Design Quickies: This is NOT My City (Album Cover)

My younger cousin is intelligent as hell, funny, witty, and 100% her own person. She has her BS (no jokes, please) in Architectural Preservation from TU (what, what) and is working on her MS in Library and Information Science at DU. She’s awesome.

With that said, she also has some of the most quotable one-liners known to man.

One Christmastime (I guarantee it was last year), my boyfriend, and two cousins took a trip out to Bethlehem, PA to visit the annual Christkindlmarkt over in Christmas City. On the way to and from, Yenny kept firing off these phrases that were responses to things we were talking, about, but totally left of center, yet completely on brand. It got so funny with what she was spewing out, I started a new page of notes on my phone just for those sentences.

I said aloud, “Yen, all of these sound like song titles. This can be an EP.” We all laughed about it, and of course she questioned me as she always does. To be fair, though, some of these titles are not things that have physically spilled out of her mouth, but are definitely things she wouldn’t hesitate to say or that relate to her quite well.

WELL, almost a year later, I finally got around to making it happen. Now, this is entirely an inside joke, and for Christmas, to celebrate the “one year anniversary” of these quotes, my boyfriend suggested we get the album cover printed as an LP and instead of a record inside, create a photo album just for her. I think it’s a smashing idea!

I sent a screenshot of the front and back covers to her older sister, who was in the car (she was driving!) when all of this took place and she got a kick out of it. Even told me she’d have to nudge her sister to pre-order it. ;)

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Elements:

1. Photo of Yen - taken by me at 2018 Wawa Welcome America Party on the Parkway, Philadelphia, PA

2. Alley stock photo found on Google

3. Typefaces used: Rock Salt, Myriad

4. FBI Anti-Piracy Warning logo (downloaded as SVG from Brands of the World)

5. Republic Records logo (downloaded from Google)

6. Parental Advisory logo (downloaded from Google)

Time taken: 2 hours

Programs: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop

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Poster: Alpina B7

Project: Serif Vs. Sans Serif Effectiveness in Advertising
Type: School Project
Class: ADV5503 Persuasion and the Marketplace
Photographer: Kevin Nguyen (Photos used with permission.)

Two posters designed for an experiment to determine whether serif or sans serif typefaces are more efficient and effective in eliciting positive emotions in print advertisements. The subject of these posters is one of four; only two were present in the experiment.

Each set of posters were set in both serif and sans serif type (one family each) with varying weights.

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Tutoring

What do you do when a former colleague of yours comes to you with a slight (large) career change in mind with no interest in getting a whole, brand new four-year degree, but is willing to work alongside and under you to learn your trade?

You laugh and say tough cookies, my man.

…

NO! Absolutely not. You help them and give them the tools they need. I would never encourage someone to go and get a second bachelors degree to change careers unless they were absolutely passionate about it, but I wouldn’t also turn someone away who asked for help that genuinely wanted or needed it. If I can provide, I will.

My friend, former colleague, and now pupil, has been in touch with me to see if i could teach him things about graphic design for a couple of months now. The good news is, he has a creative base to work on, especially when it comes to composition, which is what we’re working on now. I’m not an educator by any means, and honestly, I don’t want to make this boring for him. It’s crossed my mind to take what I learned in 15 years of self-education and 4 years of formal and condense it into months of learning. Some would say that’s really unfair, that I had to pay thousands of dollars and push through four years of constant judging, belitting, and the utmost drilling of information and ideas just to hand it to someone to do over, say, 8 weeks time.

Nah, it’s all good. I have knowledge and skill and if I can share it, I will. I did it at my last job, and the job before that, and the job before that.

He’s not going to become a master graphic designer under my guise. In fact, that’s a task he’s going to take on by himself. There are TONS of graphic designers who are successful, but self-taught.

I need to start by having him understand what graphic design is. I showed him the course path LinkedIn Learning has on graphic design and the first module available in the course is “What is Graphic Design?”

Today’s email, I saw he sent back his latest assignment. After a few weeks on the pen tool, with the ellipse and marquee tools peppered in, I decided he was ready to start learning about composition. Yesterday I emailed him an assignment briefly explaining depth (which should be a refresher, as his degree is in photography) and asking him to create a composition using color and shape to show me depth. He emailed back to me a correct, but very basic and boring assignment.

I didn’t specifically tell him to jump through hoops, but I also didn’t expect getting the bare minimum back, especially from someone with lots of fire. So, I emailed him back and said, “Do it again, but this time let’s think outside the box.” I showed him a couple of photographic examples of depth and two examples from design (on top of the other examples I originally sent with the assignment) that show depth and hierarchy. I also attached the image on the left. I did it in 5 minutes, but I used color, shapes, and layering to try and show something that’s not just a bunch of triangles in a size/gradient order sitting atop a box with another gradient effect.

I told him for this assignment, his piece didn’t need to make sense or have a story, though if it did (both make sense and have a story), I wouldn’t be mad because it would further prove his understanding and help define his thought process.

The piece I did to show was done in 5 minutes using about 4 layers and some doodling around to make it make sense. To me, I was thinking of a stylized galaxy, with a ringed planet. This isn’t the Mona Lisa of my portfolio, but I hope he sees it and is inspired to make something much better.