Poster Project

My orignal poster designs

Independent Project

For the independent project I chose to work on an update advertising campaign for the charity Vest-A-Dog which helps provide ballistic vests for police and service dogs. The vests have been responsible for saving the lives of many canine officers but most agencies don’t have the money in their budgets to provide these vests. 

Vest-A-Dog Website: www.vestadog.org

While the Vest-A-Dog website is function and fairly well assembled I found it to be a bit boring and hard to navigate. So as part of the rebranding attempt I started work in progress website that contains the same information but is more visually appealing and easier to navigate. 

You can find it here:

http://roolowe7.wix.com/vestadogrebrand

I also used a QR code square that links to the Vest-A-Dog website. [Included as separate image in the attached photos]

[Following write ups are in order of attached images, but titles should help connect them to working files]

Title: A Life of Service

Medium: Photoshop Photo Manipulation

Purpose: Website Ad or Poster as part of advertising set for Vest-A-Dog

Concept: This poster is supposed to represent how service dogs (especially police canines) spend their entire lives protecting their human partners and the community at large. The picture is meant to encourage people to recognize that police dogs are protecting people their entire lives and keeping people safe is their entire life. 

Notes: I spent a lot of my time on this piece correcting the colours and contrast until I was happy with the picture. I found it was a bit dull and the colours weren’t vibrant enough originally. This was probably my least favourite piece and I had a lot of difficulty trying to figure out what to do with the background, my original plan had been to erase the background and substitute it with my own design but I found I couldn't erase the background without a lot of fuzz and leftover pieces that were really hard to try and erase. 

Title: Man’s Best Friend

Medium: Photoshop Photo Manipulation

Purpose: Poster or Website Ad as part of advertising set for Vest-A-Dog

Concept: The concept of this piece is that police dog’s literally “jump through hoops” to impress us. The poster’s focus is that because police dogs spend their time protecting people that the least we could do is to try and help protect them while they do the same for us. The image of the dog jumping through the fire-hoop also exemplifies the danger that police dogs go “through” on a daily basis. 

Notes: I was really pleased with how this one came out, unlike the first image I tried to make the fire and the dog a bit more vibrant but dull the rest of the image a bit. I did this to try and really accent the smoke that was coming off the fire, I think that helped to make the image more dramatic. I also included the QR code in this image so that the poster can be tied to the website and as such increase traffic to the website if the ad is effective.

Title: Police Pup

Medium: Photoshop Photo Manipulation

Purpose: Website Ad or Poster as part of advertising set for Vest-A-Dog

Concept: This image was meant to really showcase police dogs as members of the police force. I wanted to go for a “COPS” feel with this one so I really highlighted the presence of red, white and blue because those are the colours in police siren-lights. I wanted a really dramatic tv-police feeling poster.

Notes: I tried posterizing this image to get rid of the image details and to change it to just a few colours so that I could edit it into red, white, blue and black. I had trouble minimizing the colours as much as I wanted to so I had to erase most of the yellow that was left over by hand.

Title: Save A Life

Medium: Photoshop Photo Manipulation

Purpose: Website Ad as part of advertising set for Vest-A-Dog

Concept: The idea behind this image, like with Police Pup, was to show a dramatic side to police dogs. I also really wanted to show a canine ballistic vest on one of the posters. 

Notes: I tried to make an interesting and easily recognizable background for the image and to show both a canine ballistic vest and a dog wearing one. 

Title: To Serve and Protect

Medium: Photoshop Photo Manipulation

Purpose: Poster or Website Ad as part of advertising set for Vest-A-Dog

Concept: I wanted something that had a little more historic meaning as well as being easily recognizable. So I decided to make the base of this image a picture of Dale of Cawsalta, the first ever RCMP dog.

Notes: To highlight the police aspect I tinted the image blue and changed the vibrancy, which also modernized it because the original was a black and white image, and I added the slogan of “To Protect and Serve” which is a motto most commonly known in connection with law enforcement. I added the QR code to link the poster to the website and I erased the background so that the dog was the focal point. 

Title: VAD

Medium: Photoshop Photo Manipulation

Purpose: Site Logo part of advertising set for Vest-A-Dog

Concept: I wanted a basic minimal logo for the website. I wanted something that was fairly identifiable as a police dog, so German Shepherd was the ideal choice, and I wanted it to be wearing a ballistic vest as that is the charity’s purpose. 

Notes: I decided to use a silhouette for the dog and flat colour for the vest to keep the design as basic as possible. 

Infographic

I chose to explore two possible career paths through two schools for my career infographic.

I intend to pursue a career in criminal justice and so I chose to look at the police foundations program at Seneca and the criminal justice program at Humber. 

My infographic starts with Lakeshore Collegiate and I used the same colour for the “square-arch” Lakeshore logo as the fill for the words through the rest of the infographic to show how things I got from high school can stay with me throughout the rest of my career. 

I chose to look at Humber and Seneca as my two school paths because they are my first choice programs. (Please note: The only image I didn’t do myself was the Seneca logo because it’s just a font in red) I included requirements to enter both programs in the boxes next adjacent to them.  Under the Humber section there are two points that are additional requirements for graduating the program that should be acquired during the duration of the course.

After graduation I chose to look at two major paths I could take my career. One route is to go into private investigation or security and the other is to go into public law enforcement, either through the O.P.P or the R.C.M.P as a base-level officer. I also extended my infographic to show   possible specific paths within the public-criminal-justice stream 

I looked at the K-9 unit and the Homicide division requirements as both fields interest as a possible future position.

