Illustrator Tutorial Videos

I thought that these videos were very nice introductory videos that demonstrated the capabilities of Adobe Illustrator. I think that the ability to make something scale to any size you want without sacrificing any detail at all is incredible and will prove to be very useful. If I had a dollar for every time I needed such a feature, i'd be a millionaire. Illustrator having some drawing tools to create your own custom graphics, eliminating the need to have Photoshop open at the same time, is also a very useful tool.

In the second video, they mentioned that due to the fact that pretty much everything in Illustrator is made with vectors, the things you make in Illustrator can be repurposed for anything, gives it edge over Photoshop in versatility. It also allows you to easily select your artist's intent, which can help us in our projects, and the ability to adjust advanced settings for your final product, like print bleed, raster mode, and color mode for websites. Overall, I think I'm going to like Illustrator, as opposed to InDesign, which I really disliked, especially when we were introduced to it.

Peer Review: Quintin Harris and Demarco Sanchez's Brochures

Quintin Harris' Brochure

Quintin's brochure was very impressive. I liked working with him because even though restaurant brochures are very similar in design and presentation, our brochures turned out pretty different and we each took our own approaches on them. The way he used pictures of the food as a backdrop for the text was a simple yet effective way to force the reader to see them. He also used a menu, something I personally didn't do. My only complaint with his brochure is the difficulty with reading any text on this brochure located over white bread.

Demarco Sanchez's Brochure

Demarco's brochure is an example of work that could have been made much better with some more time. The layout was simple yet effective, with text and a picture under it. The text got the message and information across effortlessly and efficiently. However, there were a lot of things that didn't turn out as well as they could have with more time. For example, a pure black background is not easy on the eyes, when he could have made a backdrop of his own. The pictures were also not cropped properly. The outside pages of the brochure were also unfinished, and the dark red text is quite hard to read. I thought that as far as an informative brochure goes, it was good enough in my book.

Interactive Brochure Video Review

The video was quite interesting. It highlighted all the possibilities of an interactive brochure in Visual Design CS5. Some of the things that stood out to me were the animations and the interactive images. The animations, while it is easy to overdo them, can really add to the flashiness of any brochure. The interactive images, through the use of states and buttons used to navigate through said states. You could get creative by using both of these things in conjunction with one another, to make the brochure less stoic and unimpressive, looking like something you could have easily printed out with the same effect. It also seems streamlined in general, not having to use timelines like with Photoshop animations, and making the buttons very simple to use by assigning commands to them.

Brochure Review

Purpose of the Brochure

This brochure is a brochure for Invisalign Teen. This is a product that does the same thing as braces, while being almost completely invisible. The brochure shows off the product, what it offers, and what are the benefits of having it/why it's better to have it than typical braces.

Graphics

The brochure shows some pictures of the product and people using it. It has a very summer, bright feel to it, using bright colors and showing pictures of people in a warm environment. I figure this is because summer is a time where people go out a lot, and the brochure is trying to get across that this product is the best because nobody can tell that you're actually wearing braces.

Design Principles

I think it is clear what the creators of this brochure wanted to get across. They wanted to show off the product and its benefits for a younger audience, instead of focusing on all the scientific stuff that most people my age wouldn't care about. There's also a lack of in your face design elements, instead using just a few pictures and a rocky background that is somehow calming, with bright colors all the way through to enhance the happy, bright mood it wants to get across.

Cost of Printing

This brochure seems a bit more high budget than others, being almost entirely in color, which would cost money to print, and being printed on a glossy, high quality paper.

Sustainable Design Principles

I don't see anything on the brochure that mentions anything about being recyclable. However, I guess it doesn't do a good job at sustainable design, being that it's made out of a thick paper, and I have no idea if it is recyclable or not. I think a better job could have been done here, perhaps with a small note on the back of the brochure saying that it has been printed on recyclable paper.

Content

The brochure is arranged simply enough. When fully open, the 3 pages you're looking at are lined up next too each other, each page showing a different benefit of Invisalign teen. The benefits are simple enough and everything is easy to read, save for the first page. While I can easily read it, others may not be able to. However, what is written is convincing enough and put in a good enough looking brochure that it could make anyone want the product. In my opinion, that makes it a successful brochure.

Peer Review: Demarco Sanchez's Portfolio

 http://www.ithstech.com/MVP/pd4portfolios/Demarco%20Sanches%20Portfolio%20Copy.pdf

Demarco's Portfolio is arranged quite well. When you open it up, it has a nice, abstract welcome page. However, this welcome page is something that I saw in a lot of other portfolios during the presentations, using the same design with the colored, see-through rectangles. The welcome page could also do with a name on it, and "Visual Design Portfolio" written on it, rather than simply "Portfolio."

Onto the portfolio itself, it has a color scheme different from the default, which I thought was a nice touch. The portfolio is arranged in a very simple way; Labs, Narrations, and Projects. This makes it easy to get where you want without having to look into it. In each folder, is a sub folder, making things even more organized and easy to find. However, the portfolio feels rather incomplete, in that there aren't many labs in the lab folder, the narration folder is empty, and the project folder only has 2 projects in it, out of the 4 that we did. A narration folder at all seems rather redundant and should have been deleted, as every project and lab has a narration explaining the project/lab under it, something many portfolio makers didn't get to finish.

All of this is under a header, which shows the logo, name of the portfolio, and some simple contact information. The logo, however, is a reused welcome page picture, and it would make the portfolio look more professional if it was a different image. The name of this portfolio is simply "Portfolio" so again, your name would have made the portfolio better. Ultimately, the portfolio was arranged very well and it was definitely one of the easier ones to follow. The main problem is that it feels a little rushed/unfinished, but it's still very good and has a good layout. If I had to rate it out of 10, I would give it a 7.

Typing on Paths

This is what I ended up with when I started working with typing on paths. First, I had to make a straight line, and then select the Type on a Path tool in order to write on it. That is a very basic and somewhat useless use. However, it gets a little more interesting after that. You can create curves using the line tool by dragging around its anchor points, which ended up resulting in what looked like a cartoonish open smile. To further this, I made the text inside it white and the resulting shape black. To add to the smile, I made two circles as eyes, and it turned out pretty well.

This showed me the possibilities that this can be used in our advertisement. We can make text less boring  by not having a bunch of straight text everywhere. Curvy text, if used correctly, can be appealing to the eye. The shapes can also add text to the graphics in our advertisement, making it more memorable.

What drives me, as a consumer, to buy certain things

I am not a huge brand name buyer, however, it is something that I take into consideration. For example, I love to buy jeans and shirts whenever we go to the outlets. If we're going to go shop for jeans, the first thing I think about is prices. I will almost always go to say, Tommy Hilfiger, rather than Levi's, simply because of the price difference. But if two stores have the same prices, I'm going to go with the more popular company's product. When it comes to shirts, I also do the same, but I also go for brand names first, such as Calvin Klein because they're easily recognizable brands with well made products.
I also love to buy video games. I'm not a big tech guy but when I buy video games, popularity, advertisements, and the company that created the game are taken into consideration very heavily. So advertisements do play a big part, and some sort of sale will make me run over as soon as possible. Generally, it's all about popularity and advertising. I will also buy games that aren't as popular but if it's something immensely famous then I will almost always go out and buy. Lasting value is another big thing when shopping, be it for clothes or games.