adventures

I'm a graphic designer and illustrator from Louisville and this is some of the stuff I make.

[emilyjohnsonhitegd]

Hey guys, so first of all, sorry. It’s been well over a year since my last update on the Coffee Lover’s Tarot deck. I have a million excuses between finishing school to graduating to hunting for a job, but the truth is that I should have made it a priority to keep you in the loop. You’re the people who encouraged me to complete the deck in the first place. The good news is that I’ve been back to the grind on completing the minor arcana of the deck for the better half of September, and I’m happy to tell you that I’m over half way done and intend to have the whole deck designed--and hopefully available to purchase--by Christmas. This was a process blog I had to keep for classes, so from now on, bounce over to my main blog @pixlvvitch or follow me on Instagram (@pixlwitch) for updates on the deck as well as other artistic projects. I’m happy to be back on track, and can’t wait to finally show you the finished product. Thanks again! 

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Unfolding the Everyday is an interactive art exhibit exploring American and European drawings and painting of the early 20th century. As this period covers a wide gambit of styles and subjects, the exhibit focused in on the things that make the individual pieces alike and means to explore the complexity and beauty of the mundane and to paint a rather dry sounding subject in a new and more captivating light. This is accomplished through a mature yet exiting color palette, type and marketing that refers to a spirit of discovery, an immersive exhibit with eerie lighting inspired by the artwork, and a looking-glass app that allows participants to explore the exhibit up close and invites them to bring the styles of the artists into the real world.

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[emilyjohnsonhitegd]

This was a theoretical stop motion social media ad spot I created for Hi-Chew. The target audience was Gen Z females and was intended to inform the audience of the new Hi-Chew flavor while also better defining Hi-Chew USA’s branding and voice. 

The piece was made in my room using a sheet of pink vellum, 192 tiny kiwi birds, my cell phone camera, and a lot of time.

[emilyjohnsonhitegd]

Hey guys, sorry for the long break. The minor arcana of the deck is still in the works, though with being in my last year of school, I haven’t been able to dedicate as much time as I’d like to it. Even so! I’ve entered what I have so far in a local design competition in Louisville and it mean mean the world to me if you could click the link below and show it some love!

https://aigalou.submittable.com/gallery/6b027cde-5ca3-4562-a461-c1727364a216/8857457/

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Final Reflection

What a long, exhausting semester.

For seven weeks, my abilities and workflow were pushed to their absolute limit. Having no time to really think and plan out my concepts was a totally new experience for me, and while it was hard, scary, and really, really stressful, I would absolutely do it over. I came up with crazy things that I would have never thought of on my own. I’m looking back on my seven flash projects and my long term project WCKD good and thinking, wow, that just came out of me. It’s insane.

At the same time, I don’t think I’ve ever burnt out that quickly before. After the seven weeks, probably even before the seven week line, I felt like I was totally drained—a feeling I usually don’t get until the last few weeks of the semester. I loved this class but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t effect the way I performed in my other classes; the flash projects each demanded the majority of my weekend, and the final project demanded the lion’s share of my attention through finals. I still think my outcome was worth it, but I would give a word of warning to any student to take this class in the future. You have to have a lot of motivation, great time management skills, and not be too attached to your social obligations to survive this class.

Again, I want to stress that it was absolutely worth it to take this class. I not only have a great portfolio piece ready to go, but I have 6 other fantastic ideas to expand upon and a whole new strategy for concepting new ideas. I’m a better artist than I was six months ago, and that makes it worthwhile.

[emilyjohnsonhitegd]

I’m sorry this update took so long, but I finally finished the major arcana of my coffee-themed tarot deck! These are a few of my new designs, and I can’t wait to share the rest with you all~~ The first 22 cards were all I needed to complete this semester, but I absolutely intend to finish the whole set within the next few months. Thanks to everyone for all your enthusiasm and support for this project, I literally would not have even thought to finish it if it weren’t for your positive feedback! 

[emilyjohnsonhitegd]

For my final exploration, I chose to create illustrated posters for one of my favorite indy films, Kung Fury. The movie uses tropes from pretty much every 80′s movie genre as well as strong retro futurist visuals and glitch effects to make it feel like a VHS tape right out of Blockbuster in 1988. I used colors, textures, and even my worst enemies outer glow and gradient to try and achieve the same mood. For the characters themselves I looked to cartoons from the 80′s like GI Joe and Thundercats and tried to emulate that same style with simple black lineart and shadeless bloc coloring.  

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So this was kind of an uncomfortable week for me, both because it was my very first attempt at animation and because it was my first time speaking openly (and now posting on the internet) about my history with self-harm. I thought an animated gif would be the best format for what I wanted to communicate: I wanted something that would loop endlessly to show the cyclical nature of my harming and how I would use it when I dissociated in order to feel normal, only to kind of faze out again and harm again and so on and so forth. I wanted to do something less literal and more symbolic to show how I felt at the time, and I think I was pretty successful. 

