Good or bad, here are my comps for proj3. Glad they're done but not happy with how they look.Finding the right photos was difficult and my basic skills with PhotoShop don't allow me much flexibility. Saturday and Sunday I made an awful decision and wasted massive time and paid for it the rest of the week. Benetton produced an ad for domestic violence with a bruised woman wearing a purple shawl. It was 
perfect---shawl shape was the same as the ribbon. Couldn't use that same photo though, right? Decided I'd put the head of another woman on the photo. Difficult because the hair of the original model was long and cascaded onto her torso. Had to edit the torso out and make a shirt. Ugh. You can imagine how all of this went badly and wasted huge amounts of time. I didn't step back and say 'this is too time consuming, think of something else.'
Made another similar mistake with taking a photo of a woman with sleep bags under her eyes and accentuating them to appear as black eyes. Neither of these photos made it into these pieces. In fact, the postcard girl was a last minute decision yesterday. I'd found her earlier in the week but kept her on the back burner. But by picking her, I lost some of my ethnic diversity.
The only thing I really like about the photos is I wanted to go for a progressive emotion to parallel the stages represented by the headlines. Silence = bruised and head down. Words = improvement. Empowers = confronting the camera.
Haven't even fussed about my design elements! I had a very basic, straight layout. Wasn't happy, but the intended audience is a workplace so they need to have a professional look. Had something going Wednesday night but got off track and ended up with a bad execution of ribbons running through the design.
Grabbed an Urbanite for inspiration. Saw an ad for Hamden. Top was solid color interrupted by another solid color--the shape of a straight bullhorn--and bottom was solid color. All straight lines. Got me to the curvy, softer look you see here. Rough going and I don't love it.
Lessons learned: if something is taking a long time, reassess it's worth; don't spend too much time trying to find the perfect image--if you can't find it within an hour, it doesn't exist; don't leave your laptop security key with your husband.
4 comments:
this has been quite a week for you. for what its worth, i really like the color palate. this week, i think, is the hardest so far because you have to know right away. i had the same problem you did with my cartoons. i eventually had to just trace them and rescan them because i couldnt find anything high-res. but yea, i couldnt decide on a character.. lots of time wasted. but im dying to know - whats up with your husband and the security key?
Glad to see your comps! They look good. True, some more diversity is necessary, but considering your setbacks, not bad. It is hard trying to find the right photo to go with your idea.
One suggestion: I see that the wave treatments are not quite consistent: the postcard and poster(?) both have the solid wave on purple, and the magazine ad(?) cuts the wave off at the top. And I'd nix the watermark from the ad - I like the clean design.
I like the copy treatment overall - it's very clean.
I had some trouble finding new images for mine as well. I had to look for new ones based on my critique of my original images being too overwhelming and not speaking to my audience. I like what I wound up with though. i certainly can empathize with your Photoshop situation. I learned after week #1...just find the pic you want and don't mess with it. It brings on too much heartache.
Aw, I think a big part of the fun of Photoshop is image manipulation. But I see your plight, too. I spent a decent amount of time manipulating, changing, merging and painting on my images for my campaign. Not one of them are 'as is' and I know my project wouldn't have the same effect had I left them that way.
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