a view of computer system under drawing of brush(Wk9_2)

As looking at my desktop computer at home, I got an idea of drawing it on brush in adobe illustrator. It looks more funny and I think that it may be very useful if this type of drawing applied for advertisement.

A view of my book cover and bookmark design(Wk9_1)

In this week I designed a book cover and bookmark for my assignment. This is an interesting assignment because it helps us know how to design a book cover and a bookmark practically. Basically, my design based on white, gray, and specially bold red for blood due to this is a book of a mysterious story. The center point of my design is a died girl on the chair. This image I took it from my friend and used basic skill on photoshop to get her picture in threshold. The most interesting thing is that the knife on her hand and blood on it was made by me with only gaussian blur effect of photoshop. Finally, I looked at margin of my design mostly to follow the rules of gestalt and all of text in my design were arranged into same lanes.

From original image to threshold(WK8_1)

Sometimes people want to use an image with only black and dark black for some purposes of illustrating. this is quite easy with the help from Photoshop. It's quite easy: firstly, open the image that you want to get a piece of it, double click on background layer to let it becomes layer 0 . Use pen tool (Ctrl+P) to trace the area that you want to select in a new layer. After tracing it successfully, right click and choose make selection and it becomes a selected area. Next, go to Image\adjustment\threshold and save the image as type that you expected.

A simple flat world(Wk7_2)

Let's imagine a simple view of our earth: It was created from two polars: Northern, Southern and two directions: West and East. If we illustrate our Earth in a scientific way it may become complicated. However, in the view of art, a world can be illustrate by a flat compass with towers, house on it.

Photomontage (Wk7_1)

An image which is created by photomontage is a photo in which people can find many different meanings from the original photos. In this week I had an assignment for creating a photomontage with at least eight different photos. I decided to create a photomontage about about the history of USA under president George Bush's period. This photo was created with main potrait of Mr.George Bush at the center of the photo. Main events in Mr.Bush's period was recreated: terrorist attack on 9.11.2001, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, economic crisis and the first time in USA history a Negro American Mr.Obama won in the president election.

Let's protect environment....(Wk6_2)

Today on many electronic devices we may find many different marks of standard like CE(Europe standard) , UL (US standard).... but we rarely see any mark of protecting environment mark. I have found only protecting environment marks on refrigerator and air conditioner of LG and Sanyo products, so I had an idea to design a simple mark of protecting environment which was created of green leaves for good protection of forest, blue for fresh air and water, human hand for consciousness of people on protection of environment.

Simple but easy to realize(Wk6_1)

On the last Saturday when walking on the street I found many traffic guide boards with simple design of lines and shapes. Therefore, I had an idea: why don't I modify it to make it look more interesting? My modified design of boards look very simple with blue background and white for objects. I think that if these boards applied on the streets they may make the streets look more interesting.

Design a letter(Wk5_2)

In the previous week Miss Tuyet gave me a letter "C" . At the first time I had no idea to design it but after looking at some letter designs I got an Idea: design different types of "C" letter to use it for different purposes: the first and the last one could be used on advertising because it has decorations at corners, the second one could be used for labels of commercial products like sweet or toys. the third one is suitable for technical drawing only like drawings of machines or charts (diagrams) because it is clearly to be recognized.

How to make a dynamic image from an usual image(Wk5_1)

Photoshop is a powerful software to help us add and adjust effects on our original photo to a splendid photo. today I want to introduce the most easiest way on photoshop to adjust a normal photo to a photo with motion inside. Firstly, let's choose a motorman for my example:


After choosing an image, I used stamp tool (S) and Healing brush tool (J) to clone the corners to make it looks like a normal photo. Next, I used polygonal lasso tool (L) to choose the whole motorman. In next step I choose filter\blur\motion blur and adjust to about 3. That's all for motorman. However, the background looks like a static scene, so I choose select\inverse (or Ctrl+Shift+I) and after that choose filter\blur\gaussian blur and adjust to 2.8. Here is the result:

Easiest way to protect and decorate your electronic things(Wk4_2)

In Ho Chi Minh city people can find many places where they can cover their mobile phones and laptops with labels. This is really convenient because label can protect your mobile phones and laptops against scratches. This service is quite cheap, about 10,000VNĐ for a mobile phone and 30,000VNĐ for a laptop. Let's have a look at my little sister's laptop after labeled.

