Seed Packet Project: Final Critique

Seed Packet Project: Second Class Critique & Progress

The results of my full-critique.  Most comments were positive about my changes & the design overall.  Some areas for improvement included spreading the faded effect more across the piece, reconsidering the font for "Ol' Dusty's," and rewording my marketing slogans at the bottom.

I've made sure to spread the faded effect more across the packet.  As well, I experimented with a more characteristic type face for Old Dusty's "branding." Lastly, I made sure the slogan at the bottom was less aggressive & more informational.

Seed Packet Project: Drafts for Entire Series

Seed Packet Project: One-on-One Critique & Further Refining

Seed Packet Project: Post-Critique Refining

Seed Packet Project: First Critique

Today was our first critique for our first seed packet fronts.

Here is my draft of my seed packet (on sandstone resume paper) with notes from the critique.  Changes I plan on making include enlarging the label circle area, flipping the "Donald's" for readability, adding some sort of detail to the green banner that runs across the top, adding some sort of banner to the bottom for balance & as a place for advertising/text, and lastly adding some more grungy & worn texture or treatment.

Seed Packet Project: Conceptualization, Direction, and Sketches

For my seed packet project, I am using the Dust Bowl as a backdrop.   The Dust Bowl was a  time of agricultural and weather-related distress; the bare essentials were the only necessities.  I'm designing 3 seed packets for corn, potatoes, and wheat.

Because of the Dust Bowl context, I am pulling most of my design inspirations from the 1930s--colors, common packaging design, even drawing ploys from the advertising of the day for the back.

Here is the first draft of my first seed packet.

Seed Packet Project: Mood Board

Inspirations for my Dust Bowl-esque seed packets.  Pulling a lot from the advertising & packaging of the time, as well as fabrics, patterns, & color schemes.

Seed Packet Project: Mind Mapping

At this point I'm leaning towards a historical Dust Bowl theme, nodding back to 1930s-style advertising and utilizing the struggles of that era to put a creative spin on everyday plants.

Mesh Exercise: Super Mario Mushroom

A practice with the mesh tool in Illustrator.  The shading is certainly not perfect, especially in the mushroom top & dots.  I am pretty satisfied with the head & eyes though.

Pathfinder Exercise: Logo Recreations

Original logos on the left, my Illustrator recreations on the right.

Video Summaries

This weekend's videos touched briefly on the topics of the differences between CMYK (print) color & RGB (screen) color as well as the differences between the stroke of a form & its fill.
The bulk of the videos concentrated on paths in Illustrator and many of the tools that are based off of paths.  Paths are defined as open or closed, open being a line or a spiral (something not enclosed), & closed obviously an enclosed shape such as a rectangle or an ellipse.  The tools included averaging and joining (two techniques to combine paths of objects) as well as the scissors and the knife (two techniques to separate paths of objects).

Video Summaries

Today's videos from Illustrator CS6 Essential Training provided a thorough introduction to the basics of Adobe Illustrator.  Topics covered included guides & grids, artboards, selection tools, and alignment, as well as a simple explanation of vectors.   These tools are all crucial to working on any level project and are really the foundations for all the advanced tricks to learn in future videos.  A few interesting things I learned throughout these videos included the following...

• Artboards were created as a response to disgruntled designers complaining about the inability to create multi-page documents in Illustrator
• Using the Group Selection tool, you can create groups within groups within groups in your image (whoa, group-ception)
• Not only can you resize images proportionally (&, er, not so proportionally), but you can also scale it to a certain section of the image