Okcool

[rocketpharah]

# semester reflection

Through this semester of study, I learned a lot beyond my expectation.

At first, my personal objectives for communication design studies were to enhance the ability of aesthetic cognition, develop personal insights of the essence of design, explore my own visual language and design style. Although I am still groping my personal design style ceaselessly, the inspirational experiences I have had during the class helped me to stimulate my creativities and keep open-minded to be on the right track.

Additionally, I developed many skills, particularly in some aspects like zine-making, layout arrange and type-making. By learning and understanding the ideas such as typographic principles and publication design, I improved an ability of solving communication problems with various graphic elements and tools.

During the class period, I have been inspired so many times on developing my own designs, and I especially like the collage activity which asked us to cut out letterforms and shapes to group a zine because it allowed me to think freely and boldly without constraints, providing more chances to polish the last zine-making assignment.

Overall, I really enjoyed every different and inspirational activity happened in class, which helped me to achieve many personal objectives.

[rocketpharah]

#week 12 (zine project rationale)

In week 12 tutorial, I submitted my physical zine copy.

I had interviewed my friend who is an artist and architect in the real life. I made a list of various questions then carefully selected 5 critical questions based on his area of specialty. Compared with the last assignment, I managed my limited time more efficiently and made a lot of preparations such as doing zine layout researches, trails printing out and colour scheme tests in order to meet requirements.

In my zine design, I used bright and high-saturated colours to enhance the visual effect and deliver an intense sense of contrast on each page to viewers. At first, I tried to make my zine in Indesign, but after doing a few trails, I found that the colours appeared a distortion by using Indesign, therefore, I decided to make zine by Illustrator page by page in order to ensure the high fidelity of image colours.

I only applied sans-serif typefaces in regular and bold forms in my design because of its modern sense, which was associated with the artist’s painting style. The main design element I used was the geometric lines and shapes, by cooperating with the legible sans-serif typefaces which were arranged in a left-alignment way, forming a neat and readable layout. Additionally, for my physical zine copy, I printed it out in two different versions that one is the wire binding without cover and another is the saddle stitch with die cut cover, then I decided to submit the one with die cut because it looked more like a zine instead of a notebook.

[rocketpharah]

#week 11

On week 11 tutorial, I applied different colours set on first few pages of my zine to test that which set looked better and more eye-catching, then I decided to take the second set with red, magenta and navy blue to be the final theme colour because of their brightness and high saturation, which generated a stunning visual effect. Further, after doing many layout tests on Indesign, I found that the colour brightness and saturation were easy to be distorted and weaken, so I gave up Indesign then chose to use Illustrator to finish each page of the zine for reserving the colour qualities.

[escapekit]

Brandphabet

For the 36 Days of Type, Spain-based artist Jaime Sánchez created a series called The Brandphabet. Turning each letter of the alphabet into easily recognizable trademarks such as Apple, Barbie, Campbell’s soups,

[rocketpharah]

Wow, these types formed beautiful images with vivid colour schemes😯😮😲

[rocketpharah]

# artist details (interview project)

Charlie xiao(查理 萧）I had interview with an artist named Charlie, he was a project architect and he has been studied in RMIT uni. Also, he is my friend in the real life. Now he has been exploring his new interests in art field especially on abstract fine arts. His artworks have been exhibited in Melbourne and New York several times Including the personal art shows and cooperating artworks exhibitions. He does exquisite, unique and impressive fine arts which helps me to capture my imagination and inspirations many times, and this is the reason that who I decided to choose him as the topic choice on my planned interview list. (the pictures above are his featured artworks!)

[designeverywhere]

Americans

[rocketpharah]

wonderful colours used on design! Great inspiration

[rocketpharah]

#week 10

On week 10, I made thumbnail layout for my zine, it will has 13 doubt-sided pages with one more cover page and each page has the different content on it. I am feeling really excited to see what will the final zine look like!!! I am going to apply some high saturation colours on final zine to make it eye-catching enough!

[rocketpharah]

#week 9

We had a such inspirational activity which asked us to cut out the letterforms and different shapes from magazines to build a zine. Each group/person shared their unique result on the wall. This was an important activity which helped us to develop the layout arrangement skill in design, also, I saw many cut-out objects can be presented in a typography way, which were more eye-catching and effective to communicate with the audiences.

[rocketpharah]

#week 8

In this week’s tutorial, we were asked to walk around in city campus to find and take photo on some” hidden fonts” in the buildings. I find the letter “O” and “C”.

[rocketpharah]

#week 7

There was no tutorial this week because of Easter holiday! But I just found a talented designer on Instagram and I would like to share his account here because his works are so amazing and bold, which inspirated me a lot, such as the bold color swatches he used on works, his typography works with contemporary styles.

[rocketpharah]

#week 6

On week 6 tutorial, we have explored and developed geometric typefaces by arranging the coloured paper in different colours. This was a such funny activity that enrich imagination, each group mate shared different ideas and type concepts to polish the final look.

[rocketpharah]

#week 5

No tutorial or lecture this week! So I spent the time on doing improvements on the inspiration ideation assignment in image and identity course. And this will be my final design for submission on next Thursday, hurray! :D This design is combined with typography and irregular coloured graphics to present and communicate a intuitive and effective inspirational idea to audience.

[rocketpharah]

#week 4

On week 4, we practiced to arrange our type design on the Photoshop, the question I asked was “Can design make life easy?” and all the stuff I used in this design are daily-use devices in the real life, they look usual and nothing special in them, but because of the designing of these tools, our life became easy and convenient.

[rocketpharah]

Location: sea life in mel

[rocketpharah]

#week 1

In week 1 design tutorial, me and my teammates made alphabet by different belongings. Some letters look really abstract but they still have the general shapes of the corresponding letters.

[rocketpharah]

#week 2

In week 2 design tutorial on Friday, we have experienced that delivering messge on clay tablets and replying the others’ message by carving emoji without any fonts. Moreover, we drew self-portraits on the tablet and pasted them on the wall. Each person in the class had different drawing styles to show a unique look, some of them even made it in 3D😂. Additionally, we tried to form the letters in the name by human hands.

[rocketpharah]

#week3

In week 3 tutorial on Friday, we had a lot of fun on making pangram by different materials such as paper tape and water. The biggest challenge in this experience was that the water is dry out so quick under the sunshine so the effective teamwork played a crucial role for making sure the whole pangram could be remained as complete as possible to leave a image (The second pic). Also, because of the contributions of the other group members, we created a such bold and unique work by paper tape, which gives the viewers a strong visual effect and a dynamic feeling (The first pic).