Graphic Design Project Final Draft

After reading through the comments I found them very useful. Overall there are 4 major areas I needed to change. First it was the contrast between my pictures and the background. Originally My pictures and my background were in the similar color tone. Nathan suggested that it would be better to make my background and the map background darker in order to make my pictures standout more. Therefore, I changed it by adjusting the shadows/highlights under the “image” -> “adjust options”. I increased the radius of the shadow and highlight as well as the contrast of my background image. Secondly, I needed to standardize my boarders since one of my pictures looked very different. Shanyeung suggested that I crop my ‘meeting quokkas’ picture in order to make all my pictures look the same. As such, I cropped the white boarders in my original photo, then readjusted the boarder into 10 pixels wide, and it look just the same as my other boarders. Thirdly, as Nathan and Sam advised, I slightly adjusted the size of my “family gathering” pictures and my “meeting quokka” photo. Previously these two photos were too small for the readers to clearly see the details of these two photos. Therefore, I simply pressed control + t when selected the layer of the photo and increased the size of it. Lastly, the most important and challenging adjustment came from Nathan’s comment: the map of Australia that I inserted did not fit into the pictures and looked out of place. The boarder did not blend in with the color of the background picture and the green land of the map was not emphasized enough due to the ocean blue boarder. To do this I cropped the map by a few centimetres and added shadows around the boarder. Since earlier I increased the contrast and shadow of my background pictures, adding the shadow of around the map both increased the contrast of the background and made it fit with my background picture more.

Graphic Design Project

For this Graphic Design project, I decided to make a poster based on my trip to Perth in Australia. The reason I pick this topic is that I have been to Australia many times with my family and I enjoyed my trip every time. Therefore, I wanted to include four photos in my poster including the background to represent different aspects of my journey.

For the process of designing my poster, first of all, I selected a photo as my background. However, I encountered some problems which is the picture was not big enough to fit in my poster. Therefore, I watched a YouTube video of how to resize an image without losing its quality. After getting the background done, I placed three photos onto the background and I wanted to add some styles to each layer. I selected one picture, picked the option ‘stroke’ and changed the color to white. Then I clicked ‘new style’ and then clicked on my other two photos, so that they could have the same boarders. Finishing the boarders, I selected my family photo and then used the rectangular tool to draw a label under the picture. I clicked on the text tool and wrote down “family gathering” and adjusted the size of the text. After this step, I went back to move tool and moved the text into my label box. I named the label and duplicated the group so that I could move the rectangular box to other pictures and change the texts. After completing all the photos and the tagging I’ve noticed some blank space on the right half. Therefore, I decided to insert a map of western Australia to fill in the space and make the poster look more colorful. Firstly, I added the map to the second bottom layer so it is beneath my photos by above the background. Then I lowered the opacity to eighty percent in order to let it blend in with the background. After that, I added a twenty-five percent light color blend so the ocean blue on the map fits more onto the sky back ground.

This assignment was a little hard but I went back to watch the tutorials from last week and it helped a lot. Overall, it was a great experience for me to get to practice how to use Photoshop. The visual elements were important to my design. Based on color theories, I used complementary colors with my background and the map so that the colors could contrast with each other. The photos also illustrate highlights of my trip to Perth and the labels give the audiences a clearer direction of what I did, the back ground shows the beautiful scenery of Perth. For the storytelling process, I believe that my photo clearly explained my amazing trip to Perth and showed its purpose with design.

 

 

 

 

Resources:

This is the link of how to resize an image that I used to resize my background.

 

http://www.maphill.com/australia/western-australia/maps/physical-map/

This is the website where I got the map photo from, and the map is included in my poster.

Image Collection-My trip to Australia

 

My topic for this Graphic Design Project would be: My trip to Australia. The reason I pick this topic is that I have been to Australia many times with my family and I enjoyed my trip every time. I had many memories there and through this project I would like to create a poster with all the pictures I took. The photos above are all belong to me and I want to make this poster very unique based on the photoshop skill that I learned last week. Through this poster I would like to show the beautiful views in Australia, my family gathering memories and the great food we’ve had. I am looking forward to starting this project!

The Photoshop Tutorials

Here are all of my finished tutorials.

The Body Shop

 

My topic for today’s post would be the famous makeup brand The Body Shop. Body Shop is a British cosmetics and skin care company founded by Dame Anita Roddick in 1976 in Brighton. It has over 1,500 stores in 47 countries with a range of 400 different products . The reason I chose The Body Shop is that I respect and admire the culture and the concept of this brand for against animal testing and being environmental friendly. Most of the cosmetic companies still test on animals, such as Bobbi Brown, M.A.C and Covergirl. They test their products on animals to see if the products are safe and effective. However, personally, I prefer the brands with anti-animal testing. The Body Shop focuses on seeking and sustaining natural materials and ingredients for their products and also follows the environmental rules to reduce the harm to the planet. It was one of the first companies to make a stand against animal testing in the cosmetics industry. From my point of view, this is amazing because the Body Shop is sending a powerful message to those companies that are still testing on animals. It also continued to fund organizations campaigning to end the cruel suffering of animals through The Body Shop Foundation.

For choosing this topic, I am planning to collect original materials such as photos and information through the official website of The Body shop, flicker images and their Instagram page. This will provide me lots of useful information of The Body Shop such as their latest products and new concepts and standards.

For the unit projects, I would like to interview some of my friends of their opinions of anti-animal testing by The Body shop and make it an audio story. For the video story, I plan to make a video of me and my friends using the products of the Body Shop and explaining the feelings and the difference comparing to other brands, or to find some videos of some famous youtubers testing the products of the Body Shop on Youtube. In other ways, I could also add some visual images to my recordings about the brand and make a great video out of it. For the logo project, I will go on the official website and look for their existing logos, and design my logo for the Body Shop based on my opinion and understanding about this brand.

 

Here are the links that I used for the post:

1. http://www.thebodyshop.com/services/aboutus_history.aspx
2. http://businesscasestudies.co.uk/body-shop/the-body-shop-approach-to-stakeholder-auditing/introduction.html#axzz4J7eZz5zH
3. http://www.thebodyshop.com/content/services/aboutus_values.aspx
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvnSX6qFl6s

 

The first link is the official website of the Body Shop. From this website, I got the information about the history of the Body Shop and its anti-animal testing mission.

The second link is a short introduction of the Body Shop with their mission statements and trading principles and values.

The third link is also the official website of the Body Shop. They explained their values toward the businesses with protecting the planet and providing the most natural products to their customers. It also stated that they support community trade and against animal testing.

The fourth link is a famous youtuber trying on some products from the Body Shop and see how that looks and feels. Personally I think this provides us useful information when purchasing the Body Shop products.

 

The photos down below are the sources I got from Goggle images, these are the posters from The Body Shop for against animal testing. This shows how much they care for the environment and being eco-friendly.