Thursday, 26 February 2015

Rocket & Pear (Illustrator workshop)







To make the pear was actually very simple. Once I had the image of the pear, we then used the Mesh Tool to create a 3D net over the shape of the pear. Once this was done it was the long process of clicking each point using the direct selection tool and the Eyedropper tool to select the colour of the pear under that certain point. This would colour that point of the mesh in. Once all points had been selected and sampled I found a texture to put on the pear. This was to make it look more realistic. To do this we just had to select an area of the texture and crop it down to the shape of the pear, and turn the opacity down to around 10%.















These 9 print-screens briefly show the stages of making the rocket using illustrator. I first used the Ellipse tool to create the basic shape of the rocket and then modified it using the Direct selection Tool to form the shape seen on the first screenshot. For the rest of the screen shots it consisted of the same technique. To create the dashed lines and patterns etc, I Stuck to using the 'Apearance" window through out all these processes.

Monday, 16 February 2015

Simple shapes animation test on After Effects

This is a quick test I did in order to help me practice towards my final piece for Earth Artifact.

Simple shapes animation test on After Effects from Junaid Arshad on Vimeo.

Kinetic Typography after effects workshop - Physical Studio

In this workshop with Sara we we taught the process of how to make simple kinetic typography in Adobe After Effects. First we had to choose a quote to make into kinetic typography. Once this was done we made a layout page in Illustrator to give an idea of the font & colours which were going to be used.
After this we started to lay the page out in After Effects like we did in Illustrator (my layout changed a bit when we did this) and then we added an audio track to make the kinetic typography fall in time to. Below is my end result.

After Effects animation workshop - Physical Studio

In this session with Sara our group looked at making images in Adobe Illustrator and then animating them in Adobe After Effects. With the image in Illustrator, we had to make the limbs of moving joints of the picture as a separate layer before moving them into After Effects in order to animate each part separately. Below is the Illustrator part of my animation which was of a footballer.

Thursday, 12 February 2015

Artist typeface transcription (Part 1) - Process & Production

In this process & production session with John I was looking at typography. At the start of the session, John showed the group some examples of typography from previous students and told us how they were made with a few of them - he showed a picture of something (say a building) and pointed out how there was shape in it which looked a letter of the alphabet.

After looking at several images which John gave us as help for our development, we had develop our own typography from looking at the images and picking letters out. Below is the result of what I did.



Wednesday, 10 December 2014

Workshop Week - InDesign Tutorial

InDesign is a software used by a majority of designer to create books, documents,  presentations, newspapers, magazines, posters etc. In today's workshop tutorial we learned how to use some basics of this software by Jeffrey Bowman. We  worked on different 3 different briefs throughout the workshop which each tackled a separate subject on InDesign.. First we started off on looking at how to set up a new document and how different platforms (such as annual reports or mood boards) would have different document settings. Below are all the details of the briefs, which we received in the workshop.


Brief
Exercise 01 - Making a basic moodboard using 02 techniques

Specifications

Size: A3
Orientation: Landscape
Margins: 15mm
Columns: 4, with a 4mm gutter

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Moodboard 01

Place 8 images onto your moodboard and lay them out using the grid structure

01. Make a new document using the above specifications.
02. Press CMD + D or go to File>Place.
03. Locate the Exercise 01 folder on your desktop and select the image 01.jpg.
04. Now your cursor will be loaded with the image.
05. Click and drag out your cursor on the art board and a picture box with the image should appear, let go when you are happy with the size.
06. Repeat this process until all the images are on the art board.
07. Now arrange the images to the grid lines.
08. To scale up an image box, use the Selection tool (black arrow) and hold down SHIFT + CMD and grab the anchor point around the selected image an scale up or down.
09. Make sure you arrange your images so they all fit on, look neat are aligned to the columns and inside the margins.

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Moodboard 02

Making a moodpboard form a structured picture box.

01. In the page pallet press the 'Create New Page' button.

02. Now from the Tool Palette you want to select the Rectangle Frame Tool.

03. Now click and drag out a picture box that sits from the top left of your margin to the bottom right.

04. Now delete this and do it again. But this time once you have dragged out the picture box, do not let go of the mouse, instead keep the mouse pressed down and use the arrow keys on your keyboard. Press up and down to add rows and right and left to add columns. This will split up the picture box.
05. Using this technique, split the box into 8.

06. Note, this may be tricky so try it a few times.
07. Now using your Selection tool (black arrow) click on one of the boxes and then press CMD +D or File>Place and locate the Exercise 01 folder on our desktop and select image 01.jpg
08. Now the image will be inside the picture box.
09.Now select the Direct Selection Tool (white arrow) and you should be able to pick up the image inside the picture box - a brown box will appear around it when you have got this, and you can then move the image around inside the box.
10. You can shrink the image down by pressing shift and grabbing one of the anchor points and scaling it up or down. Make sure you always hold SHIFT to keep it in proportion.
11. A shortcut to shrink it into the box is simple - Click the image and press CMD + ALT + SHIFT+ E (the claw).
12. Practice this for the other 07 remaining images.

Now all your mood boards for the rest of Uni should be presented like this!


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Brief
Exercise 02 - Formatting type

Specifications

Size: A4
Orientation: Portrait
Margins: 13mm
Columns: 4, with a 4mm gutter

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Styling up text

01. Set up your document with the specifications above.
02. Select the Text Tool from the Tool Palette.


03. Draw out  text box over 03 columns.
04. Open the TEXT.rtf file from the Exercise 02 folder. Copy it (CMD+C) and then come back into InDesign and paste it (CMD+V) into your text box.
05. Now turn on Hidden Characters. Either press ALT + CMD + i or go to Type>Show Hidden Characters.
06. Delete these 03 Hard-Returns, but leave the ones that are at the endow the title, sub-title and each the 03 paragraph sentences.

07. Now open your Character Palette, either press CMD + T or go to Windows>Type & Tables>Character.
08.Highlight all the text and go to the Character Palette and select the font:

Helvetica Neue and 55 Roman.
Set the point size to 8pt
Set the leading to 11pt

09. Now highlight the top line including the hard return:

10. Set the text to:

Helvetica Neue and 75 Bold.
Set the point size to 30pt
Set the leading to 30pt
Delete the word (title)

11. Highlight the second line 'sub-title', include the hard return and then set the font to:

Helvetica Neue and 65 Medium.
Set the point size to 15pt
Set the leading to 20pt
Delete the word '(sub-title)'

12. Next we want to open up the space between the paragraphs. This is called SPACE AFTER.
13. Open the Paragraph Palette by pressing CMD + ALT + T or going to Window>Type & Styles>Paragraph.
14. In the paragraph palette, set the SPACE AFTER to 3pt.

15. Now try playing around with the different values for the title and sub-title, maybe they are too big, maybe the space after needs to be bigger or the leading  (space between the line).

These are basic ways to typeset text.
- Body copy can be 8p-12pt in size with always 2pt extra or leading.
-Leading refers to the space between each letter.
-Kerning is the space between each word.
-Space After is set between 2pt and 4pt as a rule.

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Obviously the above is specific instructions as to what I did on the tutorial, however, the basic points and helpful shortcuts can be seen by anyone and used on any InDesign task/project.