Final Project - Martha's Vineyard Summer

For my final project I decided to talk about Martha's Vineyard, MA where I spend my summers working and living. My parents got a place in the Vineyard 5 summers ago and I have been there every summer since (hopefully not this summer if I can find a real job and not just a summer job).

I took a lot of pictures from facebook of my friends and I in the vineyard and also took some from the internet. I talked about what Martha's Vineyard is, who visits there, the towns, and the social life. I also talked about what I have done for work there as well as what MV means to me personally, an oasis, a place for me to get away from school and family. This project was not all that difficult besides figuring out what I wanted to talk about and pictures to use.

I am a huge New York Rangers fan and was thinking about doing something on the Rangers, but decided not to because I wanted to incorporate what I do over the summer (my favorite time of year). This project reflects me because the pictures I used are something I am directly involved with.

I used webng.com to post all of my soundslides. I found webng to be very difficult because many times the files wouldn't upload, the site would say loading like it was trying to upload the files but never ended up doing it. After trying for hours they eventually uploaded. My username on webng is mfox137 and I have 3 soundslides located there. This is a great feature to know how to do because I know some people that were talking about doing a slide show of numerous pictures and now I know how to do it and will be able to.

Waffle Fries - Animated font poem with collage

Herbivore Restaurant & Store Online Brochure - Home Page

The main purpose of this site is to promote the concept of veganism and the lifestyle that goes with it. It is also to inform and gain awareness in the public of Herbivore and what the restaurant and store have to offer.

There will need to be important but brief information about the restaurant and store on the home page along with multiple hyperlinks to the other pages. Vegan promotional pictures will also be incorporated into all of the pages. There will be hyperlinks to different pages which will be titled: about us, menu, restaurant, and retail store. The retail store will contain an online ordering section to make it easy for customers to purchase items with ease.

I used photoshop to complete the mock website for Herbivore Restaurant & Store. I decided to use a black background, even though black is not the best option or color for veganism, because I thought it would look better with the letter colors and pictures. As you can see I uploaded a couple of images from the internet that show was Herbivore is all about. This is just the home page, with the links on the left and the title of the page top center. I only used a little information in the green text to describe what Herbivore is all about. The other links will lead to more information.

Again, I chose this topic, Herbivore, because Matt Ball is my client for PR Techniques class and thought by doing this I can help out Matt Ball in any ways he needs. I messed around with the fonts and layer styles to get it to what I liked. This was not all that hard just took some time in getting the layers to what I wanted and to finagle around the options. I wouldn't say that this is a great website but it is a start to something Matt Ball could use to gain awareness and to show people what his philosophy on life is.

Herbivore Restaurant & Store Brochure

For the brochure assignment, I decided to do it on my Public Relation Techniques client Herbivore Restaurant & Store. For my PR Techniques class we have been dealing with Herbivore as our client. Matt Ball is the owner and founder of Herbivore and he “opened” a vegan restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island. He has a restaurant on the West Coast as well. He expanded here to Rhode Island. We had to make a brochure for him to gain awareness.

PURPOSE: The primary purpose is to increase business for Herbivore Restaurant & Store by informing and convincing the public of the goods and services Herbivore provides. A secondary purpose is to gain awareness in the Rhode Island area about the vegan lifestyle and the friendly atmosphere involved with Herbivore Restaurant & Store.

ORGANIZING CONCEPT: The concept of the brochure is to be plain, simple and to the point. We would like to express our themes and actions on the first page for they are a key utility in reaching the existing and potential customers. Another concept that will ultimately help Herbivore Restaurant & Store’s business and financial stature is having the audience or readers picture themselves in the shoes of those in the pictures found in the brochure.

CONTENT: The content of this brochure will include those of the website. We will have a section for background/information on Herbivore (mission statement, Matt Ball, vegan history/facts.) Another section will be focused purely on the restaurant that will include testimonial favorite dishes and hours of operation. Another section will be focused solely on the retail store that will include some pictures of the hottest items and the earthly techniques in producing the products. Another section will be on the upcoming events and will add a testimonial on the bottom about how fun the previous event was. Lots of pictures will be used and friendly, earthly colors will be used on the background or edges of the brochure.

