Collage Project

For this project, I used only pictures that I have taken (or that have been taken of me) during the past few years. Most of them are memorable experiences or symbols that are important to me, such as the photos taken during my semesters in France and New Zealand. It took quite a while for me to complete this project, mainly because I had a difficult time placing and arranging each layer, considering there were so many of them, and making sure that the layers were in the right order. I played around a lot with drop shadow, inner and outer shading, and the stroke aspects of each photo. I also used the selection tools and the magnetic lasso to cut out some images, and used the eraser tool on low intensity to help blend others into the background. I saturated some pictures to help them stand out, and tried to put interesting borders around others to add interest to the collage. 

Magazine Design Final Product

I ran into a few difficulties with this project, mainly having to do with not having a complete understanding of how to use InDesign. The first aspect of the cover that I made was the model, then the magazine title and background. I had to create the model, title, and background in Photoshop, then link the layers and drag them to InDesign in order to have the model’s head in front of the title without having the white box surrounding her cover the title as well. After figuring that out, I moved on to adding text. I chose the background color to match with the model’s bikini bottom, and used bright colors for the text that would both be visible when placed on the blue background, but would also not clash with anything else on the cover. For some of the cover stories, I imitated  Shape’s text design by highlighting some of the text boxes and making different lines of text different sizes. I made up some of the cover stories (such as the Candice Swanpool section) and chose some highlights that were used on previous issues. 

Logo Final Design

For this project, I changed the font, just to make the logo slightly more recognizable, and added the small climber silhouette. I also added a very basic outline of the recognizable shape of a mountain, which gives the logo a little something that identifies it with the sport of climbing. I also chose to keep the logo black, again, to retain the simplicity of the design.

Seabiscuit DVD Redesigned

The finished product.

DVD Redesign

I chose to redesign the DVD cover for Seabiscuit.

Shape Magazine

I'm not a big fan of magazines, but one of the ones I usually go to right away in the supermarket is Shape. I'm a very active person and I'm always looking for new workouts, so health/lifestyle magazines tend to draw my attention. They also have articles relating to new finds about healthy eating and how to boost energy levels, which is also something that interests me.

Basically, I'm not into the gossip/tabloid genre of information and magazines like Cosmo fall into more of the 'read it to make fun of it' category, leaving me with either Men's Health/Maxim material and, the only other option, women's health magazines. I used to tear out pages from Shape that had any kind of new ab routine that I hadn't heard of, and some of the articles in there are genuinely interesting. Shape more or less pertains to my life, and although 'Rumors that Jennifer Aniston is Having Octuplets, and you'll never guess who the dad is!' headlines are tempting, I prefer the good ole' 'Ten Ways to Toned Thighs' subject matter.

CD Redesign- Finish

CD Redesign

I chose to redesign the album for Cake's Comfort Eagle. I'm a pretty big fan of Cake, and they tend to be a little weird and out there, so I though it would be fun to remake their Comfort Eagle CD using ideas from some of the songs on their album, especially the classics like Short Skirt, Long Jacket, and Love You Madly. I would like to to play around with the figurative meaning of some of their lyrics by transferring them literally onto a template using visual aspects. At the same time, I don't want to make it extremely obvious that I just took some of their lyrics and put pictures to them, I'd like it to be a bit more ambiguous than that.

Logo Sketches

Petzl

Petzl is a very popular climbing company which sells basically the full range of gear out there, for sport, trad, and ice climbing, and caving as well. It was created in the seventies by a caver named Fernand Petzl, and is now one of the leading climbing gear companies in the world. The logo is very simple, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I think it could be changed, not dramatically, to retain the simplicity of the logo while adding something a little more recognizable to the climbing world. The key would be to retain the logo's easy recognition and not complicate it too much. Climbing gear is, in general relatively small and there are restrictions as to the size and amount of detail that one can incorporate into these logos when having to put them on such products as a headlamp or grigri. I would like to change the logo by adding some sort of clue as to the nature of the company- climbing and climbing gear. 