I made the background a gradient of blue to white (top to bottom) because law enforcement is often represented by the colour blue (the white just helps add to the ease of reading and the complexity of the background, it’s more interesting than straight blue) and police uniforms in basically every country are blue. I tried to incorporate as much blue as possible for this reason, made easier by the fact that Lakeshore Collegiate’s colour is blue (orange is stupid and I don’t accept it).

Visual Identity Written

My personal brand “Leatherwing Designs” was designed to convey a fun, cartoony kind of vibe while still maintaining some professionalism for a company. My company is intended to be a design company because that’s where my interest and skill set rest. The purpose of my company is intended to be for commercial advertising and marketing design/campaign. I want my company to give the idea of smooth and fun design, complete with pieces in a variety of colours and styles.

For my logo I chose to create a simplistic dragon image. To do this I used fairly smooth cartoony lines and restricted the colour palette to three colours to keep it simple and smooth, I also avoided shading for this reason. I chose to keep the image dimensionally flat-looking to help retain the idea of a comic drawing or illustration. The lines are singular and connected, I wanted to avoid a sketchy look and I wanted all the pieces to be connected because I think that excess lines take away from the professionalism and that when lines don’t connect it appears distant and unfriendly which wasn’t the feeling I wanted my company to exude. My dragon image is anchor-shaped because I find that it draws the eye that way, the entire shape fits into a circle smoothly and each wing (plus the tail) point out and draw the eye along the logo. The anchor shape also makes it easy to incorporate images “above” the dragon in the sense they can be placed behind it’s head but in front of it’s tail to give the impression that something in that space is interacting with the logo instead of just being next to or on top of it.

I designed my stationary by putting a line-only watermark of my logo in the background so that it would be obvious but not obtrusive. There is also company contact information in the top left corner so that is the first thing you see when you read through the paper.

I chose to keep most of my merchandise related to graphic arts. I designed a USB key, a mouse pad and a tablet sleeve which are all things you might use in graphic design and as such are relevant to my company which is why I chose them. I also did a line of clothing (a sweater, a shoe design, a tote bag and a drawstring bag) because fashion design is something I haven’t really gotten to try yet and would really like to. 

Portfolio Presentation

My visual identity/portfolio website can be found here

Discuss your inspiration or influences for one or more of your pieces of artwork from this class. What next? Look at the concepts and also techniques that inspired you and why. Discuss any artistic influences as well as what might be a next project-either based on similar influences, or something different.

One of my biggest influences as an artist is literature. I love reading and I’ve been an avid reader since I was in Grade 2. By the time I reached Grade 5 I was reading at a Grade 11 level. My love of books is definitely something that is prominent in my creativity, books influence the way I talk, what I’m interested in and quite frequently they give me ideas for art projects. 

The idea of conveying stories through art is really intriguing to me and it’s something I really like designing layouts for. 

My traditional art project “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” was a really heavily influenced by my racing at the time. When I started that project I’d just recently read Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and had a bunch of ideas for art with components from the story, especially the good/evil transformation concept. Then when I came across the sketchbook prompt for “Something in a state of change” my first thought was transformation which I connected immediately with Jekyll and Hyde. 

Literature and writing were also a big part of my Anthology of the Apocalypse image which I made to go along with a short story I wrote for my Writer’s Craft class. We weren’t required to, or even asked, to make a cover for our stories but I found that to really take writing to the next level you need to add something visual to the mix. It was a really enjoyable time to put the cover together, I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to make all the components myself so instead I photo-manipulated a few pieces to try and convey my theme which I think was actually more creative than having drawn a cover myself from scratch because this way it was really important to consider each component and how it contributed to the piece as a whole. 

I still really love reading and writing, maybe even more than I enjoy art and so I want to continue to combine them in the future. 

One of my next projects that I have planned is a bit large and time consuming but I’m really excited to get started. I plan to redesign covers for some of my favourite books, I have over 20 in mind currently and many of them already have sketches in my notebook.

Which project created this year (or in the last two years) helped you learn the most about yourself as an artist/designer? Why? Explain. 

While I’m drawn to say the Lakeshore Open House poster was the most eye-opening project for me because I worked collaboratively and it was in my preferred field, I can’t actually cite it as the most important project to me when it comes to understand myself as an artist. While the poster was everything I was looking forward to with graphic design in CyberARTs, I already knew that’s what I was excited to do and that it was something I could do. 

Of all the projects we’ve done in the CyberARTs program I think the one that taught me most about myself as an artist was the the Movie Trailer Mashup project. Going into the CyberARTs program I wasn’t shy about admitting that I had absolutely NO animation or video editing skill/experience and I was very adamant about having little to no interest in either as well. While the Drama Promo Video was the bane of my existence for several weeks, the only enjoyable parts being the travel and interviews, and the GIF which was cool but I clearly struggled with the technical aspect of. The video scramble project was really fun and I enjoyed pulling it apart and putting it back together in a different way to change the whole feel. While I had no prior experience with the video editing process my video came out at least as good as the majority of the class. I never thought that I’d be able to finish a video project because of my inexperience and I never expected to enjoy it because of my lack of interest in videography. I love to watch movies put the process of assembling them never appealed to me. However when I was making my Sherlock Holmes video mashup I had a really good time learning about the program and trying out new things to try and make something that was entertaining to watch. 

Visual Identity Failed Attempts

Visual Identity Pieces