The front panel is the picture used from herbivorerestaurant.com labeled as “the earthly grill”. This informs everyone what the brochure is about. Underneath the picture I placed the title “herbivore restaurant & store”. The back panel has the contact information to contact Herbivore. We do not know the exact address or phone numbers because Matt Ball didn’t really open a restaurant in Providence, we just pretended that he did. The inside flap is the mission and objectives of Herbivore Restaurant & Store. The inside of the brochure was broken down into three different segments. On the left I chose to talk about the restaurant itself and what it’s all about. In the middle I have placed information on why to eat vegan and about the veganism lifestyle according to Matt Ball’s philosophy. I chose to do this because we want to reach those who enjoy the veganism lifestyle and I felt that if the audience was to read his philosophy that they could agree with the idea of Herbivore and want to know more. On the right side I talked about the retail store that is located right next to the restaurant. I didn’t put all that much information on the products or menu because I want the audience to look at the brochure and want to know more by either going to the restaurant and store or to check out the website.

All in all, this wasn’t that tough of a project to do because I knew the information I needed to put in it and used photoshop images to enhance the brochure.

Big Rush aka Sean Rosch

The poster is probably my best work in the class. I chose my artist to be Sean Rosch from Pawtucket, RI. He is an up and coming local rapper. He goes by Big Rush. He is originally from upstate New York and has moved to Providence doing local shows and sometimes travels throughout the Northeast. I used photoshop to design this poster. Using a picture of providence found on google images; I chose to put it on the bottom with the picture of Sean on top, kind of like he is on top of Providence singing down to Providence. I rotated his body to make it look like he is singing down to the city of Providence. The top is the final while the bottom was a draft. I realized on the bottom one that the writing "check out my tunes @ myspace.com/westallah was not centered and therefore had to and I also changed the colors around to Sean's likings. To get the glow on his sweatshirt I used the erase tool to air out some expression coming from Sean.

I messed around with the different types of fonts to see which I liked best, I had a bunch of options but went with the big clear letters... BIG was a larger font while RUSH was a little smaller but same font. I took the image of Providence and used the outline glow feature to spice up the poster. I am most proud of this assignment because it came out really well with a lot of time put into it.

RHCP Powerpoint / Soundslide

Font Poem

This "poem" can be heard and found on youtube. I chose a couple of song lyrics first but realized that they were either too long or not weird enough for my liking. I took this phrase from a popular youtube video. It's this guy talking to his "girlfriend" and telling her to make him a chicken sandwich, and of course, "fo free". The creator of this youtube video is clever, rude, and hysterical. These youtube videos I believe first came out about five years ago and I still hear some of his quotes from time to time by friends and random people. I myself have formed a habit of talking the way he did. He talks the way you would talk if you were angry and said things but didn't move your teeth, kind of keeping your bottom teeth touching the top.

Anyways, the font poem was a ton of fun, but also so very frustrating at the same time. I first made one that somehow got erased and had no idea what happened. I had to start over. Ahh, I know. So when I got the words out there I messed around with the styling and colors. I used a lot of black lettering because the way you say this quote/poem is in a dark manner. None the less, I had a black background as well, but just absolutely didn't like it so I immediately changed it back to white.

The fonts and coloring were very tough. I was able to somehow figure it out the way I liked it. As you can see not much has changed from the rough draft from the final. I had the colors, font, and size down in the rough draft, I just wasn't sure of how I was going to position it. I knew I wanted the "chicken sandwich" and "waffle fries" together but separate. Another tough part was the words waffle and fries. You can see the in the background of the word waffle and fries are letters. I copy pasted the letter "i" and placed em in the background and rotating them. The same went for the word waffle but with the letter "l" and there is one "f" as well in the background. This was tough to do and took some time but all in all I think that it is the highlight of my font poem.

This was the most fun and exciting assignment to date and it also helped me a whole lot with the program PhotoShop. I didn't know how to do much of this in the beginning but after playing around for hours - I learned as I went.