Lucida Grande

Lucida Grande is a humanist sans-serif typeface. Humanist fonts are those which allude to human handwriting in the construction of the letters. The sans-serif design can be classified into four major groups, one of which is the humanist group. The typefaces belonging to the humanist group tend to be the most calligraphic, and are typically more legible than other sans-serif fonts. Lucida Grande is a member of the Lucida family of typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. It looks very similar to the typeface Lucida Sans and Lucida Sans Unicode, in fact these fonts are almost indistinguishable. The two settings for this typeface are regular and bold, and there is no italicized version of Lucida Grande. Many websites and blogs use Lucida Grande as the default typeface for body text, most likely because it is easy to look at and read, and it one of the more simple fonts resembling human handwriting. On of the most popular sites which use this as a default setting is Facebook. 

Pentool exercise

Model

Family Photo

Bike

Seashells

September 19, 2011

Me

Despite the fact that I tell virtually everyone that I’m from New Jersey, I wasn’t born or raised there. I don’t actually feel like I’m ‘from’ there, either. I think the reason I tell people that is because it’s a lot easier to name one of the oh-so-familiar tri-state areas than to explain that I was born in the Virgin Islands (and no, not while my parents were on vacation). My picture, above, is the VI flag. I was born on St. Thomas and lived there for three years before moving with my mom and brother to New York, Florida, New York again, and eventually New Jersey. Although I had only lived there year-round for three years, I spent at least four months there every year afterwards, visiting/ living with my dad. I don’t really feel connected to, or have an identity with, any of the states I’ve lived in since, but I do feel a strong connection with my birthplace. Practically all of my happiest memories took place there, and I feel like it is a part of me as much as I am of it. 

Don't Forget to Turn Around

The past three months of my life have been almost entirely spent on planning trips, going places, and seeing things I have never seen before. Arriving in New Zealand was like landing on another planet; there are so many different things worth seeing and doing here that I could never have seen or done anywhere else. And with a seemingly endless list of places to go and things to see, one would need seemingly endless amounts of time to accomplish them all. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and I do have a finite amount of time here. This sad fact has led me to the conclusion that it is ultimately impossible to cram the experience of every exciting aspect of New Zealand into four and a half months and a limited budget. That is not to say that I, and nearly everyone else I have been traveling with, didn't do our best to try. At first the speeding from place to place barely slowing down long enough to rest our eyes on a single focal point for more than an instant seemed necessary. The less time we spent at each location that had been previously mapped out on our itinerary, the more chance we would have of making it to each town within that timeline. It made sense that the other two vans of our caravan would take off and leave for the next destination without even waiting for the third to fill up on gas. Time was of the essence. Constant stress was necessary to make it everywhere on time. This is the way it had to be. Or was it? It finally dawned on me that we were going about our time in New Zealand all wrong. Clearly, something had to be sacrificed, whether is was enjoying oneself or sticking strictly to an itinerary. So, while in the South Island, I came to accept that I would not see everything no matter how fast we drove or how little time we spend appreciating the scenery; I could not defy the laws of time and space to suit my own whims. This realization came to me as all twelve of our group embarked on a day-long hike though a coastal track in Abel Tasman National Park. I didn't even get a chance to see any of the breathtaking scenery around me during the first few hours, being too busy staring down at my own feet to make sure I didn't trip or slip on the muddy root-ridden steeply uphill trail we were following. And then it dawned on me. I couldn't recall listing 'to stare at own foot' as one of my reasons for wanting to come to New Zealand. In fact, I was almost positive that it was not. Thankfully, a few other of my friends shared this same sentiment. We weren't sure why we were rushing, yet again, through what was supposed to be an enjoyable, relaxing trek through some of the world's most beautiful landscape. Yes, it was easy to impress everyone back home with tales of how we made it to the northernmost point of the Southern Island, where one could look out across a great expanse of ocean and be able to see the southern tip of the North Island in the distance. But would we even remember what that place looked like? Every time we stopped at a lookout point that appeared to have come off of a high-resolution postcard, there was barely a pause long enough for a picture or two to be snapped before someone inevitably felt the weight of the itinerary on their shoulders and declared "all right, lets keep moving." There was absolutely no appreciation of nature, of the details, or of where we were lucky enough to be. Thoreau would have been appalled. 

