I did a lot of work in Illustrator for Matt’s NMD 104 class but this was one piece that I particularly enjoyed. The task was to create a CD cover for a particular band. I chose the Gorillaz and although they don’t behave or appear anamalistic, their musical genre could be thought of as having similar qualities. It was for this reason that I chose to incorporate the mean-looking face of a primate on the cover. By using a horor-themed font and blood-red coloring I hoped to accentuate the fear one might feel when confronted by such an animal in the daylight or otherwise. The stark contrast of the face and the inky background give the CD cover even more of a shaky feel and drive to promote the band as tough and serious about their work.

This project was one of my first experiences with Photoshop and although it was incredibly infuriating at times, I felt very accomplished at the end. I don’t remember how I came up with the idea to do a Mexican-themed project for our mock website assignment but I do remember feeling a stroke of genius – the name just fits too well. I went with dark, spicy colors to aid the Southern vibe this site demands. I accented these darker colors with some bright yellow to make things stand out. I felt like the font choice really helped as well. Also, if you read the descriptions of the food items you may get a sense for the fun I managed to have building an approach for this site. I now prefer to do most of my designs in Illustrator, although the lessons I first learned here in Photoshop carried over and helped me a lot.

For NMD 295, Matt had us do a vector portrait. I had seen a few of these done before and they all looked fantastic so I assumed that it wasn’t difficult… Of course, I was horribly wrong. I had used Illustrator a few times before, although my novice with the pen tool shows up in this portrait. We only had one hour to do the entire assignment and I had to go a tiny bit over to add detail to the hair and beard. The hardest part, for me anyway, was moving on when something didn’t look perfect. Overall I really enjoyed the project and will be doing a few more of these later in the year.