I hope you get a chance to peruse through these and add a comment. Am starting to see some stylistic development in these coupled with the timeline which is another good indicator that you’re getting more time to develop your personal expression rather than just the techniques as tools.

I’ll be adding to this entry here but wanted to get the imagery up while I had a chance.

Final Assignment: is to produce a trio of 8″ x 8″ images that use the live trace, live paint or are personal illustrations executed in Illustrator of a favorite personal object in several contexts:

• A. The personal object illustration in front of a background that helps tell it’s story.

A pixel based image was the suggested background for this. You can always step outside that parameter.

Do as much work in Photoshop, cropping down and altering images - that way you don’t have to use Illustrators clumsy cropping option using clipping masks.

Workflow tip - Cut and paste between applications. Remember since our outcome is a digital file you can work in Photoshop by copying and pasting your Illustrator file into photoshop.

• B. The personal object illustration in front a background where it is completely out of context.

Or presents a very opposite idea, context, setting or feeling.

Yet another aspect of contrast is; color, shape, size, composition.

Again a pixel based image was the suggested solution but if you have a good idea go for it.

A strong answer is a background that transforms the object into something else.

• C. Third image was on a background also generated in illustrator, this could be completely abstract.

This could achieve in even the simplest of ways by using patterns in a step and repeat process.

Or a gradient gone wild.

Don’t forget about the symbol sprayer and distort effect and other options in the effects menu.

Think about the tone - Loud and obnoxious or quiet and delicate, set a tone.

All 3 are to be submitted matted, also adding that I’d like to get these posted with your time line projects.

Each of the designer pages are up
Yeah, the designers pages are finally up — took me a while to see the darn code problem with the pages — long pause. This also helped remind me that we had till last class to make any changes to the time line campaign.

Last class this Saturday — Will be short and sweet but will give us a chance to go over territory I’d hoped to cover earlier working in Wordpress as a digital publishing platform and getting your own work into a format you can add to a web page.

Use this last lesson to then create images that can posted. I will be leaving this up for probably a long time and had thought looking at these it would be nice to post your last assignments.

You all have done great work. Adobe illustrator has probably the highest learning curve of any of the Adobe CS software. Vectors alone are a whole different animal - we’ve now scratched the surface enough that you should find lots of good reasons to keep up you chops in this tool. I find it to be one of the most versatile tools I use.

To utilize this feature you must “place” a pixel/photoshop jpeg, tiff etc. format in an illustrator document. To better follow what we did in class I have found a video tutorial on the Adobe site.
http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/
click on or paste this link into your browser and you will come to this screen.

There are probably many other helpful tutorials on here all provided by Adobe.

Here too are a couple of other tutorials on the subject

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4ZcRZCXi34&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0yNFH99cWg&feature=related

http://www.tutorial9.net/illustrator/adobe-illustrator-tip-1-intro-and-livetrace/

For the the final assignment I have asked everyone to choose and bring in a simple object that has sentimental value. This could be a seed pod, a toy, a vase, a pair of shoes. Essentially any easily transportable object that can be drawn that has meaning to you.

We then covered the Live Trace function in Illustrator.

The assigment was to use Live Trace on a series of images including the following

Black and white image - could be illustration preferably something very simple
Illustration - can be black and white or color
Detail color photo

Below the two tests is a link that will prompt you to download a pdf. Download and “open with” Adobe Illustrator.

Open the layer palette and you will see each layer is a frame.

Piled on top of each other they can look like a mess but when you export a layered Illustrator file and select export as .swf format each layer is converted to a frame.

Going to the “file” menu select export you will encounter a dialogue box. Pull down the very top pull down menu and set to “AI Layers to SWF Frames”. There are other options as well that are more intiuitive like FPS, (frames per second) and loop. You can experiment but the greater the number of layers (think frames) the smoother the transition.

We’ll demo this and more possibilities in class, this is just to give folks a better picture of what it is the Animations process will be.

Hope everyone can see this - testing a new plug-in to embed flash.

working file

If you want to see how something this simple can be taken to a sublime level check out this. I’ve only pasted in the teaser - check out the link and share it.

Bembo Zoo

Everyone’s finished time project should be printed and mounted for review.

You will also be required to submit a jpg of the timeline for posting on the blog, the process for which we’ll go over in that class, so don’t worry about having that for next class.

To push a head and get onto our next assignment which is an animated banner, I’d like us all to be thinking about rough ideas for this next assignment.

The animated banner will measure 768 px wide by 90 px high. This is a standard “leaderboard” web banner.

The subject of our banner - you guessed it - we’re going to leverage the research we’ve done to advertise our designer.

You will have the opportunity to produce a vector format .swf file that we will embed into the blog.

Here’s a couple of links to sites that give a bit of background and examples.
http://www.historyshots.com/

http://dekstop.de/weblog/2006/01/visualization_of_numeric_data/

http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/milestone/

http://www.communication.org.au/htdocs/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=61

http://infosthetics.com/

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00006W&topic_id=1&topic=Ask%20E%2eT%2e

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/programs/davidcopperfield/timeline.html

Next step for the following week, week 3 is the basis for the final project.
Sketch - create a fairly precise pencil rendering In addition a skeletal digital model of the timeline.
Plus at least two tight renderings of the graphical elements/images that will be part of the final layout

So these three phases of completion are needed for the 3rd class

• Pencil rendering of overall design
• Adobe Illustrator based rough of the chart structure
• 2 images or graphical motifs you plan on using in the chart (i.e.; timeline markers - which will have the year and event listing, or special headline or layout treatments)

The following week is the completion.