Typography

This lecture was focused primarily on the area of graphic design known as Typography. I have had experience with Typography before and understand that when used correctly that creative placement of text can have more impact than any image. Typography has always been something that I have had some interest in as a graphic designer.

What is typography?

"The art or procedure of arranging type or processing data and printing from it" - Google Definition

We was shown a poster which I have seen before, but which I still find really interesting, this is the bad typography is everywhere poster. With its simplistic colour pallet and neat design, the message I personally receive from this is that bad typography stands out more than good typography, shown with the red overlaid type.

However something that caught my attention during this lecture was the terminology of Typography and typefaces. I was unaware of how detailed and complex typography really was. The lecture talked about many aspects of type such as:

Ascent
Ascender height
Mean line
Descent

Tracking

Counter
Bowl
Spine
Descender
Serifs
Stern
Terminal
Ligature

Visualisation Of Sound Project Introduction

This lecture introduced the group to our new project, Visualization of sound. Unlike our sense of place project, we were given a much shorter time frame consisting of 5 weeks to produce 8 experimental outcomes, based on the visualization of sound. It was advised that we took a varied technical approach to generating these outcomes, using many different forms of media, such as, animation, stills and practical methods. This was basically to test ourselves under pressure, like the way in-which we would be in industry. I was really excited for this project as I had already decided that I would be producing a different outcome though a combination of stills and animation.

It was further discussed that like in real industry we would be provided source material, this came in the form of music, where we would need to use or respond to a select portion within our work. These music clips would be able to be downloaded through Unilearn. It was then the lecture focused on inspirational pieces of work, where we could get ideas for how the visualization sound could be achieved.

We was then asked what does graphic design have in common with sound. I came to the conclusion that sound can be represented by shapes, such coming from the idea of music sheets. This basic form allows for the production of music, visualising sound. This was a really unique way of looking at the concept as usually it would be more common to make a music video or just incorporating sound, rather than making a key to what each sound represents. However my favorite part of the inspirational material being shown was a video called Cymatics by Nigel Stanford. This video focused on using particular frequencies in correlation with equipment to visually see the effect that sound had on a substance. The way the music video was put together was really well done and had really inspired me to produce something for the project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3oItpVa9fs

Overall I thought that this lecture help me think much more broadly about the outcomes I could produce for my formative assessment. It allowed me to think about all the different possibilities I could do and think about which form of media would be the best to portray them in.

APA 6 Referencing Seminar

This seminar was focused on providing myself and the group with information on how to reference correctly for my upcoming 2500 words essay summative. I have never referenced before so this was something very new to myself. The seminar informed me of when and how to reference throughout my essay, giving me the understanding of academic terminology.

Something stressed heavily during the seminar was plagiarism.

Plagiarism: Defining someone else's work as your own.

Accidental Plagiarism: Incorrectly Referenced.

When to reference

Paraphrasing: Putting eternal text in your own words.
Images: Images found from books or the internet.
Statistics: Factual information based from a reference source.
Quotations: Direct information from a source.

In text citations - Shortened versions of references to link to full reference

Example Of An In Text Citation - (Oxford Dictionary, 2016)

Full reference - Contains all references information

Example Of A Full Reference - Oxford (2016). In Oxford DictionaryOxford University Press. Retrieved from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/subculture

During the seminar it was also explained that their was a reference list and a bibliography, previously I thought that they were both the same. However it turned out that a reference list is where you contain all of your references citated in your work and a bibliography is the lists of reading sources which have been looked at but didn't directly reference in the essay. In addition to this we were shown some assets which could make the referencing process easier, such as Mendely and Ref Me.

Types of references

Articles
Websites
Books
Magazines
Journals

Overall I found this seminar session to be quite useful in clarifying many confusing aspects of the reference process. It also gave a much broader understanding of essay terminology, allowing me to understand how and when to references, whilst clarifying the word Paraphrasing as I struggled to understand the difference between this and plagiarism.

Creative Cloud Suite: Illustrator Image Trace

The task for this creative cloud exercise was to produce a image trace photograph with a custom based logo. We was asked to use a sport based photograph for this task, I think that this would work well for a promotional design. I decided to find a quick photograph online for my design, this ended up being a photography of a blonde women running in a city. With this photograph I then image traced at a 6 colour setting, with the result of the colour scheme being below. In addition to this I could ungroup this image trace and delete any areas which I did not particularly like, to perfectly capture of delete any unwanted features within the trace.

Fortunately the design I was left with satisfied the concept that I was looking for. After The completed trace I then had to design a logo to be place on the image. Keeping in mind the activity that the women was doing in the photograph, I decided that my logo would be called Endurance as it symbolized the women's pacing. Using the typeface Helvetica I then added a simplistic curved shape edited with the pen tool, this allowed me to adjust the curvature of the shape to my desire. This shape was on a slight slant, giving the impression of a hill, for when running up a hill you would gain stamina and build up your endurance. I got this idea from the Adidas logo where there logo represents mountains for running.

Here is what the original photograph looked like before the image trace.

Overall I am really happy with the overall design of this image trace and I will make sure that I experiment with this Adobe illustrator feature in the future as it captures a stylised appearance of design, without doing a lot of work to it. This could possibly be a great idea to mock up concepts for designs.

Creative Cloud: Interactive Album Booklet

This Adobe Creative Cloud tutorial was to explore more advanced features of creating an interactive PDF. These extra skills would help us in producing out PDF's if we wanted to include video references in our future research and or development.

We began by reproducing the pervasive percussion album cover using a new blend of tools. A new tool which I found out was to be able to select the exact colour of an image and applying this to text and shapes in the document. This made finding the exact colour of the document very easy. This tool is similar to the Eyedropper tool in photoshop, however in indesign you need to hold the mouse button down and let go when over your chosen colour.

Here is my version of the Pervasive Percussion Album (Below)

After this brief introduction to the session, we then looked at creating a table of contents, which is basically a digital contents of all the pages in the document. The reason why this is an effective tool, is because it saves time on constructing a contents page manually, and can be updated if the documents layout changes. This is also where I found the help tool effective as it guided me to the table of contents, as I was unable to find it.

This part of the session I looked at including video within a interactive PDF. We used a video suppled on unlearn called Swing of change, which was an animated film. Quite simply to have video in indesign you have to simple place it in the document, however to have a fully functional video, with a pause and start button, you are required to mark some options in the media tab. Features in this menu include the ability to have the video play instantly as you go to the specific page the video is on and also create a display window of a particular frame, if the video fame currently is bland. Something which I did find useful however, is that to be able to see videos in the document PDF, it has to be opened in Adobe Acrobat reader.

Overall I gained the ability to add videos into indesign, which in my opinions a very important skill to have when constructing digital media. I also found out that Indesign is much more than a research and publication software, as it can be used to create many sources of media. I am very happy with the PDF I produced and although it's not a publication worthy outcome, I think that the skills acquire fro this session are very important, which I will apply to my future project documents.