Steven Aguilar

For this project I chose the brochure  and the reason for it was because I enjoyed being creative with the layout of the design using the grid. I enjoyed basing the project on an upcoming James Bonds movie “Spectra”. In the design I made sure to make good use of the negative space. I used Helvetica for the font style and I could saying I am becoming I big fan of this font.

While working on the style I made sure that the design was consistent thru all the pages. I made sure to made all the subheadings were consistent throughout the whole page. When using images I made sure the interaction of space and images would be clean. I also used a couple of quotes that I really think worked out well. One on the top of the third page and another small quote in the middle of a column.

I learned in this project how to use negative space and the grid. It made me more aware on the importance of consistency throughout the design which is something I really find useful for any future project.

Santiago Vinasco

For my final project I chose to do the signage option. As a daily commuter, I’m constantly facing a sign wherever I go. This year I’ve seen some clever ideas on the long, rectangular subway signs in the train carts, so I decided to try my own. It was a rewarding challenge because I had to use the rules and guidelines set forth by Professor Klein. That meant I couldn’t illustrate anything, even if I just use letters. This definitely allowed me to look deeper and closer at the words and subtleties in my design. I made more sketches and drafts for this project than I did for any other project in this class and thus I also learned the importance of manifesting your ideas in front of you instead of keeping them in your head. By the end of the project I felt that I did grow as a designer– being able to make a clear statement in the most minimal way possible is the mark of a designer who knows what he’s doing.

Christian Velez

I decided to work on the brochure project. I found this project to be really cool since its purpose of a brochure,fits very well with marketing. On this project I wanted try and use what I have learn throughout the semester negative, letter, word space, it’s structure and the use of the grid to perfectly fit the products information in an organized manner.

On this project I decided to work around the images and not around the words. This was because I wanted to make sure that whatever typeface I used would match and go well along with the images–Baskerville was the best typeface. Since the images were very dark I used a white color to contrast with the images. What I learned most about the project was the importance of position, and the use of the negative space to my advantage. I also learned how to set up documents within Indesign for different publications.

Cindy Chan

For this final assignment, I chose to create subway ad banners. With the context in which these creations will be displayed in mind, I decided to go with both very large and very small fonts (context wise) for my design, with the last word of each message blown up to fill the banner and split lengthwise. The space created by the split is filled by the rest of the message. I chose this design because it lends impact to the information conveyed on the banners (Yes, I know the text content is irrelevant in this assignment).

Brochure Project – Danisa Valdez

I chose the the Brochure Project because I liked using the grid in the previous project and it gave me an opportunity to further explore different options and different ways that I could use a grid.

For my project, all of my typefaces were Baskerville. My project was based on the Yankees and their typeface is most similar to Baskerville so I used it to my advantage and created everything with that typeface.

This project taught me the importance and difficulty of placements and size. When I decorate or create something, I naturally overwhelm the piece because I become completely drawn in by all the possibilities and I want to use all of my ideas but this project strictly taught me how to manage that. I used many pictures, large and small, and because of that, I had to use my placement of words and their size very carefully in order to make it look clean. In the beginning, I had a few ideas but when I put it in indesign, it looked different than what I had originally planned so I had a lot of editing to do. I cropped, moved and did several other things to all of my images and text boxes in order to make them work together until I finally settled on what I created.

For the brochure project i found it difficult to effectively assimilate the text and images in the given space. however i accidentally pressed a button that spread an image across the entire page and they idea clicked in my head for it to look like a magazine. i wanted the typeface to resemble that of the company and that typeface was called pragmatica, a offshoot of helvetica. i enjoyed doing this project greatly. With a brochure, you are selling a product and i felt i designed this brochure to effectively sell that product.

I chose to do the brochure project. I chose to do it based on the types of music that i like and listen to. The design was constructed to feature the genres of music that i listen to and some of the artists or scenes related to the genre. My design approach was pretty much random and i edited and edited the brochure till it came out more polished. Lines of color were added to make the brochure look more minimalistic with straight lines and strict guides. i chose helvetica as my typeface of choice as i believe it adds a more elegant look to the brochure.

What i learned from this project is that it takes a lot of time and creativity to make simple text to look like an art form. It also takes plenty of design element or none at all to make typography art to look like something meaningful and appealing. What i also learned is that all design elements have to be coherent and in unison to make a design look good.

Xin Lin

The signage system I chose for my final project is Ads in train. Before I started to design, I browsed through good amount of Ads post inside of train cars. For this particular system, the most important part was being attracted. Most of them used bright or high contrast colors combination in order to make them look more attractive. My signage system adapted this idea, bright background colors contrasted with white and black letter to make it easy to read and grab the attention.

Most signage are designed to read fast, but in this particular system, the design should be more entertaining . I thought about when I was on train, I used to stare at random thing and space out. So why not play with my letters? Letter designing came into my mind. I tried to make the letters to present the meaning of the word. Most of them required people to look twice and find out the trick. I used two typeface, helvetica and baskerville, because they look good with the design.  The variety of typefaces,colors and playful letter design make the simple signage appear more interesting.

For the letter space, I chose it visually by comparing with different versions. Since they were belong to one system, I made all of them same letter space. The part took my most the time for this project was proportion, because I didn’t pay too much attention to it at first. After I finished designing, all the pages which have been copied from the first design were not in a nice proportion, so I ended up fixing pages one by one.

I did the brochure project on Converse Shoes. I actually had quite a hard time trying to think of what I should do the project on because I wanted to do something different. I chose Converse shoes in the end because converse are very different and unique so I could get a lot of good images.

I chose the Bodoni Book font on the first page, as like the “logo” font and used that for every big heading on the other pages. I used the Bodoni Poster compressed font for the subheadings, and I used Baskerville as the font for the text. I used the Monotype Modern Std font for the expressions I put on the pages. I learned that consistency is very important in a good design. If you don’t keep the font consistent, the design seems like it’s lacking something. It seems like the brochure does not belong together. I also learned that a good design does not need a crazy or very different font. You can say the same thing by using one of the five fonts that we have used in this class. This is why I didn’t venture very far when I chose fonts.

When I used the images and designed with the text, I didn’t want to get too complicated in that either. Converse on their own are very unique and colorful, and a big design would have just taken away from the. I wanted to keep it clean and classy. In the end, I learned that going too complicated doesn’t really add too much to make the design better.