Welcome to The Wall

 THE CARDS!

All designed in Photoshop,these cards were designed for a game fittingly titled "The Wall". So of course I had to give it a Game of Thrones theme. (Is anyone surprised?)

The idea was I had to design four cards: A card back (The first image), a Wall (The second image), a Reinforcement card (The dragon) and a Damage card (The Battering Ram). I drew it all by hand (Yep, even the dragon!) in Photoshop with the use of my Cintiq tablet. The lines for the Wall card back were so good, I copied them for my Wall picture, but without the extra bleed colours. To fit the style, I used a much sharper style with the Wall, the Damage card, and the Reinforcement card than I did with the card backgrounds. 

I feel like I could have been more consistent with the style (I shade a little bit on the Battering Ram, but probably not where it counts most, due to the late hour I was working on the cards no doubt), and I could have been more consistent with the lettering (The text is red on the dragon card because black would have bled into the dragon image, unfortunately. I'm still not completely happy with it, but it was incredibly late when I was finishing it, and I deemed it tolerable). But all in all, I don't think it was too bad! I could do more of these at some point in the future, really. 

(Also, the perspective doesn't look like total crap on the walls, so I'm happy!)

Art Deco: The Rookery

So it wasn't said that we had to post this, but I will anyway. An Art Deco poster assignment!

It lacks the grain that's on many art deco posters, but I don't mind too much, the sharp colours and almost cut-out look. Once again it has to feature a crow, because this was a poster for The Rookery, The castle base is from somewhere in the UK again. I have so many stock pictures from the UK, of course I'm going to keep using them. 

The look I was going for is establishing the design for 'The Rookery', a castle for a hypothetical family in Game of Thrones. Or just any generic castle, but I like the Rookery, I think it has a nice sound. Originally I was going to put a person in, too, but it just seemed like too much when I could be emphasizing the awesome castle!

I could've gotten more detailed on the architechture, but I opted not to, it would've taken more time and probably taken away from the stark detailing.

The image was made in Photoshop, the text applied with InDesign.

Winning a Kingdom (By Deception)

As many of my friends know, I've been deep into the Song of Ice and Fire series lately (Finished book 1 in under ten days, about to start book 2. No spoilers!) So I opted to make a quick infographic about how to win a kingdom by deception. Anyone can win in an honourable fight with enough soldiers and knights, but it takes true mastery to win a kingdom by deception!

In the PDF, the rollovers are a burgundy colour, and it all seems pretty flawless... except that saving the file as a PDF deactivates the links. I checked, I couldn't find any way to make the "go to page" button work, making the interactivity part of the interactive PDF utterly pointless. Hopefully I can fix this in class, but if not... I tried. I did. It just doesn't function because reasons. That's all I got.

I drew up the image in Photoshop, popped it into Illustrator to livetrace it, and made it all work in InDesign with a little work. All in all, it was kinda fun! If I can figure out how to make the interactivity work in the future, I might make a lot more of these!

Zoetrope crows.

my zoetrope of crows flying. They're really only prepared for one wing flap, but if I made the animation take any longer, I'd need to make everything huge for anything to be visible. It's about a five-frame animation, I think.

This wasn't too terribly difficult, but I did have to monitor how the layers worked in Illustrator, and once again the render time was abhorrent. This is primarily my fault still, my computer is in desperate need of cleaning up, and I still haven't done that. (I like to hoard videogames onto my computer, but constantly neglect to play them because I have other things I feel like I need to do).

If I were to do this again, I might try to find a way to make the animation smoother, but once it rendered out, it actually turned out quite nice. I certainly don't mind it.

And of course, my theme of crows again. It was an easy enough thing to find, so why not?
(The images of crows flying were found online and livetraced, I can't claim to own them.)

Spud Goodman Newsletter

Today I had to work on a newsletter for the Spud Goodman Show. The thumbnail isn't great, admittedly. It looks a lot like the one that showed up in the demo Brian Martin did, but I used some colour palates from the first image to change the background, links (except they wouldn't work on the email links for some reason) and emphasize bolded parts, and I bolded the famous names as well, because the big glob of text wasn't giving me anything to look at. I thought some bolding might make it all more interesting to look at and emphasize the stars. 

I had some difficulty with the text sizes, the live view and the working view of the set were completely different. I also didn't feel like the direction on how to make the links work was very clear, but I figured it out (after posting the whole thing to the web server we use for DDSGN 150). 

It was a little difficult, but not too bad. Easy enough in Dreamweaver with a bit of Photoshop.

Another Wordpress Site

I'm getting mighty sick of blogs I have to make for these classes. That's two wordpresses and at least one blogspot for classes. Ah well.

With that, the link to my new Wordpress, which I'm not sure I'll use after this:
https://smorstan.wordpress.com/

And a screenshot:

This assignment wasn't particularly difficult, just prodding around the site to make sure everything was done properly.

I'm not terribly fond of the colour schemes for the page (there were only three to choose from). I chose one that worked with the header image I picked (again, not great, but it was what I had available). I might actually use this site at some point for a portfolio page someday, too.
The menu is hidden behind that box in the upper right-hand corner, once you click it, the menus show up. I'm not sure if the menus always have to be hidden, but I thought it was nice and minimalist, so I went for it. Hopefully it'l be a hit. (I'll consider changing that header image soon, once I've got some other things up on the page. Providing I ever make more stuff to put on the page.)

Dreamweaver Doozy

So I had to make an image and turn it into a webpage as well, this week.

I've been reading lots of Game of Thrones lately, and opted to make a GoT inspired webpage as well for my own hypothetical house. (Because I am a colossal neerrrrd).

When the website is viewed, you can roll over the navigational buttons, and the buttons get stricken out and turn a bloody colour, with a few bloodspatters. The site is unfortunately full of jpeg artifacts, which I would fix if I were to do it all again, but as it is, I think it's not... the worst thing ever. I've certainly made better webpages, though. I like my divs a little more than using the slice tool, I find. Which I never thought I'd say. Divs drive me nuts.