I want to take some time to reflect on my graphic design journey so far. I am now working on my final projects and my evaluation is coming soon. On April 18th to be exact.

We have worked on projects from a children's book, packages, restaurant brandings to a beer brand and packaging. I have found each and every project challenging and enjoyable. Truth be told, some projects were more enjoyable than others.

The project that I enjoyed the most was the children's book. I enjoyed every aspect of it from writing the story to illustrating the story. My story is about a little girl named Vallery who won't eat her vegetables and her responsible, older sister is always telling her to eat her vegtables. Through nightmares and being scared, Vallery finally tries vegetables and ends up liking them. I'm not much of a writer but I think that illustration also plays a big part in telling a story. I have loved illustration since I could pick up a pencil. I loved my children's books even before I learned my ABC's, so the opportunity to create my own book was appealing. As eager as I was to create my own book, I quickly learned how difficult it can be. It definitely helps you to appreciate the books that you read as a child, and not just see novels on a higher level. The difficult thing in creating a book is first of all to write the story. From there, you have to create a style that depicts the mood of your story and illustrate it in a way that conveys the story visually. The whole process of mocking up a book was difficult but fun.

Another project that I enjoyed was the beer branding. We had to create our own beer name and create a label for it. I created a beer called King Beer. I decided to keep it clean and simple by using a two colour solution: black and white. Black and white is not only simple and classy, but it's the maximum contrast you can get. By keeping the colour palette simple, I allowed myself to do some ornamental work on the label. I thought this suited the name 'KING.' I have a crown as well as finer detailed designs that frame the label. I enjoyed the challenge of creating my own label and coming up with a series design of the label, package and poster. I don't drink alcohol, so researching other beers and learning about label requirements was new to me. I had to design for a certain demographic- but on a topic that I had no experience in. I am proud of the work I did and the brand I created.

For my illustration class we had to create a series of five patterns. My topic was flowers. I created some colourful and some simple designs. No matter what the style was, the flower design was carried throughout the swatches. The next step in this project is to create a swatch book. I am enjoying the research and thought process behind it. It takes me back to the challenge of creating the children's book, in terms of managing and organizing layouts.

Other projects that we have worked on was a restaurant logo and menu. The logo design was one of my hardest challenges. I picked the name 'Elite' and that made it difficult for me to really envision what a logo would look like. I got so many opinions on what people thought of when they heard the restaurant name, and that gave me an overflow of information that confused me. I am still in the process of editing the logo to suit my liking. I had to create a menu for the logo. The challenge with that was selecting the food that would go with the type of restaurant. The other challenge was the layout of the menu itself, but it was useful because I got to use InDesign more. As teachers have told us through the year... if you're to know a program inside out, it should be InDesign. I find that to be true with each project. It's helpful with layouts but I am still adjusting to properly using the program.

Through all of the projects that we have done, I have enjoyed all of them. All of them have given me a challenge. Some of them I enjoyed more than others but I can't complain about anything that challenges me as a designer. My first evaluation went well but I was told to focus on one element in my design. I have tried to do that this year and tried to keep my work simple. My next step is to open up a little bit more and feel completely comfortable in asking questions and not being afraid of critiques.

Starbucks Logo

Fairly recent news to hit the design world was the changing of the Starbucks logo. What I didn’t know was that before the recent redesigned logo, there were a redesigns of previous ones.


Before analyzing the new logo, I wanted to look at the history of the brand and logo. The logo is made up of the siren, the rings and the text. The first noticeable difference in the first logo was the image of the siren. The siren has a double tail and went from a progression of a lot of lines in the drawing, to a simplification in the line work. The colour of the circle surrounding the image is brown and white. The name of the logo is also different. The name says” STARBUCKS COFFEE-TEA-SPICES. The original owners didn’t sell espresso drinks like they do today. The majority of products were coffee, tea and spices, as the name says.


The next edition of the logo is noticeably different. First noticeable difference is that the brown has now changed to green. The products offered in the previous logo are gone and now reads STARBUCKS COFFEE. Stars on both sides of the logo now replace the dot separators in between the words in the previous logo. The image of the siren is also noticeably different. The ring surrounding the image is now black. The inclusion of the black ring helps to establish the siren as a separate element from the outer title ring. The siren image has now changed to a cleaner lined drawing of the logo. The breasts are now covered (but the belly button is still visible) and the image is created with evenly weighted lines in the tails and hair.



The next logo's siren image has been cropped. Only the sides of the tail are now visible. My critique for this is that without knowing the history of the logo, you wouldn’t know what the sides are.  The double triangular shapes on the ends of the tail are hard to figure out when you don’t know from the old logo that it’s the ends of the tails. 


The progression of the Starbucks logo has come a long way. The new logo has taken out the rings with the text and now simply features the siren as the star. I liked the previous logo more than the new redesign. The way the green text ring fit around a black circle I feel helped to visually separate the elements in the design, while at the same time unified the design by enclosing them in the same repeated circular shape. Although everyone recognizes the siren as the Starbucks logo, even without the text, I think the name added a nicer look. It helped to unify the design and did not compete, but complemented the siren.

Inspiration

Art and design is about creating. Sometimes we come up with our own ideas and sometimes we are inspired by others. Ninety-nine percent of the time, anything we dream up has already been done. It has been done either better or worse than our own attempts. Sometimes these inspirations come to us intentionally because we go looking for them. As creative beings we seek inspiration. We look to what other designers and artists are doing to inspire our own work. We look at other work fields, at the media, at fashion and any other fields to inspire us. That is the beauty of creativity. It transcends all avenues and can creep up in any part of our lives.

I'm writing this blog because I have been looking and researching different forms of art and seeing photographs, paintings and drawings that remind me of one piece of art I may have seen, or one that I created myself.

I first created a hand drawn image of this and used pencil crayons to colour in the different rings. It was a long process, but I enjoyed  the meticulous work of drawing each circle and colouring in each ring with the appropriate colour. The purpose was o create an image out of circles while giving the whole image a look of depth with the colours of the bubbles. I later moved on to creating the same image on the computer. The process was also challenging. One might think it was easier because the computer makes things faster, but truthfully, it took about the same amount of time to create the computerized version as the hand drawn version did.

To tie in my point about being inspired by others, whether we sought that inspiration or not, I found the following image.

This portrait instantly reminded me of the colourful bubble portrait that I had previously made. Looking at the far picture from far away, one might be unsure how the image was created. This portrait was created by Zac Freeman was created with random little objects like buttons and little objects ppearing to be stuck meaninglessly- but from a distance is recognizable as a face.

I was interested in the fact that my bubble portrait and this portrait reminded me of each other. They weren't created using the same method but they still resemble one another in the circular elements coming together to create a whole image. This just goes to show my earlier point about being inspired by others and how mostly everything we create has already been done before in some way.