Contact Sheet

The first row dealt with differences in resolutions. At first I didn't know much about resolution and the way it affected each picture in the row. I went to Image on the toolbar and clicked Image Size; here, I changed the height to 1in. Here is also where it showed me the exact resolution of each picture. As the resolution goes down you can clearly see the differences. After playing around with pictures and manually changing their resolutions I stuck with the grasshopper. What I did was saved each picture into my Contact Sheet folder, specifically the pictures section, after saving each one I dragged the picture from the pictures folder right onto the word document. The picture showed up, everything was good. After finishing the 1200 dpi I opened the original photo back up and changed the resolution respectfully for each box. I had to change the size each time to 1 inch in height. This is a pretty good tool to use because different photos are meant for different resolutions. Some photos look way better at a certain dpi level. I am new to Photoshop so this is a great tool to be able to use in the future.

The second row was the Format/Mode row. The boxes are labeled CMYK, RGB, DuoTone, BW. I looked at these and had no idea what they meant, although I did guess BW meant black white. CMYK is print color, RGB is monitor color, DuoTone is pretty strange to me, and I still don't fully understand but it was cool beacause you can add different color schemes to it. CMYK is the colored format that is printed from a printer. RGB is monitor meaning colors you see on the web. The original picture is a field that has different colors for each row, which I felt would be a perfect picture to represent each formatted mode you can use with PhotoShop.

The third row is dealing with different orientations of a picture. I found a really nice photo on the internet and used it because a difference in orientation would not affect the masterpiece of this photo. The landscape orientation was done by changing the width to 1.75 inch and keeping the height at 1 inch. As for all the photos on my Contact Sheet they are all 1inch high. Orientation dealt with changing the width. The square orientation is obviously 1 inch by 1 inch and done by using the crop tool from the top left corner - then went and moved it to the right to the spot in the photo I wanted to capture. Portrait has the same height with 1 inch and changed the width to .75 inches; this was also done by using the crop tool from the top corner and then moving to the most desired area.

The fourth row is a photo of a bunch of pencils. I chose this photo because I wanted to show all the pencils and then eventually zoom in to the tip of one or two colored pencils. As you can see in the wide angle photo it shows all of the pencils and I didn't make any changes to the original photo. I used the original photo for the wide angle. I then began to slowly zoom in on the right side of the pencils by using the zoom feature in PhotoShop. Then I chose to zoom in on the left side of the colored pencils, again using the zoom feature. The close-up photo I chose to zoom way in on the middle of all the colored pencils to show the tips of them. All in all this row was a great learning experience with the zoom feature on PhotoShop.

The fifth row deals with the content of a photo while using the zoom feature. I chose a picture of Alexander Ovechkin, who plays hockey in the National Hockey League for the Washington Capitals. He might be one of the best players playing at the moment and also one of my personal favorite players. The representational photo is the photo of Ovechkin made to fit 1 inch in height. I then began to zoom in on the next two photos and ultimately got the the abstract photo. The abstract photo is such a zoom in whereas you can barely tell what is going on in the photo. This row shows the abstract photo and then gets to the representational photo. By looking at the abstract photo you can't tell what the photo is until you zoom out or look at the representational photo.

The last row is dealing with different purposes you can use. I chose to use a photo of a T-Rex in this row. I did this because sometimes when I am dancing around my friend have mentioned that I look like a T-Rex, I don't know - thought it would be funny playing around with the different artistic features with this. The journalistic photo is the original photo fitted to 1 inch in height. I then moved to the CrossHatch by using the smudge feature to smudge the picture a little. The DryBrush photo is my favorite photo because I added the glow feature to it. I did this because it makes it look like glowsticks and rave type atmosphere, in which dancing, and T-Rexin' come hand in hand. The Palette Knife photo was done by using the palette knife feature which smudges the photo a little bit but not as much as the CrossHatch. All of these features are found in PhotoShop by going to Filter then Artistic then choosing whichever feature you want to use to fulfill your purpose in the photo.