Step Six: Take In The Criticism - How To Proceed?
My choice of interest-based design was too lacking in deeper meaning for my peers to consider it a design that really tells them something about me. I decided to start from scratch design-wise, so as to find a more meaningful way of conveying my interests with some sort of symbolism that suggests more depth about me.
Step Seven: Back To The Drawing Board
Here began the doodles for the second (and completely revised) version of my design. The idea of the outline is an N and the Hebrew letter “Nun” (נ). Within the boundaries of the N/nun (which I will refer to as "the N" or "the letter" from now on), which I will borrow my friend’s Wacom graphic tablet to use to draw, I will incorporate several of the significant elements from my original design – writing, dancing, guitar. But this time, the manner in which these interests are depicted will be different. Everything is interconnected, overlapping, and contained within the boundaries of the joint “Hebrish” first letter of my name, rather than separate elements forced together by my original dancing-guitar-with-a-pen. I hope that using a graphic tablet will help give the outline of the N the “hand-drawn” or sketched out aspect that I was hoping my original design would yield. I also hope that the sketched out lines of the letter’s outline will be a nice contrast from the cleanly contained and blended inner elements of the letter.
Step Eight: Photoshop, The Sequel
To the right, I have outlined the step-by-step creation of the final version of my design. I started working on making my doodles digital exactly as they were, but things changed around fast. First, the Israeli flag provides a nice background start for all the elements I sought to incorporate in the N. I found that when I didn’t fill the entire space with the flag, the flag’s stripes messed with the image’s balance as a whole because they were almost parallel to the horizontal top-and-bottom boundaries of the N. Having the stripes line the top and bottom of the letter’s outline was more effective, and it worked out nicely such that the Star of David surrounded the point where the letters intersect. When the flag was anchored in the left part of the design, I had the dancer legs on the left as well with the ball of the dancer’s foot on the Israeli flag to make a connection between my roots and what grounds me (symbolically represented by how the dancer balances herself on the Israeli flag).
But then I decided to make the flag take up the entire inner space, and so the dancer legs had to move too. I liked how a part of the Star of David was missing from the gap in the outline of the N, and I looked for a similar effect with the dancer’s legs, which I achieved by splitting it at the opposite vertex from where the Star of David was. I changed the color of the N to pink for the femininity aspect I originally intended to use glasses for (in the first version of my design), and changing the dancer’s shorts from black to pink added connectivity between those two elements. The pink with the blue of the Israeli flag provided a nice color composition for the image so far. Unsatisfied with the static pose of the dancer, I copied/pasted and toyed with the opacity of her right leg so as to imply motion.
Next comes the guitar. In some of the doodles, the circle representing the hole in the body of the guitar “reverberates” out past the guitar into smaller and smaller circles. Originally, the smaller and smaller circles lead to a dot drawn by a pencil, but I decided to incorporate writing in a different way, which I will explain later. The fading dots add another element of motion, like the dancer’s foot, and also draw the eye from the guitar across to the N-half of the N/Nun. To keep the continuity and balance of the image strong, I made the guitar and its fading dots the same color as the pink outline. A resulting effect is the fading dots leading to the pink shorts of the dancer, literally drawing the obvious connection between music and dance. Fading, repeated images in a design suggest passing of time, or implications of one’s past, and the dots head towards the Star of David before passing it, reflecting the significance of Israel in my history. I think the fading dots also portray a similar kind of playfulness to that depicted by the sketched outline of the letter, which is a part of my personality that my original design (referring to my first attempt, not the original doodles pictured above) failed to incorporate. Thus far this design is much better than my original because it’s not just a bunch of elements slapped together, but rather a bunch of elements that have something to do with each other and are connected. Already I am much more satisfied with this design – and I’m not even halfway done!
How do I incorporate journalism? The HuffPost logo is out of the running because the entire shape is a letter itself, which makes the blended HuffPost “N” not as interesting or unique in the context of this image. Originally I found an image of a newspaper with glasses resting on them, which I darkened and smudged in attempts to incorporate it as another continuous element of the image and not one that jumps out (see right). But I didn’t like it, so I left the journalism part alone for the time being. Perhaps I will find text to use as background image – I can duplicate layers and play with opacity to make the words unreadable (and therefore sticking to the no-text requirement of this assignment).
New York City occupies the solely “N” part of the letter (i.e. the right half), and it’s an image I took myself on a plane ride home last year. I blurred the sharply straight edge of the left side of the NYC image, and I darkened it as well as made it more opaque. Opacity was the prime tool of creating a continuous set of imagery within the boundaries of my letter because it is a simple way to make multiple images blend together while still giving the viewer the ability to distinguish each one. Once I was happy with the island of Manhattan image on the right part of the “N,” it was time to reincorporate everything else I had done so far.
I liked the feeling of motion given by the fading dots of the guitar as well as the dancer’s leg, and even slightly by the aerial shot of New York, so I wanted to give the outline of the “N” a similar motion-like effect. The best way to do this was to copy and paste the outline and shift it over slightly, either diagonally up-right or down-left (emulating the drop shadow effect without simply using it to do the job for me). Then the letter’s outline looked like a mishmash of too much pink, and I wanted a darker color to stand out. One of my favorite colors is purple, which goes nicely both with pink and the blue of the Israeli flag (it’s important to keep all colors in mind throughout this process), and after playing around with a few shades of purple I came across one that I felt fit perfectly.
Back to journalism. I decided to Google search “newsprint” to find columns of text that I could futz with in a way that added to the image without disrupting it. There was too much white on the “Nun” part of the letter anyway, and I thought the text could be the perfect way to fill that space. I duplicated the layer of text I found three times, and made them all different opacities, and then shifted the second and third copies slightly up and to the right or down and to the right – I can’t remember exactly what I did, but the resulting effect is a clear depiction of lines of text without readability, and that’s what I wanted.
The last debate was the background of the entire image. I am unsure whether it needs a background or not; some people found the white to be satisfactory and others thought that incorporating the same lines of text captured inside the letter as a background image (with different saturation to make the background distinct from the letter and its inner elements) was effective as well. I like the background, but if I think about this image as my logo it makes more sense to have the empty space be white so that the focus is entirely on the design.
Step Nine: Credit Where Due
Here are the images I used, linked to where I got them from:
