BFA Student Newspaper Redesign

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Rascus
on December 3, 2009
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20091028chrons

At the begin­ning of the school year, in my Graphic Arts class, one of the things that was planned for us to accom­plish was a redesign of our stu­dent news­pa­per The Chron­i­cle. I was very excited about this, since it deliv­ers good con­tent, but with a lousy layout and typog­ra­phy. I couldn’t wait to get started. It was the first big project of the year, and with only 2 people in class, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. We started brain­storm­ing var­i­ous changes we could make, cri­tiquing pre­vi­ous issues, and learn­ing a lot about news­pa­per layout and design at the same time. Work­ing on The Chron­i­cle entailed lots of back-and-forth between the Jour­nal­ism class (who writes and pub­lishes it) and us to figure out if we were meet­ing their needs. Near the end of the process, it was really coming down to the wire with delays in con­tent and printer issues, but me man­aged to get it out on time. The reac­tion was very pos­i­tive from the stu­dent body. Next issue, we’ll try to make the online ver­sion in color!

Here is an older issue that you can com­pare to (links to PDF: 676KB)Previous Issue

This one has been on hold for a while, due to tech­ni­cal issues with get­ting the page layout of PDF ver­sion cor­rected. It came out on Octo­ber 28th, but hasn’t been fixed till recently.

Click here to down­load PDF (1.9MB), or use my local mirror.

Letterforms in the Environment

Published
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Rascus
on November 19, 2009
in Uncategorized
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Poster Layouts

For this assign­ment, we had to go around town and find, well, let­ter­forms in the envi­ron­ment. It’s harder then it looks, and requires look­ing at things in a dif­fer­ent way then normal. It orig­i­nally had a blank back­ground, but our teacher sug­gested an old paper tex­ture might look better.

Link to high-​resolution PDF (11MB).

GA 2 Landscapes

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Rascus
on November 5, 2009
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One of our Graphic Arts 2 assign­ments was to take 12 land­scape photos that exhibit shape. Gave me a chance to get out with a nice camera and lens again. Kan­dern is so nice in the autumn…

Gallery (uploaded in full resolution)

Sophomore Class Field Trip

Published
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Rascus
on October 10, 2009
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Last Friday, I went on my sopho­more class field trip to the Struthof Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camp in France. It was pretty cool, and a great place to take pic­tures. The camp is split up into three parts. The first part is the main building/museum, with exhibits and movies show­ing. The second part is the actual camp itself, with bar­racks, a scaf­fold, and the crematorium.

The bar­racks has been turned into an exhi­bi­tion of life in the camps, with draw­ings, pic­tures, and arti­facts on dis­play. In the cre­ma­to­rium, we weren’t allowed to take pic­tures, but there was an oven, a few prison cells, and an exe­cu­tion room.

After that, we went down the hill a ways and came to the gas cham­ber. It was a small build­ing with a smoke stack coming out of the side, fairly non-​discreet. Inside, it only had about three rooms, two of them with stor­age freez­ers to hold bodies and body parts for experimentation.

It was a very sober­ing, yet good experience.

See the pic­tures here (all pic­tures are full res­o­lu­tion 3008x2000px.).

Graphic Arts 2: First Assignment

Published
by
Rascus
on September 2, 2009
in Design
. 3 Comments

I’m back!

After a long period of inac­tiv­ity, I finally have some­thing new to show!

In my Graphic Arts 2 class, our first assign­ment was to draw on paper a pic­ture, or col­lec­tion of pic­tures that rep­re­sented us per­son­ally, then dig­i­tize it with Adobe Pho­to­shop or Illus­tra­tor. My draw­ing was a map of the world, with a line trac­ing through the var­i­ous places we have lived (see list here).

Mission MapThe point of the assign­ment was to warm up our Pho­to­shop (or in my case, Illus­tra­tor) skills.

I’ll soon post pic­tures of my com­pleted GA1 port­fo­lio from last year.

