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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Week2-1

In this week I learned technique of photoshop to add and remove different objects from different pictures and photos. In this technique, lasso tool is used mostly and after finish our work on adjust the photo, we must also use crop tool to make sure that the picture is in the size that we expect. The stamp tool and brush healing tool is also used to fix the unexpected area. Here is my results:

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