Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Poster Essay (Final Fantasy)

I chose to do my presentation on Final Fantasy because it is the series that first inspired my love of gaming and introduced me to my favorite genre of games therein, RPGs. Since its debut to the gaming world in 1987, the series has been ticking off new entries to the series like hands on a clock. I chose all of my design elements out of my love for symmetry and repetition while also trying to add subtle differences to each side. I made the face of the clock glow to hopefully try and draw the viewers eye there first, though without a small border between the black text and the dark blue glow it looks a little blurry. I tried to use the pendulum to bring the viewers eye to the text inside the interior of the clock, but I could have done a better job drawing them first to the text on the left rather than the text on the right. I broke up the blocks of text with the signature crystals that the FF series is so heavily focused on. Each represents one of the games that came out during that time. I wish I could have added a few more elements to the bare parts of the clock to help trim off a bit of the excessive negative space, but I'm overall very happy with the way the whole thing turned out.

Un-dumped Thumbnails

Thumb nails I've kept in my journal but never scanned until now.

Ordered newest to oldest.

These three were for the history poster.


These were for the stamp design.



And these were for the typography project.



Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Stamp Inspiration

Some of my favorite stamp designs I found while digging through the internet. All credit goes to their original owners. In all honesty, I don't think all of these stamps are officially licensed or endorsed by the United States Postal Service. I'll leave it up to the imagination to decide which.

Typography Essay

The essay about my aforementioned Frankenstein design.

   In my piece I decided to use emphasis as a sort of base for all of the other design elements to rest on top of but I kept it far enough off the bottom of the design to both allow room for flow to seep through and so as not to upset the balance of the central corners. Keeping the largest and most eye drawing of the elements off of the absolute bottom of the design also helped me keep the design from being too bottom heavy, as I had always intended to rest balance on top of emphasis. I wanted to use the A in balance as the absolute center (but not the focal point) of the piece, which would allow it to equally spread itself inside the center box. I wanted to connect contrast to balance but also have another design element on the other side, tipping the scale. I decided to make contrast the "lighter" element even though it was more integral to the objective of the piece because it brought the viewer's eye back up to the top left corner before their eyes were drawn back down the piece through alignment and repetition towards flow. Alignment was placed as it was to keep the two upper right corners from being completely bare, but was also was hopefully made small enough to leave a decent bit of negative space. Repetition took control of the rest of the negative space above balance and served as to "weigh down" the opposite side of the balance. From there, flow guides the eye through the base of emphasis and gradually expands towards the end to fill in the bottom left third.

    I made emphasis as big and bold as I could to…well emphasize it. It takes up the most space in the design and the thickest word of the bunch. On top of the H in emphasis I separated the A from balance to make a sort of fulcrum between the two sides of the word. It pretty literally acted like a balance, with other design elements resting on top of it to tip the scales. I made contrast a circle balanced on the tip of the A with each side letter being contrasted with each other, but with the opposite sides of the circle being the same value to keep it balanced with itself. Repetition is repeated in an inwardly spiraling design, getting smaller and smaller to make the design thicker and thicker. This along with alignment, which fits itself at a right angle into the repetition square pushes the balance scale downwards. Flow is in cursive and repeats itself, at first small, then making itself thicker and thicker as it has more space to maneuver, representing water dripping from the edge of balance.

Typography Final

And taking bits and pieces from those drafts I came up with this unholy Frankenstein monster of a design. Be gentle.