Blends on photoshop (Wk4_1)

Photoshop has many interesting functions. One of them is brush. I really love to use brush because it really saves time for us to make complicated images and effects with least time. Brushes can be downloaded easily from internet at some design forums like DevianArt. After downloading it, you must open "Brush window" in Photoshop and then choose your brushes which had been downloaded before and drag them to the "Brush window". That is the easiest way to install a mass of brushes at the same time. in order to make bland, the most important thing is that you must take care of color brightness and contrast. this is very important because if you do it carelessly, people ca realize the contour of object which is manipulated.

Make effects for photos without Photoshop(Wk3_2)

Today I want to introduce to everybody a software named vvphoto version 1.8 to make effects on photo like sepia, old photos... and one of the most special effects of this software is that it can make a photo looks like pencil drawing. But actually it makes only photo looks like pencil drawing , it can not be as well as original pencil drawing. I hope with this software people can make some interesting photos with only two easy steps: import the photo and choose effect and than choose which effect that they want :). Easy to make old photos. Here are some examples of old photos that I made:

Using mask and threshold in Photoshop(Wk3_1)

Mask is used widely in photoshop in order to hide things which we do not want to show on our art work. In the past I wondered how can I merge different areas of 2 different layers. It was so difficult for me to merge good areas of two layers until I studied how to use mask. In order to make mask for our work we must have at least 2 layers. For example, if we want to adjust an image , the first thing we have to do is that copy our image to a new layer or we can use shortcut key Ctrl+J. After that we wiil tick off "eye icon" of layer which we want to hide. After adjusting the first layer, we move to adjust the second layer by ticking on "eye icon" of second layer and tick off the first one. However, we found that each layer has its good and bad things. In order to get good things of second layer we must use "mask" . In order to make mask, we must choose the upper layer(in this case is the first layer) and choose making mask icon ( making mask icon looks like a circle inside a rectangle on layer work area. After that we choose brush tool and choose black color and choose mask layer we have made. As we brush the lower layer will appear. Therefore, we can merge good things of first and second layer.

The original photo:

The first layer :

The second layer:


The result:

typing...typing things(Wk2_2)

Today I had mood to make different composes of things based on typing which I studied in semester 1. This is an interesting work in which I can imagine and make different things that I want.Basically, I made my typing work by keeping original ratio of letters without scale. I just adjusted the size of letters and it was really difficult for me to keep it fit to the ratio of things which I intended to create.

Gestalt - basic tools for design(Wk2_1)

After studying gestalt theory and how to use it effectively for my design work, I found that in the past I made a lot of ineffective design because I did not know how to make a good feel to the viewers. The problem was that I could not make the viewers focus to my design due to my bad gestalt. However, after studying gestalt with different kinds of closure, continuance, similarity, proximity, alignment I found that if I know good about these concepts I can make my works better. I have tried one of them -continuance in my exercise with a background of snow flower and another background of vinca under the body text. I think that both background are about flowers and they are suitable for the content of body text. Moreover, the background of body text is darker than the main background will make the viewers focus mostly on the body text.

A view of a simple Universe (Wk1_2)

Universe is something which is strange and mystery. But on the art aspect, the universe can be represented in many ways like the Romans represent the universe with horoscopes or their mythology of many different saints or the Orients like Chinese represent the Universe with the symbols of yin and yan. All of the concepts of universe above lead me think that both the Earth and Sun has a relationship which can be represented by two gears, the big one is the Sun and the smaller is the Earth. This idea is based on a fact : the Earth turns around the Sun and turns around itself like a small gear turns around a big gear. The colors also represent for Sun and Earth ( Earth is called "Blue planet").

