Rethinking Digital Art and Design

   I cannot believe that I completed this assignment. When will I ever learn to pick simple projects? We had to re-design a book cover ,didn't seem like a big deal, I love books so I figured that this shouldn't be a problem. Wrong. First it took me days to choose a book that I really enjoyed, there were too many to list. So I chose a book that could have an updated cover, Cheaper By the Dozen. I began to visualize how I'd redo this cover. Then one night, I took a good look at a book that I had just purchased 101 Diamonds. A very simple cover,  red and gold text on a white background. This would be easier and faster, so I thought.
   I understand how to use most of the tools in Photoshop CS5 now, and I was going along smoothly until I hit the Arabic. It took me days to find the name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) clear and large enough to use for my idea. It turned out that I had one in one of my own photo files. Working with that was crazy, until I remembered the magic wand tool, checked my textbook and saw that all I had to do was select similar layers (of course this took a day before I figured this out). I decided to stick with the same text style or close to the original cover. Fitting and aligning was another story, until I realized that it was better to create an new layer for some of the more difficult words ( I actually omitted one word because the text was out of sync).
   The part that make ask the question "why on earth did you choose this book?" was the small Arabic writing on the end which translates to "peace be upon him". This took days to try to add and I simply could not get it right until I remembered that I have been writing Arabic for almost my entire life and I could simply create a new layer and write this myself. Why did I think this was better? I had to use my finger to control the brush tool (yes I tried my pen) and this was very difficult. After countless restarts, I wrote directly on the main background layer and was successful.
The diamonds were not that hard but shaping the drop at the bottom was, I didn't know which was the best way to do this so I warped.

Digital Design..... me and my big ideas. The original cover is at the top. Guess what? I forgot to create the book binding. AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!  I had to fix it again.

So you wanna make a poster

   For this assignment we had to create a poster, simple right? I think not. I suppose that one who is quite familiar with Photoshop CS5 would likely think "piece of cake". I learn by doing, so I can read through a textbook to gain an understanding, but the information means nothing to me unless I am applying it somewhere. I am getting better and faster.

   This really wasn't that difficult. It seems that the hard part is to come up with an idea and figure out how to present it. While searching through posters online to get an idea of how I should approach this project, it seems that some them were just TOO chaotic. I prefer simplicity, that is how I live my life. So I think that most of my designs are likely to look plain and boring. Maybe they'll be jazzed up here and there, then again to each his own.



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