(Design Assignment Contradiction Creation)

A beautiful river, a warm fall day, the perfect place to avoid. What dangers are there? Poison ivy, bugs, other people? I wouldn’t recommend going there!

For this assignment I thought of the phrase “Leave your mark wherever you go” when looking at this image I took of handprints painted on a river rock. I decided the opposite of that was just avoid it all together! I wanted to show that though the area is littered with rocks and debris it was still a gorgeous space it just needed some enhancement.

That’s why I chose to use the enhance tool in GIMP when making this image. I used High Pass to make the sun on the river a little more noticeable and add definition to the whole image.

Then I added a border to make it feel like a poster that would be hung up in a classroom or bedroom.

Finally I added text over the image and chose yellow for the color as I wanted something cheery to go with the tone of the image.

(Design Assignment Are We There Yet?)

It’s just a sunny Summer day and I’m sitting in the public gardens in Halifax. I decided to bring my favorite book to have a good read in the sun, right? But what about the lighting and what about how flat the book is? Okay, clearly I’m not actually there, but I wish I could be! This original image is from when I went to a Broadway show in 2019. I liked the idea of trying to change what was in my hands for this as before I was holding a playbill. I thought it would be more of a challenge to create the extra layer of my hands, and it was! Do I regret it? Only for how much extra time it took.

Here is the original image:

I tried to lessen the purple lighting but struggled to without ruining the rest of the photo. Overall the hands were definitely the hardest part and I just couldn’t make them look right.

How did I make this?

First I made duplicate layers of the original image. I then used the selection tool, Intelligent Scissors to just select the hands on the top layer.

Then I inverted the selection and erased the outside of the image.

I did the same process on the next layer to cut out me from the background. Then I opened the background I wanted and put it behind the two layers. I then added a 4th layer between the hand layer and the main layer of the book I wanted. I scaled it down until I could place it just right in my hands!

(Design Assignment Barcode Transformation)

Everyone is trying to make their products stand out now. Incorporating unique designs are important to luring consumers in, and that includes barcodes. Nowadays brands can shape their barcodes into anything, from rolling hills, to animals, to even just fun designs. Since I work at a store I see this often on products and the only rule is that there must be one part of the image that the barcode can be read straight across. I chose to use a tiger as my image because it incorporates a colored barcode and they already have stripes. Since barcodes read the lighter spaces it is important that a colored barcode uses a shade far enough from black that it will still work. While this isn’t the most important design aspect of a product, it is always fun to find one when doing your shopping.

How its made:

I found an image of a barcode that was already the color I wanted as well as a silhouette of a tiger.

I then used the select > by color tool to select just the silouette and I erased within those lines using the erase tool.

Finally I just pulled the erased area over the barcode and got my tiger!

(Design Assignment Weird Book Room)

“Bad scores are a thing of the past if you know your way around them. This step by step guide will help you pass with flying colors. Find your smartest friend and bring them round to help you pass the test!”

This book cover is inspired by a dumb joke my friends had in high school. When one of my friends had gotten an almost perfect SAT score he joked that he would give his score to one of us in his will so we didn’t have to do our own. I took the idea of copying the general layout of an SAT prep book but turning it into this messed up guide.

Process:

I implemented all my layers using open as layers to start.

Then I arranged as needed using the transform tools.

I mainly used the scale tool to arrange my layers to the right proportions on the image.

Then I used the Set Opacity tool which I did not know where to find so I went under help and searched for it. I choses to reduce opacity by 10%.

I then added the Text into the page. I just used the text tool in the side bar.

Finally I used the blur tool on the base layer so the background was slightly out of focus.

(Design Assignment Computer Books for Kids)

“How many kids do you think use computers everyday but don’t really understand what it means to accept a cookie from a website? In If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, you will learn the two types of cookies used in web browsing as well as the benefits and potential dangers of allowing cookies.”

When coming up with this assignment, I thought it would be funny to use the original book title to and change it to be the computer book. It worked well here because obviously a mouse and a cookie are both parts of every day computer workings. I appreciated the simple cover that I only had to remove the mouse and crayon from the original image and could cover the rest of the pieces with other icons.

Process:

I first got an image of the original book cover and used the paint tools and color picker to cover the mouse and crayon with the background colors.

Then I added in the computer mouse as well as the “cookie” icons using open as layers under the file tab.

Then I used used the transform tools to scale, crop, and rotate them until they were the right size and in the right place on the image.

Then I was able to export the image and have my book cover!