Design a T-shirt (Wk1_1)

The first assignment of electronic imaging is interesting with a task of designing a T-shirt with both Sun and Moon on it. Firstly, the main idea must be based on Sun and Moon and everything relates to them. Secondly, the Sun and the Moon must be designed to be interactive (attract the people ) and there were two options for me to choose: cute or abstract. I chose the first one because the T-shirt is not only designed for adult or people who under the meaning of an abstract picture, the T-shirt is designed for all people of all ages and for both men and women. As I said before, everything must be related to Sun and Moon, so I designed in front side of the T-shirt an image of the Sun on the background of a blue diamond represents for the morning sky. I chose a blue diamond shape for the background in order to make a reflection to attract the visualizing of people. The Sun wear sun glasses also means morning is the time when most people feel cheerful. In contrast, on the back side of the T-shirt I designed a face of the Moon and people can realize that the face was based on the face of a woman instead of a man like the front side. My main idea of designing the T-shirt is basically based on reflection of Sun and Moon, day and night.

week11_5 Review my last DIM 2 course

It is nearly to the end of semester 2, it also means that I am now in the last of DIM 2 course. In DIM2 course I learned many things from my lecturer: Ms.Li Ping. She taught us many different techniques of Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and Flash. These tecniques are very useful and I think that these techniques are a combination of skills which we must use in the future on web design, publish and Photography which are related to my design job in the future. I also found that Flash is also useful when making an introduction or credits for my video assignment, this is a good thing that we can see if we know how to work on different design softwares. Therefore, techniques are very important and I learned a lot of design techniques in DIM2.

week11_4 Is Nintendo DS Lite designed based on MacBook ?

since Nintendo Lite sold, not only me but also my friends asked a question: Is Nintendo DS Lite designed based on MacBook ?

This question is not easy to be answered. however let's have alook on Nitendo DS Lite. All its corners were rounded as seen on MacBook, it also has white and black color for different models . It looks like MacBook but this is a portable gaming device, so I think that it is quite different due to its small size.

Week11_3 religion construction(cont)

There are many differentiations between western catholic church and oriental pagoda design.In western countries the churches were designed with many sharp shapes and sharp corner while pagodas in oriental countries based on curves. The reason for this was that in western countries, most of the constructions, include churches must keep warm in the winter, so the roof with sharp corners will keep warm most effectively while oriental countries are tropical countries, so heat is the most consideration and the roof with curves will make the air inside more cooler, especially in summer.

Week11_2 - car design by the time.....

Car is one of the most popular transportation vehicle which changes daily life extremely quickly. however, car design also has a long history since the car industry was born.

VW Bettle,photo:stray muse from http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1044350 on 7/9/2008

Volkswagen Bethe was the first popular car during Pre-World War II period. This car was designed with rounded shapes to make a visual smooth. This car was manufactured up to 2005 with the last one in Mexico. The design of this car is suitable for Europe : small size can move between small streets, cheap, low fuel consuming (this is very important during Pre-WWII because fuel price at that time was high).

Oldsmobile Super88,photo:stray muse from http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1059937 on 7/9/2008



Avto VAZ 2103,photo:stray muse from http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1062733 on 7/9/2008

During decade from 1960s to 1980s, car design changed to two types in two group of countries: capitalism and socialism. design of car in western countries like West Germany and US was based on fashion and important event at that time : the first time people go to the space and go to the moon, so cars of US was based on image of spaceships although those deigns were not suitable for moving, they were too big to move on streets. In contrast, cars in socialism countries like East Germany, USSR, Czechoslovakia were designed by only two reasons: cheap and durable, so these cars were not attractive consumers.

sports car,photo:stray muse from http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1019561 on 7/9/2008

From 1990s, the cars were designed mostly based on fashion, speed and low consuming fuel. Therefore, cars during this period were designed beased on results of many different research on air effect, safety.

Yellow New Beetle,photo:stray muse from http://www.sxc.hu/photo/953130 on 7/9/2008

Week11_1

Today I will introduce some websites where provides free icons for different purposes like build a web, flash and they are also useful for visual programming. These are loyality free icons websites, this is the most important point because I found that many students got trouble with copyright problems before.

http://www.webappers.com/2008/02/12/webappers-released-free-web-application-icons-set/

http://elevatorhappyfun.deviantart.com/art/AirPort-Disks-Icon-79141643

Be careful when use these! :

http://www.vistaicons.com/index.htm

http://www.crazyleafdesign.com/blog/sunday-design-resource-issue-3-500-icons-every-designer-needs/

week10-2

A common question when we draw with Adobe illustrator is that how to make another copy of an object inside that object with a smaller size. I have found the answer when I did my tutorial assignment: choose the object that you want to make a smaller copy inside it, go to Object\path\offset path and choose the offset that you want. Another tips for making the intersect of 2 lines look more naturally at the corner made by 2 lines is that go to window, choose stroke and you can choose the type to round the intersect of 2 lines. I hope that these tips may be useful when we want to make our drawing looks more naturally.

