The Mind of Wes King

For journal assignment #3, our communications graphics class was assigned the task of creating our own post cards describing ourselves using three graphic design applications, Adobe InDesign CS6, Adobe Photoshop CS6, and Adobe Illustrator CS6. The class was already quite familiar with using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign to complete posters for past assignments, but in the week that journal assignment #3 was assigned, professor introduced us on how to create our own shapes and designs in Adobe Illustrator. The first step I took into creating my own postcard was taking a "selfie" on my camera phone, and then dragging it into Adobe Photoshop to change it to print format and silhouette the pic from the background. 

Now it is time to use our newly taught application Adobe Illustrator!

I played around with the shape tool for a few minutes too see what kind of wild and wacky designs I could possibly come up with. In the end, I eventually settled upon a sharp and pointy tribal looking design, just to be unique. After doing that, I went and opened up Adobe InDesign and chose to set the background color of the postcard to baby blue. The blog said to choose your colors carefully so I went with my favorite color, an indirect way of telling the viewer another fact about myself.

Like I do with all my design projects, I get different ideas on how I want the set up to be layed out and what pictures I want to add in the project. Next I inserted my "selfie" picture to the far right, my tribal design to the far left, and my header aligned in the top center (Wes King) using the font style Hiragino Mincho Pro. I used this font style because it had sans serifs “feet” on the top and bottom of the letters. It just added a little spice and flair to the header and made it look a little fancier opposed to having the plain Minion Pro default font. Underneath my header I inserted my text wrap body paragraph describing my physical attributes and hobbies/interest. Next I just literally took a step back from my computer screen and looked at what else I could do to the postcard. It looked too plain. I had space to fill in at the bottom of the screen so I know that I needed to occupy it with something or else it wouldn’t produce good results visually. After a bit of thinking I decided to take my love and passion for music and translate it into a picture of a headphone emoji to visually display that I am always “jamming”. I did the same process as I did with selecting my selfie photo as far as choosing a picture, re-sizing the picture, using the pen tool to cut it out, and then open it up in Adobe InDesign. I added one headphone emoji to the bottom left and at first was content. The next day I brought it into class and asked Professor Pabico what else could I possibly add to my postcard? Professor recommended that I take the tribal design that I had created and put on the top left of my postcard, and put another one on the bottom right of the postcard. I thought about it for a few during class and decided that as the artist of my own work, it wouldn’t have made me happy to put that design there on the bottom right. I didn’t think that it would have made good design hierarchy because my design was to abstract to begin with. Having the same design repeated again would have been too much of a sight for the eyes and would have took the attention off of my text and selfie and would have put it on the tribal designs. There would be no balance. So what I ended up doing was, I decided to take my original emoji headphone on the bottom left, copy and paste it two times to produce two more headphones and added those to the right. I felt that adding more design to that space was the icing on the cake to completing this postcard. Using all five of the Adobe graphic design applications were essential in creating this project and I am glad that we learned so much at this point in the semester to be able to create our own artwork. This was a fun project and I am looking forward to learn more!