BFA’s Got Talent

Published
by
Rascus
on June 4, 2009
in Design
. 2 Comments

Last month, BFA had a talent show called “BFA’s Got Talent”, a play on the British TV show “Britain’s Got Talent.” There were a lot of amaz­ing acts, both musi­cal, and the­atri­cal. It was also the first time I had taken school pic­tures for a while. It was nice to do that again.

I would’ve uploaded the pic­tures sooner, but my gallery was having trou­ble. But they’re up now. Click here to go there.

Personal Flag

Published
by
Rascus
on May 5, 2009
in Design
. 4 Comments

Flag Small

Before start­ing on this project, Mr. Bryan showed us a few books with flags and explained the ele­ments that make up a good flag design, like not plac­ing design ele­ments on the right side so that fray­ing won’t ruin the mean­ing of the flag.

This is my per­sonal flag cre­ated in Graphic Arts. It took me only about half-​hour to come up with the design.

Extract from explanation:

To begin, the flag’s pro­por­tions are 16:10, which is the stan­dard for com­puter widescreen mon­i­tors, which shows my inter­est in tech­nol­ogy and is also an approx­i­mate to the Golden Rec­tan­gle. The blue rec­tan­gle in the middle is 2.39:1, which is the stan­dard for an anamor­phic pic­ture in cinema. The red stripes, white stars on blue rep­re­sents the flag of the United States and France, two coun­tries that I par­tially asso­ciate with. The stars are in the arrange­ment of the con­stel­la­tion Orion, one of the more rec­og­niz­able con­stel­la­tions in the north­ern night sky, which rep­re­sents my love for ama­teur astron­omy.
The seven-​pointed stars are a symbol of per­fec­tion in Chris­t­ian religions.

Letter Design

Published
by
Rascus
on April 30, 2009
in Design
. 4 Comments

Our assign­ment was to create some­thing with a letter from our ini­tials in Illus­tra­tor. There had to be at least 5 dif­fer­ent type­faces used and only one color. I decided on the letter L since it seemed the most flex­i­ble letter.

Over Spring Break I saw a movie on YouTube show­ing a hexa­pod robot mod­eled after an ant (See here: A-Pod). Though I might make a model of that. It turned out to be a bit more dif­fi­cult to make.

Letter Scorpion

It ended up being more of a robot scor­pion thing. I wish I could’ve had more con­trol over the out­lines to give it a better sense of depth.

Now I have to finish my per­sonal flag…

Ambigram

Published
by
Rascus
on April 2, 2009
in Design
. 3 Comments

An ambi­gram, also some­times known as an inver­sion, is a typo­graph­i­cal design that spells out one or more words not only in its form as pre­sented, but also from another view point, direc­tion or ori­en­ta­tion. The words spelled out in the other view point, direc­tion or ori­en­ta­tion may be the same or dif­fer­ent from the orig­i­nal words.

-Wikipedia

One of my first real assign­ments for my Graphic Design class was to create an ambi­gram out of my name. It tok me a while to figure out what I was going to do, but then it hit me: I could do my name in hex code! I looked around for a hex code trans­la­tor and found this site, which offers hex code and a lot more! It took a lot of sketch­ing and help from Mr. Bryan to get the forms just right. I’m pleased with the over­all result.

ambigrams

Noah Leigh (Note: the “N” and “L” are in uppercase)

4E 6F 61 68   4C 65 69 67 68

I’ll have more assign­ments to post later.

New Site

Published
by
Rascus
on January 14, 2009
in Uncategorized
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Yay! I got my new site design up! My Dad and I crunched during the last few days of Christ­mas break since all our time before was occu­pied with prepa­ra­tions for my little sister’s 13th birth­day. I wanted to impli­ment sIFR in the post titles, but I couldn’t get them to style cor­rectly, so it’s scrapped until I can figure it out.