week10-1

Today I just want to discuss how to make a suitable background for a particular purpose that a designer wants to send to the viewer.First of all, the designer must determine what is he or she is now talking about. After determined the topic, he or she must think of colors, objects and the order of them in the background that he or she wants to display.About the colors, the designer should make them reflectively between objects . For example, if a designer wants to design a background for honey products, he or she can add a black or brown bear besides a yellow honey pot. This contrast of colors will get the attention of people. That is also the reason why I will also make my tutorial flash with two contrast colors like black and silver. About the order of objects, It should be focus on the main object that we want to mention.

Week9_1

After few weeks worked with my assignment of flash, my product was created with a few things I still confused. Although my portfolio flash was finished but I think that it still remained many mistakes of contents and technique. Anyway, I hope that I will fix this on my next assignment. First of all, I found that in flash with action script 2.0 code we can give a name for a frame and using it in action script 2.0. for example, I have a frame at 360th frame and I give it a name"first", instead of writing gotoAndPlay(360), I will write gotoAndPlay("first"). This is very convenient when we add new frames between old frames because the code still work when we add more frames while if you write gotoAndPlay(360) it will work not accurately.

Week7-2

There are a lot of websites and forums on the internet give us different tutorials on Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop. Today I want to introduce a website where we can find tutorials, tools for both Photoshop and Illustrator: http://browse.deviantart.com/ . At this website we can join the forum to discuss or download different tools for Photoshop and Illustrator. I hope this website is helpful for us to make different effects on our works.

Week7-1: A layout of my flash assignment

Today I have created a sketch out of my next flash assignment. At the first time, I Created its background on photoshop with yellow background. However, I realized that yellow background make my flash seems to be boring, so I decided to change it into blue and this time it looks better when the viewer watch it, It really makes the viewers feel that it is interesting. The color of buttons also forward the viewer to the contents of viewer.

Week6-2 Trace a tiger face

When I was in the process of creating a poster for my assignment poster design, the most difficult thing that I must face to is how to trace a face of a tiger and make it look naturally. After trying a lot, I found that I must trace each black block on the tiger face one by one and the other thing which make the tiger look more naturally is its eyes and its ears. These two elements are very important, if tracing the tiger face without them, the tiger may look like a dog or a cat rather than a tiger.

Week6-1 Amazing safari

Today I want to introduce my third picture which was created by using brush tool in photoshop. As we know, brush tool in photoshop is an interesting tool to make many different type of picture with only choose suitable brush, and opacity of the layer where the brush located on. One important thing when using brush tool is that each element of picture should be created on an independent layer in order to manipulate them easier later.

Week5_2 how to improve your PC for design purposes

In this entry I will introduce some ways to improve Windows computer/laptop for design purposes. I will not mention this for MAC OS PC because MAC OS and MAC PC/MACBOOK are professional systems for design. As we know, a MAC PC/MACBOOK is very expensive and many people can not buy them easily. Therefore, Windows PCs are more popular and most of us use Windows PC everyday. Generally, Windows PCs are good for common purposes like playing games, edit documents, simple graphic purposes. However, the biggest problem of a Windows PC when designing is that after working a long time it becomes slower on executing tasks. This problem comes from fragmented sectors on HDD(s). In order to solve this problem, I suugest that we should use a fast fragmenting software like UltimateDefrag 2008 after using the PC/Laptop about 1.5 to 2 hours for design. UltimateDefrag 2008 can be downloaded easily on the Internet or can be bought at CD software shops. This method I had tested before and it was very effective, my laptop with 4200 rpm HDD can work easily with design softwares and this can be better with Desktop which was built with 7200 rpm HDD. Secondly, I suggest that if we intend to use a Desktop/Laptop for design purposes with low expenditure we should buy a Desktop/Laptop with dedicated graphic card(I don't suggest onboard graphic cards like Intel 945 or Intel X3100 ) although this kind of Desktop/Laptop may be more expensive about 10-20% compares with the others which have onboard graphic cards but this investment is worth for the power of your design purposes.Lastly, I also suggest that we should upgrade the memory of Desktop/Laptop to at least 2 GB (the price currently in Vietnam is about $40 for DDRII 667 MHz ) and we should use Intel Core2Duo or CentrinoDuo, do not use Intel Celeron. I hope that after this entry, many people can use a low cost computer for design purposes. Anyway, although both MAC PCs and Windows PCs still remain a lot of problems but in my opinion we should choose a suitable PC system for our purposes but it must be also fit to our budget, do not waste your money on the system which does not bring effects to you .

