Mirroring Styles

In the Footsteps of Saul Bass

Minimalist Poster Design

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When it comes to movie posters, there is a beauty in a non-cluttered, simple design. One man who had this style down to a T was Saul Bass: the creator of many Interesting posters. In honor of his accomplishments, We were tasked with making a poster of a movie from recent years (2010 or later, to be exact) in his style. 

The first step was defining his style: we narrowed it down to minimal color, two to three key elements, and a paper-cutout style rather than using actual images. (I cheated slightly on this style by using a gradient)

The first element I chose to include from my chosen movie, Super 8, was an alien hand reaching out, shadowed. To make this part, I simply created the outline with the pen tool in illustrator.

Point by point, I got a shape that looked enough like a hand to be recognized as one, but off-model enough to clearly be something not of earth, or alien to us, at least.

Additionally, I used a gradient throughout the poster to mimic the feel of dusk or a heavy fog, giving the poster and unsettling mood to it that mirrors the mood in the film: unsettling and unsure.

A second element I used was the likeness of a train. The train is a key plot point in the movie Super 8, and with the chance to make the train also have resemblance to a reel of film in keeping with the symbolism of the camera, it turned out to work well at the bottom as a kind of lower border. In hindsight, I would have removed the gradient form the train windows and left it a flat white.

The large central camera integrated with the title '8' was the finishing touch to tie all of the elements together, with more foggy gradient in the background to complete the mood. And with this last bit, I had my poster. There are surely things I would change looking back at it, but you can't just continuously correct everything. Sometimes you have to let something fall short to learn from it.

Fancying Text

A name, my name, what a wonderful thing to have.

In the name of uniqueness and custom graphics, I have ventured forth to learn how to take a name, and make it into something special. For this exercise, I used my own name since I am both familiar with it, and a fan of how the amount of letters in my first and last names are equal (as is my middle name, but that's for another time). I took advantage if this equal spacing to link certain letters together.

Unfortunately, at first, the font I had chosen was not of equal width, and the N in my last name took up three times the space I wished it to. Therefore, I had to convert the type to points and edit each little vertex manually. This is relatively easy in illustrator, as it willingly lines up text with itself, allowing the middles of each letter to connect.

The equal spacing and roundness of the letters was aesthetically pleasing when contrasted with the sharp corners, so when I came to this point I stopped and let it be. I wonder what I will do with this in the future.

Value Poster

CONSUMPTION:

Not the eating kind, we're talking about the marketplace, here.

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When you think of What you personally value, what comes to mind? Friends? Family? The rain on a warm spring day? Well, regardless of what you thought of, it's likely you're not quite sure how these values affect you and your choices.

Below is a poster I made in InDesign on ten things that I personally value. The picture may not be quite big enough to read, so I will summarize somewhat in a moment. The things you value and like directly affect what interests you and what you will and will not purchase within the context of the market. This is important for those on a branding team to understand, for if their appeal to the masses can't relate to their own personal values, then it will not sell as it would if it connected the consumer to something they already know they like.

To put this into context, imagine you're in a store looking for a new sports drink to try:

On the shelf are two brands of sports drink: one is in a generic plastic bottle labeled "Superdrink" in red letters, while the other is in a similar bottle, but with a label entitled "Ener-life" and a picture of a woman throwing a frisbee for her dog on it. If you are someone who likes to be active and likes pets, then the second drink will probably appeal more to you, causing you to choose Ener-life over the poor Superdrink whose design team obviously was not well trained.

When I sat down to think about it, I decided that things that were important to me consisted of many creative outlets, technology, comfort, and family. This indicates that someone like me would be more driven to buy things that have been designed to appeal to those values more than one that does not. Many people like vastly many different things, which makes appealing to them difficult if your product does not have a set age group or demographic in mind.

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Miniature Typography Lesson

Can't just babble about marketing, let's throw in some design as well

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To be able to make an aesthetically appealing poster, it was important to learn about typography, and how to properly pair up fonts. A well paired set of fonts can bring desirable contrast to your graphic, and add to it's overall tone. On my poster, I went with a basic Helvetica font for the sake of readability. It's a nice, balanced font with many different weights to work with, creating contrast within itself. To oppose the helvetica, I chose a straight, serifed font similar to Charlemagne, but with small caps instead of all caps. It sits nicely on the heading, and sticks out as it should in a sea of sans-sarif fonts.