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I know it’s a few days late, but my project this week was creating dinosaur valentines. I wanted to combine comic book style illustrations with candy colors and, of course, puns to create this series. 

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This week, I combined the subject of dessert with the method of game to create Coffeehouse Tarot Cards. I was primarily interested in really capturing a certain aesthetic--I wanted the viewer to smell the coffee grounds as they held the cards, and I think I was successful. I used instant coffee as the medium on the illustrations, and created the vectored back design in Illustrator. 

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Fido is a non-profit skate fashion line that I created to help raise awareness and help rescue dogs victimized by puppy mills. The name comes from fido, the latin word meaning “loyal” and “faithful”. It is also a popular dog name, so the term is already closely associated with dogs. The logo was inspired by the story of the Akita Hachiko and his lifelong patience and dedication to his deceased master. The spirit of the entire project was this idea that dogs have brought so much joy and enrichment to our lives, and they deserve the same treatment in return. However, it’s impossible to chibi-ize an Akita without it also looking like a Shiba Inu, but given the Sheeb’s current prevalence online and in pop culture, I took this as a good connotation. 

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For this week’s project, I tackled the subject of politics with the matter of zine.

The purpose and inspiration of this little publication is the levels of general ignorance among voters in America. Sure, communication and honest dialogue are important in mending the rift in our country, but it can’t fix what doesn’t want to be fixed. We’re living in a time of “alternative facts” where feeling right is more important than being right, and people are willing to believe anything that fits into the narrative they want. I wanted to create a little piece to, more than anything, blow off some of my personal steam on the issue and maybe change a few hearts and minds if snarky frogs are they key.

The frogs and most of the type are hand drawn, the backgrounds were created with watercolors, crayons, and markers with photo elements, and the overlaid text texture is of Charlie Chaplin’s speech from The Great Dictator. 

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For my first week’s foray into my Adventures in Design class, I decided to focus on the subject of fictional character combined with the method of book. I chose to partially illustrate my favorite children’s book, Coraline at least enough to make a convincing pitch: a cover concept, and a few spreads of illustrations to show how I would handle the entire book if I were to complete it. 

I chose to work on Coraline specifically because it was the first Neil Gaiman book I had ever read, though it certainly wouldn’t be the last. He quickly became my favorite author and influenced my style as not only a writer but transitively as an artist. I realize that there is already a stop motion film based on Coraline, but I 1) have not seen it 2) still believe that, with as important as this book is to me, Coraline deserves a beautifully handled and intricately illustrated physical version. 

Whether or not I could provide that remains to be seen.

I started off with research. I looked for inspiration first from other morose, dark comedic children’s literature that also happened to be wonderfully illustrated and thoughtfully constructed such as The Sisters Grimm series and A Series of Unfortunate Events. From there I looked at illustration styles that I admired anyway and wanted to emulate especially for Coraline. Tim Burton’s work was an obvious stop on this journey. 

Next I looked at visual strategies that I wanted to incorporate into my version. It’s important to understand that Coraline is an other-world style story like Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz, though delightful darker and (I believe) superior. The Wizard of Oz specifically uses color as a visual cue to the let viewer know that something has changed: Kansas is shown in black and white, while the Land of Oz is shown in color. Without saying anything, the audience immediately knows that Dorothy is in a different place. I wanted to employ color similarly in Coraline: I rendered all the “real world” illustrations in a gray-violet wash, and the more interesting “Other world” in a wider range of warmer colors. 

I also looked to one of my favorite animes, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, for yet another strategy. Like Coraline, Madoka Magica puts a very dark and complex story in an unexpected package. The “real world” scenes in Madoka Magica are rendered in a typical and almost sacchrine-sweet style, but the fight scenes in the “witch world” take place in a disturbing collage-style nightmare realm. The contrast is stunning. I wanted my illustration to do the same thing to the viewer--I wanted that rich and jarring contrast between my doe-eyed and stripey-socked Coraline and the terrors that await her and the reader in the Other Mother’s world. 

I didn’t get to dive as deeply into this element as I would have liked. My final illustration introducing Other Mother just touches on it. I used my own hand-painted pieces along with some photographic elements to suggest at the uncanny and downright disturbing things to come. I also allowed Other Mother to be the only character to break the frame--subtly in this first encounter, but hopefully something that I will be able to realize to its full, terrifying potential later on. 

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This semester’s final podcast was an episode of Design Matters featuring Tina Roth Eisenburg. Eisenburg is a Swiss designer living in Brooklyn who has done work for the Museum of Modern Art, is the mind behind the CreativeMornings lecture series, and is the proprietor of her website/identity, Swiss Miss.