Week5_1 outline of my poster design

Well, this week I started designing a poster for protecting tiger campaign of website www.savethetigers.org. By this design assignment, I found that it is quite easy to make the tiger skin on Adobe Illustrator. My poster was a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator. First of all, I draw the background on Photoshop by using Brush tool to make the clouds and the lights. This is quite easy on photoshop with brush tools can be downloaded from www.getbrushes.com . Moreover, the tiger skin can be made by drawing rectangles and use transform tools in Illustrator to make it. This can be referenced at http://www.pegaweb.com/tutorials/tigerskin/tigerskin.htm . My poster meaning is quite easy to understand: The clouds and the lights represent for the indefinite future of tiger. The octagon with red stroke represent for the dangerous situation of killing tigers. But, if people stop killing and protect the tigers on time, they may not be disappeared, this was represent by yellow "stop" with the meaning stop on time as well as traffic light signal. Finally , the blood drops on the "stop" means it's now and everyday, everytime there are a lot of tigers are being killed for different commercial purposes.

Week4-2 Vietnamese traditional and modern religion construction

My last entry for this week will focus on Vietnamese traditional and modern religion construction.
Firstly let's talk about buddhism construction. All of the buddhism construction in Vietnam have the specification of curves on the roof of tile. This type of architecture is affected from Chinese architecture since the buddhism became popular in Vietnam about a thousand years ago. Another specification of Vietnamese pagoda or village temple is that they usually constructed from at least three main rooms with three main saints for each room. This can be seen very clearly in North Vietnam in the countrysides. According to old people live in countryside of North Vietnam, main elements of constructive material are mix of honey of sugar cane, egg and lime. This traditional constructive material is very durable. When I was a child, I lived in the countryside and my grandmother usually washed clothes on a part of old wall, it was build from a hundred years ago and it was very hard, may be as well as modern concrete. Another specification of village temples of north Vietnam is that they always have red wood columns.

(To be continued and updated)

Week4-1

My assignment for this week was re-draw(trace) a car, this is quite interesting and I got more new experience to use Adobe Illustrator better. Actually, we should start tracing from the small part of car to the bigger parts. Each part of car should be traced in one layer and the layer should be named as the name of the part of car which was traced. Lastly, when filling color, we should imagine the direction of the light and base on that to use gradient tool and adjust the opacity of layers appropriately. In order to trace my car, I used more than 100 layers to draw it. This is not the most perfect drawing but I am happy with my result.

Week3_2

Photoshop with brush tool can make a lot of image with different effects. These brush tools can be downloaded from internet. The libraries of brush tools are very useful in many cases when the designers want to draw quickly suboject of image. My 2 examples draw images of storms on the field. Those images were drew with basic techniques of photoshop in using layers, fill tool and brush tool.

Week3_1

Adobe Illustrator is a powerful software to create vector graphic and it is also useful for practical print like name card, neon sign and other greeting card. Today I created a birthday card which has the size of half of an A4 paper. This card can be created easily with a hard A4 paper and print it on color printer. This birthday card has both margin and bleed area is 0.5 cm. The birthday card was created based on gaussian blur and adjustment of opacity of objects. Each object on this card should be created on different layers and adjusted to about 60-70% of opacity .It is very attractive if people can make their own birthday card and give it to friends. This birthday card may become more interesting if we print it on an perfumed paper cost about 2000 VNĐ.

Week2-2

Another interesting thing when using stamp tool and healing brush tool is that they are not only help us in recover old photos by recovering bad area of photos but also help us remove unexpected things in the photo. In my example of church photo, I removed a car , men, wires, a bird and a tree at the left corner. I also use a new technique that I found is that I cloned the main door of the church on the left for all three doors by lasso tool and after that wrap it. I used the same one for the wall in front of the church. In old photos, I recovered them by using only stamp tool and healing brush tool.

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