It's possible to put more than two fonts in a piece, but you must be careful not to add too many, or the relative contrast of one font is decreased by the presence of contrast everywhere. If the entire piece is scattered with different style, one style can no longer stick out, so it's important to minimize your fonts accordingly. 

Children of the Kern

KERNING:

The art of creating an aesthetically pleasing space between letters in type; creating a balanced feel to fonts which feel squashed or too loose.

Some Examples of Kerning:

My Newfound Maya Toolset

I know you've seen some of my 3D creations on here,

But have any of you been wondering how it works?

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Autodesk Maya is a 3D animation program that is almost like a beefed up shiny kind of Google Sketchup, though it may almost be degrading to Maya to compare the two. Where Sketchup let you create things in a world of rather pointy polygons and an array of built in textures, Maya can take it to the next level: creating smooth shapes and  3D textures that would put many parts of Sketchup to shame. But then again, sketchup isn't an animation program as much as a technical modeling one, so that's where the comparisons stop.

Lets take a look at some of the basic tools Maya has to offer, shall we?

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Lessons From a Cup

One of the more interesting tools I got to discover in Maya was the revolve tool. The revolve takes a curve, and rotates it around the axis to create a full 3D object made from that curve.

The curve, however is a whole other tool on it's own. The curve tool in Maya is similar to the Pen tool in Illustrator or Photoshop. just in 3D. It consists of vectors and vertices that I can edit before or after I create the object. You can see these curves off to the left. (The fist one revolved to create the glass, the other the vase). 

When revolved, however, these curves make a NURBS surface instead of a polygon one. NURBS are created with curves and bends rather than flat polygons, and therefore had to be transformed into polygons in order to texture them as they appear below.

Using a light scorch called the Mental ray, I was able to achieve the reflective glass surface you see on the cup below. It took quite a bit of tweaking to get it to look just right.

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The Lofty Saltshaker

Now, when I say loft, I don't mean like a lofty height or a place to live,. What I'm referring to is the Loft tool. The loft tool's power is to lay a surface over a set of curves like a tent tarp or table cloth. As you can see in the saltshakers to the left and below, the shape it forms is not a natural one, but rather several deformed circles on top of each other (descending in size) lofted to make a surface. These circles were composed of the previously mentioned NURBS curves I talked about in the cups section.

A Dramatic Angle of the shiny Saltshaker

It took some tweaking,

 but I was able to duplicate 

the shape and put salt and a 

cap on the saltshaker to 

get the result seen here.

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The Shiniest Shape

Now, this shape here may seem to be complex and unusual, but that's not what I'm going to talk to you about right now. For now, I will talk to you about how it is lit.

In maya, there are several types of lights available to light your scene with, and they all have different uses. A few I will show you are the spotlight, directional, area, and point lights.

The light you can see on the left here is an example of how the directional light appears in maya. A directional light is a light scorch that comes from everywhere, but all pointing in the same direction. it is a lot like how the sun lights our front lawns, coming in a solid sheet of light form the sky hitting the ground. This is slightly similar to an area light. An area light lights an internal area from no discernible source. I have not yet used one, so I have no pictorial examples of it.

The spotlight is the most obviously named light in the set. It acts as a spotlight or flashlight in all aspects, shining down from a cone to light a specific area. The Point light, on the other hand, is more like a light bulb, radiating light out from a single point, as its name suggests.                                                

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Hammer Time

For a simple tool the hammer is not a simple shape. To get this specific shape to work, I had to take the faces of a rectangular prism and cut them in half in the back (using the cut face tool) and extrude them outwards to create the back wedge.

Extruding brings a face outwards from it's origin, allowing me to extend the front of the hammer face outward. To get the rounded octagon shape of the hammer face, I used the bevel tool to cut off the edges and create new, rounded faces out of them.

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I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Infinite Loops

Ice cream: fun to eat, a little less fun to model. (Not saying it isn't fun, just a tad less so) Creating ice-cream at first seems as simple as making a circle and a cone and putting them together but it's not that easy. No ice-cream scoop is a perfectly smooth sphere, so we had to compensate for reality. To do this we used bump maps, an effects that allows us to texture a surface without editing each point manually.

The slightly pre-deformed ice cream shapes

The Same Bowl with Bump Maps attached.

The final Animation ^

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A Slightly Simple Animation

A reoccurring project we've been working on is creating a bouncing animation with various balls. This time, we did it in Maya.

