Skullcandy: World Ski & Snowboard Festival

Billboards

Direct Mailer

Microsite

For my GRA550 course, we were to build an ad campaign for a company of our choosing. Stage 1 involved building 2 billboards or bus shelter ads advertising the look and feel of the products they sell. Stage 2 involved building a direct mailer or a magazine pullout and Stage 3 involved building either a microsite or mobile app. for their product or an event.

GRA462 Website Mockups: Taken 2

So these are Web mockups I've designed for the movie Taken 2. I'm a fan of Liam Neeson and I enjoyed the first Taken movie.

Believe it or not, these mockups are going into InDesign and an interactive experience will be built using Indesign. Way cool! Had no idea that was even possible. Was certain this was going to be Flash-based or using HTML/CSS. Definitely looking forward to building this project and discovering the interactive side of InDesign. Definitely going to be a bit more ambitious with this project as I have a much better understanding of InDesign as oppose to Flash or Dreamweaver.

GRA310: Motor Trend Magazine

This was probably one of the longer projects that I've taken on in my time in school, but incredibly fun at the same time. Really got to test my skills in layer masks, retouching and layer styles; very fun stuff! Being able to see high resolution pictures of the new SRT Viper was fantastic, and resulted in the main core of my magazine's content. It was really fun getting to work with all these great high resolution images as well as finding all of the content on the Motor Trend website. The images here are just some examples of the magazine's content. The document is 24 pages in length.

Coat of Arms

The idea behind the coat of arms was essentially like designing a logo that describes you, while keeping it simple and clean. I ultimately wanted to show my Japanese-Canadian heritage; it says a lot, not just about me, but my family and their history as well. It's something that really speaks to me.

Sketches over the holidays

Soldier Illustration

Got the idea from a book titled: Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers. The book is by Marcos Mateu-Mestre

I was going to use this initially as my center piece for my retro poster, but then opted to use a "photomontage" technique instead.

GRA341: Final Art History project: Retro Ad

The outcome of this assignment was to choose an art movement studied during our time in GRA341 (Art Deco, Art Noveau etc) and re-design an ad to make the style relevant, this creating a "modern-retro" poster.

GRA320 Final Project: Book Cover

So after 14 weeks of Photoshop training, this is what it all boiled down to; a book cover showcasing everything taught not only in this (3rd) semester, but the past (2nd) semester as well. That includes: layer masks, blending modes, colour corrections, establishing a visual hierarchy, colour echoing, typography etc etc etc.

The book I ended up choosing was "Tough Guy: My Life on the Edge", written by notorious NHL forward Bob Probert. I really wanted to show the stress/pressure of being one of the toughest fighters in the NHL and eventually leading to Probert's world shattering/collapsing, as he checked into rehab multiple times over his career. The rough texture not represents the playing surface of an ice rink after a bunch of guys have skated on it, but also the ruggedness of Probert's persona and the position he held as a NHL player. The type, I feel, is representative of this also.

GRA361: Final Website for Adventure Tours Ontario

Check it out NOW!

First fully functioning site built in Dreamweaver!
http://matrix.senecac.on.ca/~gnishida/

Photoshop Mockups

Altered to "home" page a bit, so it didn't look too similar to the "adventures" page. I opted to go with a larger image of a young couple camping for the home page image, just to show the demographics of which the project was trying to target.

Ontario Adventure Tourism

This was poster design I did for a class project to promote Ontario Adventure Tourism. Our target audience is 30-40 year olds with some disposable income that they like to spend on things like spas, wineries, or adventure tours. The idea was to design it with sort of an "Art Deco" or "Retro" kind of look to give sort of a style that an older audience might be able to relate to. The car is a 1959 Ford Thunderbird, it was a pretty awesome car back in the day and it was considered a status symbol for richer people. It also has that retro look to it with the tail fins at the back; you just don't see that style with cars anymore.

GRA320: More Photoshop Composite practice

More Photoshop composite practice. Pretty simple ones, took maybe 40-45 mins to complete. These focused more on the blending mode options for Photoshop layers.

GRA320: Software Training: More Composite practice

This assignment, I felt, went much smoother than the last one. Got through it much quicker as well.

Using both Camera RAW and Photoshop for corrections (Levels, Sharpening, Vibrance etc.), Colour Range to change the woman's shirt colour, eye edits, whitening her teeth and selecting the appropriate typeface for the design.

GRA350: Business Folder

 Having never designed a folder before, this assignment proved to interesting for me. There were a lot of guides that needed to be set up before the imagery of the folder can be brought in. A die-line (where the cuts will be made) had to put in place using a pantone colour that wasn't already in the document, a fold line, pocket flaps and slots for holding business cards also had to be included.

Learning about the significance of die-lines was a great learning experience and getting to see how it's done was even better.

GRA361 Web Software: Dreamweaver Starter template project

First website built in what feels like FOREVER! Working with Dreamweaver's starter pages along with basic HTML/CSS.

Certainly won't win any design awards with this site, in fact, if I saw this site on the web, I'd want to gauge my eyes out, but I'm still happy with how smoothly this project went.

Check it out: http://graemethedigitalmediaartist.com/uploads/GRA361/index.html

GRA310: Final Modern Typefamily Brochures

 Feedback from my professor was relatively positive, so only a few minor changes. The knock out type point size was reduce to a size that's more appropriate for body text. The body text examples were nudged to the right to prevent the text from falling into the gutter and I added the name of the type families to each of the brochures.

GRA350: Crowne Plaza Hotel & Resorts: Final Print

With feedback from my professor being generally positive, we managed to discuss a few minor changes to be made. I scaled the logo way down in order to draw more attention to the image and the headline. It also allowed me to make the headline type larger and open up the image size as well. The body text was also moved up in place of where the logo originally was before so that readers see the information right after the image/header.

Finally size: 7.5x9 inches

GRA320: Photoshop Composite

Working with the "Refine Edge" tool in Photoshop. Once you get the hang of it, it becomes a rather powerful tool to use. Also working with photo filters to give it a warmer feeling.

GRA350: Crowne Plaza Hotel Ad: Initial Concepts

For my Production Design course (GRA350), we were tasked with designing an ad for the Crowne Plaza Hotel. The layout is 7x9.5 in, the images had to be converted from JPEGs to TIFFs, we had to convert the colour profiles from RGB to CMYK and apply any colour corrections to the photos.

These are the 3 concepts that I came up with:

Concept #1: Hotel themed design (Interior of the plaza)

Concept #2: People themed design

Concept #3: Hybrid design of the previous two designs; both people and hotel images. This is the one I'll most likely re-tool for final submission. I like the interactivity of this design; the headline: "we've been expecting you..." paired with people who look like the hotel staff ready to serve you.

GRA310: Modern Type Family Brochures: Revised Concepts

Modified the Bodoni brochure cover; I think this design is better. Added a stained paper texture to all the designs. Although these are "modern" typefaces, their history dates back 200-300 years ago. I went with the knock out type throughout all 3 designs because I feel that it makes a design bolder than black text on a white background.

After finally deciding on a cover for the brochure and after eliminating "widows"...