The Gallery has not been updated how­ever, and I don’t when that might happen con­sid­er­ing it’s a com­pletely dif­fer­ent beast. I’ve been toying with the idea of inte­grat­ing the gallery into the blog using a plugin, but I haven’t found one that suits me yet. But we’ll see…

More Photos (Overdue)

Published
by
Rascus
on January 3, 2009
in Photography
. 1 Comment

I finally got my pic­tures from the Christ­mas Ban­quet and from Decem­ber up on the gallery. There are still some that were taken on the last days of school that I’ll need to get, so they might be a while.

Enjoy!

Christmas Banquet

Published
by
Rascus
on December 1, 2008
in Life
. 0 Comments

Christmas Ban­quet. People were talk­ing about it since mid-​October, making it out to be the big event of the semes­ter, which I sup­pose it was, though I saw it from dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive: a photographer’s.

In case you didn’t know, Christ­mas Ban­quet is a big dinner that hap­pens at the end of Novem­ber. The guys ask the girls to be their date for it, often with elab­o­rate pro­pos­als. I was not one of them, since I didn’t ask anyone, despite my friends con­stant hound­ing of me to ask some­one. But I didn’t relent. I was plan­ning to take pic­tures during the event, some­thing would be made much more dif­fi­cult by having a date. During the whole month of Novem­ber, I had to endure con­stant prod­ding by well mean­ing friends to get a date, while at the same time hear­ing about the people that others had asked.

They started sell­ing tick­ets on Thurs­day, Friday, and Monday. And I man­aged to miss it every single time! I asked Mr. Bryan about what to do, and he made arrange­ments and I got a seat! I asked him about which camera I was get­ting and was delighted to hear that I would be get­ting their top end stuff: a Nikon D300 with an 80-200mm f /2.8 lens!

For Christ­mas Ban­quet, we’re expected to wear a suit, which I had bought before school. I’ve never worn a suit before, and it was a bit uncom­fort­able. But I lived :)

Along with the camera, I also got a flash, which was pretty much a require­ment for the low light (think roman­tic camera light), and a mono­pod, which allowed me to shoot at 1/40th of a second and get a sharp picture.

Once I had given the camera back to Mr. Bryan, I could safely say that it was one of the most enjoy­able pho­to­graphic expe­ri­ences I’ve ever had. The sub­jects were inter­est­ing both on stage and off, I didn’t feel lim­ited with infe­rior equip­ment, and I got great food to boot!

I took 414 pic­tures at the Ban­quet, so it might be some­time before I actu­ally get some up here. I’m also work­ing on a redesign of the site which will, at best (mean­ing highly unlikely), go live before the end of Christ­mas break. Here’s a teaser:

Tomarrow’s my birth­day, so I’ll be feast­ing on banana bread all evening!

Thankgiving Pictures

Published
by
Rascus
on November 27, 2008
in Life and Photography
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Yeah, so what if we had it on the 13th? Since I hadn’t posted these yet, I fig­ured today would be as good as any to put them up. Taken with a D70 with a 18-50mm f/2.8, the same one I took these shots with.

Sunrise/set

Published
by
Rascus
on November 19, 2008
in Photography
. 1 Comment

During our long three day week­end on the 14th, I got a D70 with an 18-50mm f/2.8 lens for taking pic­tures of Thanks­giv­ing dinner (I know, worng time, but that’s when we did it). I used it to get the shots I’ve been dieing to get for a while. I feel like I suc­ceeded in that respect.

Note: I uploaded the full size pic­tures (3008×2000px.) this time. You can get the high res ver­sions by click­ing on the medium size picture.

Sun­rise on 14/11/2008

Sunset on 14/11/2008

Sun­rise on 15/11/2008

Enjoy!

It’s Here!

Published
by
Rascus
on November 12, 2008
in Photography
. 0 Comments

I’ve fin­ished off the Octo­ber Album, and I’ve started the Novem­ber Album.

Enjoy!