Type Design

1. Are you happy/satisfied with your design? What are some of the features that make it so successful? If you are not satisfied, what would you have done differently to make it more successful?

I am incredibly happy with my design! I think it’s a great first start for designing things with Photoshop considering it’s a program I have never used before. I think one of the most successful things in my design is the color scheme. Taking Art Fundamentals and having the color unit to use as prior knowledge was very helpful. I was used to complementary color schemes, but using a double complementary scheme was something new. I used the complements of blue with orange and blue-green with red-orange because I love blue-greens. I also thought that orange and blue would be great for this project since they really make each other “pop”, and we had been looking at different pop arts. Another successful feature I think is the letters. Their type is a solid, bold font that is like my bold colors. The letters themselves add to the design too. They have interesting shapes that look good put together-- literally!


2. List some of the tools that you learned and used in this assignment. Which ones did you find the most helpful and in what ways?

In this assignment I used the transform, paint bucket, rectangular marquis, type, paint brush, opacity change, new layer, and the eye dropper tools. The ones I found most helpful were probably the opacity change, eye dropper, transform, and the paintbrush. These tools were fundamental in the overall design because they allowed me to manipulate the background layers and my letters. The opacity tool was largely used on my background, and with it I could over lap my rectangles to make new colors. I used my overlapping layers to bring more attention to my focal point. The eyedropper was helpful when I wanted to go back and fix my layers. The transform was used in every part of this design. My letters look so much more interesting when I used transform to tilt or distort them. Finally, I really liked the effects I added by using the paintbrush. This was the tool I used to make it seem like the A was hanging off the T and the Q was hanging off the L.

3. With what areas/aspects of Photoshop do you have questions? What activities would help you better understand basic design concepts, along with more Photoshop tools, tips, and tricks?

Questions about Photoshop? I don’t have a broad enough knowledge of Photoshop to even begin asking questions. At first I thought Photoshop was just for manipulating pictures. Now I know that I can create my own design with it! I’m not sure what else I can do with this amazing application. I think that more projects such as this one will help me to learn the basic concepts of Photoshop. Activities that build on what knowledge I know but also have some new elements and tools I need to learn would be the best.