3rd Annual Toronto Shakespeare Festival: King Lear

For our second to last project in GRA210, we were tasked with designing a poster for the 3rd Annual Toronto Shakespeare festival.

You're allowed to choose any of William Shakespeare's plays; I chose "King Lear", simply because everyone else chose either Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet. Just trying to mix things up a bit.

So the following are the 3 concepts I came up with for "King Lear". My prof and I both agreed that the last one is the most effective design, simply because the crown is an actual creation as oppose to just finding an image online and pasting it into the poster. I got the idea for the crown from this tutorial. I didn't want to use the 3D effect in Illustrator, simply because it would cause my own machine to lag. Tutorial: http://vector.tutsplus.com/tutorials/illustration/create-a-royal-crown-using-adobe-illustrator-cs5/

GRA270 The Design Process: Minimalist Poster concepts

For this assignment, we were asked to design posters for 5 different TV shows/Movies/Video Games/Book/Song using the "minimalist" technique. Not sure if I got the technique down right, but these are my initial concepts; I feel that the Storage Wars, The A-Team and Fast Five are the 3 strong ones here. Will get feed back from my professor on Thursday.

GRA241: Remake Assignment: The Birth of Venus

So instead of doing the Linocut project, our prof decided to give us another project instead. For this project, you have to take a famous piece of artwork and remake it with your own style. I chose 'The Birth of Venus' by Sandro Botticelli. I remade the famous piece into a cartoon. He are the concepts:

The first concept, I wanted to focus on just the girl. Instead of having the other woman with the dress ready to cover her up, I decided to replace her with two birds carrying a piece of cloth.

This one is mainly focusing on the two girls. I'm not sure if I'll end up with enough time to remake all four people plus colour it.

GRA270 The Design Process: The Black Squares

This seems to be a universal design project. I've done this assignment in Art Fundamentals, Digital Media Arts and now Graphic Design.

I can see why it's such a popular assignment: it's a very challenging one, because you only have 4 black squares to communicate a word/idea. Being able to interpret the word and design/layout the 4 black squares in an abstract manner to communicate these words, is a very tough design challenge and really serves as a good indication of our thought process regarding anything we do in design.

Having done this project for the third time now, I can tell that this project doesn't really get any easier the more times you do it. I find that I'm getting ideas out onto the paper faster, but that doesn't mean that those ideas are going to be successful.

Here are my solutions to these problems:

GRA230: Toronto Townhouse B&B Promo Card

For Typography II, we had to design a promotional card for a B&B. For the type sizes and leading, we had to follow the Fibonacci sequence. We had to organize the information/body copy to assist in making an effective design.

 I like the gold on black colour palette. I find it very bold and appealing. Typefaces used: Century, Gill Sans and Franklin Gothic.

Rough copy

Final Copy

GRA210: ROM Poster Final Concept

Making the masks bigger made all the difference in making the design of this poster work. The masks have such unique shapes/curves to them and they're painted with unique patterns and bold colours, they really stand out even if they weren't scaled up in size. but doing so makes the poster more bold and eye-catching. Found masks that were roughly the same size, height wise, so the composition will looked more balanced and the colours for the type and the border were all sampled from the masks.

Cartoon Character Concepts

GRA210: ROM Exhibit Posters - Rough Concepts

I really like the idea of doing a sort of panoramic image for the masks. I feel that it adds a sense of depth and clever design in the poster.

SCA266: Alphabetic Landscape Poster

For one of our last assignments in SCA266 (Photography), we had to photograph objects that looked like the letters of the alphabet. The theme for our poster was "around the house". So that included household objects, furniture (indoor or outdoor), the back yard or the front yard. I like the contrast of the black and white vs. colour in the photographs, I also like the contrast of where the objects were found. (Half were found inside, half were found outside). Very fun, yet challenging project.