And so, finally, I had had enough. I ceased to be concerned about sacrificing my own enjoyment strictly to keep together as a group, although by that time I was one of very few who had been putting in any effort to do so at all. I spent the rest of the day, and the rest of the trip, taking time where time was due to be taken. You may think that the most beautiful sights are best seen by rushing ever onward to a planned destination. But it is a huge mistake to go, head forward, eyes straight ahead, without bothering to stop and look around. Some of the most beautiful depictions of nature are only seen when we stop, turn around, and look behind us.

Here are just a few backwards glances:

Ragitoto Island

Northland

Northland

Abel Tasman

Abel Tasman

Coromandel

Coromandel

Franz Josef

Franz Josef

Cardrona

Lake Tanaka

Adventures to the South Island: Part Deux

Day 7. This was bungee day. That's right, we went bungee jumping off of the Nevis jump; a 340 meter fall into a huge canyon. Surprisingly, no one in our group was freaking out too badly, as for myself I was just pumped to take the step off of the platform of the cable-car extended mid-air in the middle of the canyon. 

Pure joy. The first few seconds of free-falling were amazing and the up-down-up-down bouncing was just plain fun. The whole process only took about two hours, so we spent the rest of the day exploring the town. 

The next morning, after having cookies for breakfast, we walked around Queenstown once again not sure what to do with ourselves, until we realized all of the cool stuff there was on the way to our next destination : Milford Sound. We left as soon as we could, and embarked on the five hour drive up to the sound. We reached a free campsite right alongside a river and decided to call it a night, leaving more daylight to explore the next day. 

The road to Milford Sound is paved in...more ridiculously scenic places. We stopped alongside a huge valley carved out by glacial action, saw the mirror lakes, took a walk down Cascade Creek, and took a peek at Homer's tunnel, a really basic, well, tunnel, that was carved through a mountain. 

Once at Milford, we took a short boat cruise through the Sound, which is actually not a sound at all but a fiord, also carved out by huge glaciers during the ice age. Once again, the place was filled with postcard-worth photo-ops. Ever on the move, we then left to take of the six hours separating us from Dunedin, which is apparently a hapening town on a Saturday night. We pulled in around midnight and through the sleepy haze I was in I heard the distinct noises of college kids out drinking their faces off. The next day was spent exploring, we had heard of a cool spot called Tunnel Beach (can you guess why?).

In the meantime, one of the other group's spaceship suffered from some irreparable damaged caused by engine failure. They were stuck in Dunedin for the rest of our time on the South Island, as our ever reliable rental company could not supply them with another van.

We decided to live in luxury again that night, and booked a hostel room for the four of us. To our delight, this particular hostel also boasted free 'continental breakfast' the next morning. Turns out their idea of continental breakfast is cereal and bread with some spreads, but we weren't complaining. Fueled and ready to go, we set out for Oamaru, home of lots of different penguins. The town also had a very cute, very old part to it, filled with craftsman workshops and art galleries. We spent some time walking around the historic-looking place before heading off to make our reservation to see the blue penguins come in from the ocean. The penguins were very cute and the 'show' was very much a rip-off. We paid twenty dollars each to peer through the dark and see about twenty tiny penguins quickly run from the water across a few meters of land into shelters where they remained hidden. But, like I said, they were pretty cute. Photography was not allowed.

We drove that night (again) in order to lessen the distance between us and our final stop before Christchurch: Lake Tekapo. We arrived there in the early morning and immediately inquired about hikes to do in the area. We took on a 3-4 hour hike that brought us around the coast of the Lake and up to the summit of Mt. John.

We were exhausted by the end, but were afforded some great views throughout the hike. With no time to spare, we decided to try and make it to Mt. Cook- New Zealand's tallest mountain- before night fell. I am so glad we did, although we didn't have time to do any extreme treks to the top of the impressive mountain, we did get to walk up to one of the lakes in the area and see icebergs! The sun went down just as we made it back to the van. 

And that, friends, is where the adventure ends. We spent the night driving back to Christchurch, and caught our plane (all of us) on time. Now its back to rainy Auckland, and school.