Mike in Photoshop

Just a little note on what we were doing with Mike in our photoshop tutorial, finally learnt how to do a Duotone correctly and not make it look like a snails lunch.
First we needed a full colour image, I just grabbed a photo of when I went to egypt.
Converted to grayscale, adjusted the contrast, etc, the went to mode and selected Duotone. 

After that I toyed around with the various levels presented to me, just to essentuate the various tones present in the image, and to get to grips with what a combination of colours can do for an image, not just purely on an aesthetic basis, but a practical one.

With the option to do more than just duotone, there is also tritone, and quadtone. So I though I'd pop a cheeky tritone up just so you can see how lovely they can be.

Illustrator part 1

Suffice to say I learnt a fair bit in the session, mainly about colour selections, how to create our own swatches and load swatches. The swatch bit was handy, as we were shown that there is actually a number of swatch books that - depending on the print you want (gloss/matte/solid matte) - would give you every pantone reference, which is particularly handy, especially when you need an exact colour match and you have to send it off to the printers. There is also a large selection of spot colours available to choose from.


The handiest part for me was the edit colours  which basically enables you to spin a wheel on the colour spectrum and it pins down relative complimentaries to use. This is handy especially if like me you spend many an hour traipsing through swatches like a doped up mac monkey.


On a more serious note, when creating colour libraries/books, its very important to save the file as an ASE file, otherwise it may hinder the use of that book/library in other Adobe programs. For example, if using tints then it wont register with the other creative suite members.

Type Workshop

Last week on this day, we had our first type workshop with Graham, where we were doing some exercises to exploit the personality/mood that can be attained by manipulation of type by some basic tampering with it.

Using the word dog as a model for moulding into the various attributes given to us: angry dog, sad dog, scary dog, scared dog, etc. We were also told at the start of the workshops that we were only limited to using serif and sans serif fonts, rather than use something decorative, which can be misleading most of the time if not used in the right context. I didn't save what I did as I thought that I had learnt enough, as well as knowledge prior to the session.


4 main factors to consider when approaching any typographical matter:

1. Size - Determines the impact/effect of the type on substrate
2. Sans serif/serif - This effects the tone/manner of the type
3. Weight - This also is an aide for the effect on the page and personality of the type
4. Case - IT DEPENDS ON what you are trying to say.

This week's exercise was focusing on the space between the letters, and how the space can be manipulated to attune to a certain piece of type's function. 

Kerning was the technique applied, by identifying the largest space in between the letters and effectively kerning the letters/words, and not over-kerning which can effect legibility.

We then upped the ante by having to kern a proverb, using limited techniques to make the proverb appear as if it was spoken rather than just manipulated by the computer. The following are examples of what I did in the session. The proverb is one of Thai origin "Grabbing excrement is better than grabbing flatulence" - this basically means be happy for what you have.

The next 2 are outcomes/development from fourthreetwoone into reading onetwothreefour. This task was set to see if we could manage the task of changing readability so the class as a whole could identify with the type.