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Design Samples

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 By Xinran Zhao

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 The stop sign is familiar to drivers. We can see this sign everywhere. I have to say the design of the stop sign is very successful. It uses Helvetica typeface, and makes “stop” itself white against the red background to highlight the words. Its design plays an important role on warning drivers.

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This simple design caught my attention. The contrast between the black “CHANEL” and the white “CHANCE” makes it stand out. It reminds me the words of simple, clean, and fashion. I can imagine the smell of the perfume is as fresh as the design.

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This is a Victoria Secret’s coupon. I love it because it enlarged the “15 OFF” that makes people pay attention to it immediately. The black letters are even clearer to see by accompanying with light pink background. People all love promotion, so when I saw the promotion advertisement I was eager to look for something to buy. That’s why I think this design is successful. It simply achieve the purpose of a coupon.

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I like this design the most. It remind me my last project, enhanced quotation, because the background of this bottle is colorful and complicated, just like my picture used for that project. However, the name of this wine is still obvious. This is what I want to learn about.

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Another wine bottle with beautiful design. I think “BOMBAY” and “SAPPHIRE” together is the brand of it. Separate these two words and both words are designed along a curve which makes drinking wine a lot of fun.

Visually Enhanced Quotation

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By Xinran Zhao

This is a challenging assignment to me. It takes me more than three hours to work on it. At the first time, I had no idea what to do with the assignment, I simply placed the quotation on the top of the picture, and applied what I learned from this class so far, mixed upper and lower case letters, changed directions and colors of the words. However, I didn’t focus on the purpose of this assignment, which is to enhance the quotation. As a result, I got a very unsuccessful draft. The quotation on my picture was hard to see because I made the words black which is similar to the very dark background. During the critique, I saw a lot of excellent works from my classmates. I was a little bit upset because mine was not good enough, but at the same time I paid attention to how my classmates related their pictures to their quotations. Then I thought carefully how to make changes to my assignment. This time I came up with new idea. First, I noticed that the background of my picture is dark and complicated, it’s hard to catch people’s attention if I simply placed the quotation on my picture no matter what color of typefaces I use. Therefore, I made a pure black bar at the corner of the picture and put the quotation in the bar. By doing this, the quotation was obvious to see since the background is simple. Besides that, I changed each letter to bright color, yellow; and I used complementary color, green on some of the words which I think is important to enhance the quotation. I also enlarged the words that I want people to pay attention to. I chose Bodoni as my typeface because I feel like my quotation is easy to read with it. I like this assignment since I know more about graphic design by doing it.

 

 

Trace Your Name

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By Xinran Zhao

My descriptive word is daring. I chose century expended as my typeface to express the feeling of the word. Through the process of design, I found some characteristics of century expended. First of all, century expended typeface has obvious contrast between thick and thin. This characteristic is reflected in every single letter. For example, when I designed the letter “X”, I made “/” thin and “\” relatively thick. Secondly, the start and end points of each letter are curved. For capital letter “T”, both sides of the upper part are bending down rather than just a straight line, which make the shape look like an umbrella. Finanly, the size of century expended typeface looks bigger than others give me the feeling of bold.

Through the tracing name assignment, I learnt that each typeface has its own characteristic and different typefaces can used to express different meanings. Bold fonts can express the feeling of vigorous otherwise the soft fonts can used for some gentle words.

Expressive words

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By Xinran Zhao

For the expressive word project, I used Helvetica as my designed font. Before making the design, I knew nothing about Helvetica. I even hadn’t heard such name. However, throughout the process, I found that Helvetica is a big family that contains different fonts. Even they all named Helvetica, they all look different. For example, Helvetica light and Helvetica bold are different from thickness. Helvetica compressed makes less space between each single letter.

When I made the design, I tried to make the words look balanced and beautiful. By achieving that, I changed the size of each letter and mixed the capital and small letter. I want my design give people the feeling of comfortable. Besides that, I think the most important thing to make the design is to enhance the word’s meaning. Since different Helvetica gave me different feelings, I tried to use compatible Helvetica font to each word to enhance its meaning. For example, Helvetica bold made me feel powerful, so I used it to make my design of hostage. On the other hand, Helvetica light made me feel soft and gentle.  Therefore, I used it for the word quite.

What is graphic design?

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Xinran Zhao

The article, ”What is graphic design”, gave me a new perspective and understanding about graphic design. Graphic design uses visual and textual content to express ideas and experiences. I think graphic design is flexible and diverse after reading the article because the way of communicating design can be any forms. The purpose of design is varied. As well as the experience and the work can take place at any places any time.

My question to the author is that which one is more important between the visual effect and the content. It’s for sure that for a successful design, it cannot lose either one. However, I think the content, the idea that the designer wants to express is more important than the visual effect because graphic design uses visual content to express ideas. The purpose is to convey the designer’s idea.