To create this animation we took videos of the various balls dropping to measure out the heights in the nifty graph editor you can see here to the left, which represents the various ranges of motion the object selected can go through, which is especially nice for visual people.

Then we took note of the frame number that the objects would hit the ground at, and marked them in the timeline you can see in the right image in the bottom bar. Keyframes are a marker in an animation timeline that defines an object to be in a certain place or position at that time. The program's job is to fill in the in-between frames. I especially like these kinds of programs since they can save you the time of drawing every frame, though sometimes I still feel that drawing frame by frame can be easier for some things. The finished animation is below, and you can see our tennis ball was rather deflated at the time of shooting, and doesn't have as much altitude as you might expect form one.

Postcards From Nowhere

Seasons greetings!

(Whatever season it may be)

At the time of posting, it's about that time of year that people go about sending cards to each other to let them know what they're missing out on. So, it only seemed fitting that I work on some postcards to get some new Photoshop skills under my belt! Granted, I didn't get too much into the Christmas spirit at the time, so I stated off with a postcard about my favorite season: Fall!

The skill I demonstrate with this simple card is the use of clipping masks!

As you can see, there a nice, autumn-themed images nestled in the text. Now, how does one do this? Clipping masks! A clipping mask is an effect that allows me to frame one image within the boundaries of another. For example: framing the image of the apples in the letter A. (because apples starts with A, ehehehehe)

I used some glow and stroke effects on the text to make them have more 'POP' in the image.


Next, there was a call to make a personal postcard for ourselves! I may not be a destination, but that didn't stop me from trying to represent myself as well as possible in the card! Now, image wise, I tried to incorporate as much of my original work as possible. So, the last four letters of my name have pictures I created all by myself. (The first I have incorporated my favorite bird, the potoo bird). For the main back image, I found a shining sky and clouds background, to represent my head being 'in the clouds', and reaching for 'sky high'. To contrast it, I placed a storm in the thought bubble of the majestic Jackalope. (Kind of like a brainstorm, right?)

So, To create a nice balance of bright, shining colors, I delayered the clouds on top of themselves, and applied a screen to the top layer. To add even more shine, I put a light yellow, transparent ray of light over the majority of the image These effects gave the whole image a surreal, dreamy feel to it. The Jackalope only seems to add to the fantastical feeling.

And for any who are curious as to what are in those letters, they are a variety of creatures that I have drawn within the last year. All of the full images can be found on my
Deviantart account, as linked above.

The pinnacle of this venture, the icing on the cake, perhaps, was an independent card, made with no tutorial (though, in the model of another) over a theme or topic of my choice. Since I was, again, not in a christmas mood at the time, I went with the theme of sugary sweets of the colorful, fruity kind. (Maybe I was just hungry) To start, I had to extract the two gummy bears, one having it's ear overlapped. To fix the chunk of ear missing, I made a bite out of it.

one difficulty I encountered was the picture of the candy (Clipping mask+stroke), as it looked too powdery and light. One way I fixed with was to do something similar to what I did to the sky background on my personal card: I made a duplicate of the layer, but instead of a lightening screen, I gave it an overlay filter t make the colors more vibrant and bring out the contrast to a higher degree. Now, doesn't that big lollipop in the back just make you hungry? The degree of quality gets me every time.

Lastly, to make things pop, everything has it's own little drop shadow: giving the picture a sense of depth and letting each element separate from being lost in all the details.

Shadow Time

Recently, we attempted a shadow tutorial for Photoshop. We were to extract an image, remove the pixel fringe, then create a shadow for it on a landscape that it was not originally matched to. So, I chose a chipmunk as my shadow model. With a mirrored and skewed image of the chipmunk overlaid behind, I tweaked it's shadow to match the background.

The trick? Gradient overlay! How did that work? We'll get there in a moment! If we take it one task at a time, then we truly start by removing the chipmunk from it's habitat. Using the refine radius tool (Which is good at selecting fur and thin parts of a selection) I got a relatively clean, transparent clip

 Now for that tricky overlay! If we take the chipmunk, copy him, and skew him off to the side, it looks more like a mirror than a shadow, doesn't it? But, here's where the gradient overlay come sin to play!

An overlay layers a color, gradient, or image over a layer. So, if the shadow chipmunk is a layer, I can layer a black to BG gradient over it, and the result is...

A Shadow!