PSD Tut tres...novices beware

So here is my PSD Tut on how to make transparent glass lettering...

It was an awful tutorial. I literally only got to the 3rd step (out of 10 I think) - and the guy just tells you to copy the layer effects used from the sample. The CRAZY thing is, even when I did that (because there was no precise instructions on what to do) it looked NOTHING like what was in the example!! SO I spent like 45 min. tweaking what I had to make this, which I think looks good, but I would have liked to have a finished look like the tut does. ANYWAY - I usually read about how difficult the tuts are before I start them, and I must have only read the ones that said it was good, because when I looked back at them SO many said that it was confusing and missing steps.

Just my luck to put in an hours worth of work with no progress. humph.

Mine:

Tut:

http://psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/text-effects-tutorials/transparent-glass-lettering-in-photoshop/

-Erika

Calendar update.... technology woes.

So I don't understand it, but technology seems to be failing me lately. I have started to make the months for my calendar out of that stylized treatment on the type I am using - and I realized after you make one letter it is REALLY easy to make the rest, however, my computer is being extra crappy today. Now don't get me wrong, I love my macbook baby, but it's been freezing up Illustrator every time I save something AND won't even let me open InDesign...what the hell.

Good news is I do have something to show, unfortunately it is just the word January...however, I should be able to get all my months finished today in class on the class Mac's and then all I'll need to work on is my actual table for the days (which should be easy now that I know how to do tables in InDesign). Anyway, here's an update. I've decided to approach this project by working on individual elements first, rather than working on one month at a time. Today I plan on finishing the treatment for the months, and then work on the tables for the days of the week. Then I am going to make tree limbs out of that same stylized treatment and then add the details for that illustration later... Well, it's all in my head - I know what to do, I just have to do it now!

-Highly frustrated and technologically challenged,

Erika.

PSD tut dos

Here is my second tutorial. It was supposed to represent a sugar bag, however I chose a different font so it doesn't quite represent what the tutorial was exactly teaching. It was really easy though, I feel like what took the most time was just reading everything. Otherwise, the tutor did really well in describing EVERY step.

Here's what it was supposed to look like (click the pic to go to the link):

Here's my final product:

Quiz on Tables

Here is my not so beautiful, but (in my opinion) well table-ized calendar. I didn't want to put too much effort into making it as I want to be able move on and work on my other calendar elements right now. But, I did use and manipulate a few things learned from the linda.com tutorial/walk through.

Here it is (again not beautiful, but using elements that were needed to show I know how to use the table functions in InDesgin):

-Erika

Concept

So I do not have any physical progress to show today, as I have decided I would like to do an illustrator tutorial to create the type for the front cover along with the months. I am hoping that this will all work out to where I can also take the same style of the type and make it into the actual illustrations I create for each month. I can tell I have a lot of work ahead of me! Here is the tutorial of the type treatment I am going to use:

I am hoping to showcase this treatment in a vairety of ways throughout my entire calendar!

Wish me luck!!

-Erika

Calendar Inspirations & Ideas

So our next project is a desk calendar for the Numerical Institute (a made up company :D). I have a few inspirations I found on etsy that give me an idea of what I personally like. I know I would like to represent time passing through something like a plant (kind of like the one below with the tree...) or possibly with the actual paper changing from dark to light and back to dark for the change in the amount of light we have during the day. Also, I know I would like to focus on using just illustrations and not photos, as I used photos in the last project. I would also like to have a two-for-one type of calendar in that, on one side would represent the Northern Hemisphere, including holidays and observances from around the world in JUST the Northern Hemisphere, and on the other side it would represent the Souther Hemisphere and the holidays and seasons that change in that part of the world. This way, people from around the world could potentially purchase this calendar and it would adequately and fairly represent where they live.

Here are some of my inspirations from etsy:

Photoshop tut uno.

So here is the first photoshop tutorial we had to do. I chose one called "plastic jelly style" and can honestly say I actually liked doing it. I had painfully tried 3+ times in my class last week but I think that practice of getting familiar with what I was looking for helped me do it a final time. I didn't understand ALL the steps, but I got far enough to where someone could say "yep, that looks like a plastic jelly style." I know there are tons of cool stuff on photoshop, it's just a bit intimidating since now I am used to illustrator and indesign...photoshop is like a completely new world but it seems like it has so many more functions and possibilities then any other program i've used thus far. Anyway, here is my final product:

-Erika

Final Newsletter

So here are the spreads to my final newsletter - I actually had a lot of fun with this and I was really impressed with how it turned out. The first image is of the first spread which is the front and the back, and the second image is of the inside spread.

For our project we were supposed to choose either a topic of "design now", "global now" or "fashion now" and I chose a mixture of design and global. We were also supposed to highlight the aspect of a newsletter (like a nameplate, bylines, headlines, etc...) I used all of my own photography that I had taken while I was on a trip to Australia (in 2006 - yikes that was so long ago) and I touched them up in photoshop.

As mentioned in one of my previous posts, I wanted this newsletter to highlight different parts of the world's architecture each month, so I decided to fictitiously begin the process with Australia, simply because I took a lot of interesting pictures while I was there. You can see that one the inside spread I had to do what I like to call "information lines" as they were not true articles. As I kind of worked outside the box a bit, I wanted to just feature information on certain places in the world then have one (or two) actual articles written by people that might not actually relate to the site visited, but it be an article about architecture. Anyway, I had to work with the pictures I took, so I obviously had to find relative information about them to put in the newsletter. I also wanted this to seem like it was a brand new newsletter company starting up so I included a letter from the editor on the front.

I like to think it turned out nice and polished. (I will probably do a little tweaking in the future!)

-Erika