whippin' up a website real quick

ok, so real quick is relative.

I don't mean for this week to be "talk about my classes" week, but i am seriously taking one of the hardest classes i have ever taken. and on top of that, I am taking it ONLINE. what might this class be you ask? 

Website Development dun dun duuuuuuuuun. 

That's right. I am "learning" xhtml and css coding. Ba-scuze me?! Do you have any idea how much crazy mumbo jumbo goes into making a website?! I am sure some of you do, but if you don't, let me tell you, it is pure insanity. Now I just spent the last 4 hours (not to mention the 2 hours last night and the 2 hours last week) making this:

and this:

Don't believe me? You can go here and see it live.

It may look totally simple, and yes I am fully aware that this is the ugliest website ever, but cut me some slack please, I'm pretty proud. This simple ugly thing took some serious brain power! 

But really, I mean, these two pages look so simple. But I can assure you they are NOT (at least for me) easy to code. So the fact that blogger even can let me type in text, make it a color of my choice, center it, upload pictures, and format my design is just boggling my mind right now. I will never ever again complain about website problems or snub up my nose at a bad website! Those people out there coding those things are straight up genius.

Thank you website-coders. Tonight I commend you. 

My Photography Class

This semester one of my classes is a digital photography class. Now I would consider myself a hobby photographer, but I am learning so much in this course! Each week we have lecture and then do a little photo shoot. Here's a photo I took this week of a glass jar that used to be my grandmother's. I used two continuous lights and actually that backdrop is white but because of the way I set up my lights it made it look that dark charcoal gray. I bracketed this shoot and chose this as the best shot. F 11, shutter speed 1/20 and ISO of 400. It has been so interesting using a meter and learning what all those readings mean an how they work together!

Save the Date: Michelle and Andy!

Thanks everyone for your helpful comments about the poster!  I can't wait to apply some of your suggestions and I'll be sure to show it to you later this week after I turn it in :)

My dear longtime friend Michelle is getting married this summer and she and her fiance asked me to do their save the dates!  I just received mine in the mail so I thought I would show you all the design.  They are so sweet and took such great engagement pictures, I had a hard time choosing which one to use!  Michelle's main color for her wedding is purple, so it worked great with her dress.

Congrats you two!  I'm looking forward to the big day!

Critique Please: Donate Life Poster

Hi design savvy friends :)

I am working on this project for school - the assignment is to design a poster for Donate Life that will prompt people to sign up to be an organ donor. It's a really great cause and I'm excited for this opportunity. Our teacher is having us actually submit our designs as part of a contest, so it's an added motivation :)  Below you will see what I have so far. I found a similar idea for the heart filled with objects, and decided to fill it with the images of organs which can be donated. And I like the idea of "Signing up to be a hero" because just one organ donor could save 8 people's lives, and I think that's a really selfless thing to do. But I'm not sure if the wording on my poster is "catchy" enough.  At the bottom I will be adding the information and call to action but right now it's just filler copy.

So what do you think? Does this design get the message across? What would you do differently? Any thoughts on how it could be more powerful? I would love to hear what any of you think!

It is finished!!!

... my gradient mesh project that is. And remember when I showed you my progress a few days ago? Well, after that I decided to go in a little different direction. Ok, a compleeeetely different direction :)  That's right, I changed my image just days before it was due! But it was becoming clear to me that I was not going to have the patience/time/skill to complete Aimee's photo before tonight. So I purchased this lovely photo from Emmalynne Photography on etsy and gave it a go!

{Isn't it darling?}

And here is my attempt to recreate it in Illustrator:

I could seriously keep working on this for 100 more hours and I am a little embarrassed about how not good the spoon handle looks, but I was up late the last few nights finishing up as it was, and finally I just had to put my mouse down and call it a day :) I'm taking the "it's murky on purpose" approach with this one!  I will be turning this in tonight so that I can be all ready for my grandpa's memorial service with my family tomorrow. It feels good to have one more class crossed off the list! Now, just a final tonight and I'm home freeeeee!

This morning I woke up feeling completely overwhelmed with everything I have to get done by... well tomorrow! I'm really in the thick of it all but I just needed to post and say how thankful I am for this:

That's right folks. This is a picture of my brand new blessing of an iMac. And if you look closely you'll see that this photo was taken as CS5 was uploading. Double hooray! Seriously this new computer could not have come at a better time! I didn't even know how much I would need it, but it allows me to work on my final projects into the wee hours of the morning and I don't have to make the trip to school all the time. I can sit in my pajamas and sip on some tea while I plug away at my "to do" list. I am so excited and thankful that God provided this for me at the exact right time!  Sorry I can't stay and chat longer, but I really do have an overwhelming amount of work to do.  Happy Tuesday :)

School's Hard

Usually I write about how much I love what I am learning and how I really enjoy my program. But I thought that tonight is blog worthy because well, I think I've found the one thing I don't like about design school. 

GRADIENT MESH.

Does anyone familiar with Illustrator hear me on this? I'm sure it has it's purposes, but my instructor is basically having us learn through trial and error on an insanely difficult project. And folks, I'm finding that for me, it's usually error. Now, I admit that we had total freedom to choose the subject of our project, but had I known the difficulties that awaited me down the road, I would have chosen something much simpler. 

So to give you a little crash course on graphics to explain what I am doing, I will tell you that pictures that you take with your camera are made up of pixels. Depending on the resolution of your image, you can only enlarge it a certain amount before compromising the integrity and seeing the individual pixels. But with vector art (images created in Illustrator made up of mathematical equations), you can change the size indefinitely without losing any quality. Simply put.

Our assignment is to take a photo and draw it in a vector program (Illustrator). Now, it's totally an awesome concept if it turns out correctly. But it takes so. much. work. and makes your eyes feel like they are going to explode.  Here's the image I am using:

It's a lovely photo shot by my dearly loved and incredibly talented friend Aimee. 

And here is what I have drawn so far:

Yea. Don't judge. It's HARD. I really hope I am learning something useful with this. But right now it just feels like I'm pouring hours of my life into something that I will (hopefully) never do again. For the sake of my grade I press on. And Aimee, I am sorry if I totally butcher your lovely photo. 

Well, I'm off to give my eyes and mind a break. Goodnight!

I know I've been ranting about how much work I have to do these next two weeks, so I thought I'd do a little update on what I have been working on! The final project in one of my classes was to create a company, logo, business card, information sheets and pocket folder. I decided to make up a stationery company since, well, I love stationery! Below are snapshots of my desktop this afternoon. I did the page layouts in InDesign and all the artwork and logo work in Illustrator. It was so fun to print these pieces out on the big Epson and Nexpress printers to see the final results after class :) Now I just need to finish the copy for my inner sheets and I'll be ready to turn it in on Thursday -can't waaaaait :)

This is the business card. I named the company Paper Doll Stationery and it's growing on me! I wanted the style to be sweet, simple and easy on the eyes.  In real life the "pink" is much more red, but you get the picture...

and this is the pocket folder! Can you imagine it all folded up? The flap on the right wraps around to make it resemble an envelope and the two pockets on the left fold in to display samples of stationery. Then the two red flaps fold up and down to make pocket folders for the insert sheets. Yay! It took me a while to make the die line correct, but I've made lots of "mini versions" on the laser printer and I *think* all the kinks should be worked out...

It is definitely a lot of work and a huge learning curve, but I am still so happy and blessed to be in design school.  I can't believe I get to do this! It was such a step of faith for me to jump in with both feet and sign up for classes full time in August, but it has been so worth it to learn and grow in an area I am really excited about.

School's Cool.

Here's a picture of one of my latest projects in school!  The assignment was to create a bottle (I of course opted for a much cuter Ball jar) and label in Illustrator and use the revolve tool to put them together. I had fun drawing the "lace" for the edges as well as the little strawberry illustrations. I even brought in my similar jar and printed out the label to wrap around it! It was a pretty fun project and I just turned it in last night :)

November 19th Thankful For: Today I'm really thankful for my amazing grandfather, Pops. You may remember his sweet face from when we celebrated his birthday this summer. My whole family adores him with good reason. I am thankful that I got to grow up near him and Oma and that my 25 years of life are so full of sweet memories with my Papa. Last year they moved up to Minnesota and unfortunately the last few months his health hasn't been good. So I am even more thankful that this year we'll all celebrate Thanksgiving up north and that in just one little week, Lord willing, I will get to see my Pops again.

I love Pops' smile in this picture. This is how I always picture his face.

Magazine Cover

I have been doing some pretty fun projects in my classes and learning how to use the different design applications. It's really been a blast so I thought I would start blogging about a few of my projects. I'm hoping to put maybe one up a week or something like that. This assignment was to create a magazine cover. I really love the magazine Real Simple so I based my design off of their style. The photo I took this summer at the fair and I cleaned it up in Photoshop. I did all the font work in Illustrator. For my page layout I used Quark because that is what we were learning in class at the time, although in the future I'll most likely use InDesign.

Real Simple Magazine November 2009 and my Family Life Magazine for class!

It's not quite to the "Real Simple" level yet ;), but I'm happy with how it came out! And, this assignment gave me a greater appreciation for designers who put together these covers every month - it's definitely not as easy as it looks!

**Oops!  Thanks to Lauren for realizing I spelled "ingredients" wrong on my cover!  Guess it's not totally ready to go to press :) ** Officially fixed!

Spread My Wings.

November 4th Thankful For: Today I am feeling thankful for this stage in my life when I'm able to go back to school and learn a new skill that I so enjoy. I may not have the extra cash or the convenient 9-5 schedule like when I was working full time, but I love what I am learning and I love applying my knowledge to expand my creativity. It feels so freeing to grow in this way! What are you thankful for?

Back To School

I know it has been over a week now since I last posted, but I promise it is with good reason. Last Monday I started my latest adventure: Back to School! That's right, I have decided to go back to school to study Graphic Design! I am so excited to be enrolled in classes full time this fall and I already love them all. I will still be updating, but as my journey evolves, so will my blog :) Thanks to all of you for your kind encouragement and support.