Swiss Miss is itself a very interesting site. What started out as a visual inventory became a popular site providing a daily stream of noteworthy, inspirational, and often very dissonant content. Just on the most recent page, entries range from tshrits with tiny chalkboards on them to “soothing spaceship sounds” to an animated reminder to keep breathing after Tuesday.

So how does she do it? How does Eisenburg take topics and images and videos that all vary so greatly both in visuals and in content and make them all look like they belong in the same publication visually?

That’s essentially what we have to figure out for our Bookforms final project. The AYG system and my rENs folio don’t even look like distant cousins to each other, so at least in my own case, I’m left with two extremely different works in terms of color, content and tone to figure out how to balance and represent appropriately. On top of that, throw in four months of my own blog ramblings and silly pictures to organize and present alongside my work and I begin to face a bit of a challenge.

This week’s reading in Layout Essentials focused on breaking out of the grid structure, and then rethinking the way we use grids to achieve unique and unconventional results. I’ve never been great at using a traditional grid and sticking to it throughout a piece. I’m a big fan of reserved and clean design when other people do it, I just have a lot of trouble doing it decently myself. These chapters certainly appeal to me and I would love to experiment with the Bookform more through this project, but I also feel as though a more understated layout is called for to let my work do the talking. I think I’m going to go through the book again to perhaps get some ideas for the kind of style I want for my piece, and I can definitely see this book being a great reference tool for projects down the line.

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This week’s assigned podcast was an episode of 99% Invisible titled “Ten Thousand Years.” The episode centered around a unique design problem presented by the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. The plant is really a massive underground repository for nuclear waste—waste that will not be safe for another ten-thousand years. Human’s today can understand well enough the dangers of approaching radioactive materials—the problem arose from how to protect humans from the content of the plant for the full lifetime of the facility. How could a team of designers, anthropologists, geologists, and science fiction writers accurately speak to an audience that they have not met and will never meet?

I was curious to hear the answer.

They discussed the pitfalls of any obvious solutions such as language or symbols. As different as we are now than we were ten-thousand years ago, human kind may be even stranger and more dissonant from us in the future. Language will change inevitably: there’s no way to make a sign that will be understood that far in the future. The meaning of symbols, too, changes: what could today say “danger keep away” could say something entirely different in a few generations. Idea after idea was shot down over this and that for years, until finally…

The episode ended. There’s an interim solution in place involving stone pillars, but according to the team in charge of solving the problem, a permanent solution will not be placed until 2028—45 years after the project was first commissioned.

What I took away from this was that even with the best most creative and ingenious minds on the job, an effective design project simply cannot be completed without knowing the audience. Knowing how the target thinks and feels and understands symbol, color, and language is critical to the success of a piece.

Our folios are no different: understanding how my design choices will effect how a viewer understands and appreciates my book is vital to my book being understood and appreciated (both goals of mine.)

This week’s reading in Layout Essentials was on handling layouts with minimal information and pictures without leaving a spread looking empty. This is an area I definitely need help in, I realized especially after being faced with the possibility of having to introduce some white space into my piece to match RENS’ new branding. However, I’m not sure that I’m going to undergo any serious design changes this close to the deadline. This weekend is all about putting the pieces together: printing, gluing, and slicing.

Pictured is a very recent example of the sweat, tears, and blood I put into my work.

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This week’s assigned podcast was an episode of Design Matters featuring Stefan Sagmeister. This particular episode was admittedly difficult to absorb. This was a “vintage” edition of Design Matters from the dark days of 2013. Debbie sounded like she was recording the interview with a Nokia brick phone, and it seemed as though she had yet to develop her signature edge as an internet radio host. She conducted the interview like a middle-schooler meeting Justin Bieber, at one point asking Stephan breathlessly if he had felt a change now that he was like, totally famous.

Sagmeister shrugged audibly and told her that no, not really, and that he was really only famous to designers.

I knew that his name sounded familiar, and after a quick Google search I found out why: we literally looked at his firm’s work in class just weeks ago, and I looked through his “Things I Have Learned” piece myself. Beyond Sagmeister & Walsh’s strange live-feed homepage, I also found that Sagmeister himself is a king of experimental typography. Light, fabric, splatters of paint, hair, and even people are all up for grabs in his works, and his canvases range from thin air to human flesh. One piece I remember Steve Skaggs showing us back in Intro was a talk poster of Sagmeister’s where he had an assistant help him carve the details of the event into his own skin.

It makes my own experimental type feel really pedestrian by comparison.

This week’s Layout Essentials readings focused on designing functional grids that have to accommodate large amounts of information. God knows that this is relevant to our Bookforms project: six pages to accurately visually describe an artist’s entire body of work without it being a total mess is not easy to do. While I feel as though my layout is already coming along nicely, I still find these tips helpful and will probably implement them more in future projects.