster in PowerPoint but decided to switch to Canva since it has more options (and I forgot it existed when I started the assignment).

Since the Sokovia Accords were passed by the United Nations, I decided to make the poster wanted by the UN. I tried to stick with their color scheme (blue and white).

I looked up a FBI wanted poster to give myself an idea of what they normally look like. I learned that there isn’t really a template, but there is information that is kept the same throughout the posters. So, I took the template into my own hands.

The rest of the poster is pretty self-explanatory. I tried to keep the fonts the same or similar to each other.

I had a lot of fun with this assignment! I also tried to make it as accurate as possible. If I was wrong about something, please correct me.