course projects

RacerX Logo and Brand Style Guide

In this project, we were tasked with creating an original brand logo for a gaming company called Racer X. This brand style guide was created to accompany the logo for logo usage and brand identity. This design artifact needed to include the brand’s voice, imagery, and style for future consistency within the brand. The audience for this piece will be RacerX’s marketing team and their future graphic designers who will maintain the brand’s image. The concept here was to craft a brand style guide for a fun, casual gaming company that does not take itself so seriously. The style guide contains all of the critical design elements for a brand’s image and how to

use that image to portray the brand properly. For this artifact, a grid helped immensely to keep all of my text and illustrations aligned. This alignment is what makes the style guide feel cohesive and professional. Overall, this piece is the culmination of my studies and combines all of the skills required for brand identity.

Metromoheim Museum Portraiture Collection Catalog for Collette D.

This artifact was created to compile a fictitious artist’s collection of portraits within a fictitious museum collection. This project was intended to test our use of grids as a structure for multi-page content. Magazines, brochures, books, catalogs, and pamphlets all require an understanding of grids and how they organize the elements of a design. The audience of this artifact is the viewers of the collection as they will be provided a catalog upon entry to the exhibition. This could be family and friends of the artists as well as art lovers from the community. To be effective, this catalog showcases a grid to benefit readability which enhances my ability to create professional multi-page designs using layout and compositional techniques to make the images the most prominent feature of this artifact which communicates a level of importance to the audience that the imagery contains. Contrast and space play a large role in the effectiveness of readability and comprehension. I think the most unique feature is the use of the white space as a frame for the portraits. 

Fresh Fare Farms Hunger Action Month Advertising Campaign

These artifacts were developed as a part of an ad campaign for Fresh Fare Farms which is a meal kit delivery service. Its purpose is to be displayed across multiple channels of advertising. The first is on social media as a seamless advertisement carousel of photos. The second is an animated skyscraper-style advertisement that is seen natively and incorporated into websites. The third is a magazine advertisement which incorporates my print design skills with my ability to understand and adhere to a brand style guide. The intent is to represent the brand according to the brand style guide and spread awareness of their giving back to local communities during Hunger Action Month. The brand also seeks to expand its campaign to young adults aged 21 to 35 who may be college students or young professionals with busy lives. Together they will show my ability to create a cohesive ad campaign across multiple platforms while maintaining consistency in the brand image. 

Piddle Paddle Tours Brochure

This artifact was created to advertise the travel company, Piddle Paddle Tours. Including elements like the brand logo, photography, tagline, services, call-to-action, and destination descriptions determined the project’s success. This project’s purpose is to target the brand's audience which are those looking to travel to the Gulf Coast of Alabama and entice them to book with the tour company. The rationale for this project is to align the required elements in a brochure type of our choosing to create an effective pamphlet. The most unique feature of my brochure is the services panel where I rotated the title using a banner technique where the services are separated into large, colored blocks.

Scoop Shoppe Artisan Creamery Animated Social Media Advertisement

This ad blends target-audience preferences with interactive features and animation to attract our audience’s attention. The audience for the ice cream shop is young adults and children on social media. The message is light and easy to read while expressing interest by offering a sample with every order. The colors were chosen from the brand style guide and are all used in the full-color logo for the brand. There is also an interactive glowing button for the call to action that will navigate the user to the company's website. This ad showcases my developing skills in animation and GIF creation. 

Focus 05 Downtown's Luxxe Restaurant Banner Advertisement

This artifact is a banner advertisement that was created for a new restaurant-style where there are no phones allowed. It will be a place for a younger audience to connect with the people around you. The ambiance of the restaurant is that of a social environment where your friends and loved ones can gather without the distractions of social media and texting. The banner ad is meant to represent this atmosphere with a simple tagline of ‘No phones, just connect’. This piece employs my understanding and development of a banner ad that expresses the message of the brand while utilizing aesthetics to appeal to our target audience. The target audience for this restaurant is millennial-aged individuals and their friends who have a severe attachment to their devices and desire to spend time with their loved ones without the devices in the way. The call to action in the top right tells you exactly what to do at Luxxe and the pictures give you a peek into the dining area while showing diversity in imagery which is an audience preference. 

Community Cup's Coffee Shop Grand Opening Poster

This piece shows my skills in organizing a poster that is intended to drive a crowd through a call-to-action and eye-catching visuals. The target audience for this poster is the local community and coffee lovers alike. The rationale for this artifact was to balance all of the required copy on a page with the visuals that will draw an audience. Instead of using white for the text on the poster, I chose a triad of complementary colors that would prove for a cohesive theme and visually appealing. The effectiveness is based on the balance of color, line, shape, text, and texture in a complete design that uses the approved imagery and text. The concept is to offer a discount to new customers at their grand opening and therefore, gain repeat customers. The most unique aspect of this poster is the curved line of the coffee cup in the image that the name of the coffee shop lays on.

Typographical Portrait of Taylor Swift

This artifact was created to showcase how art and design can be combined to create unique portraiture. The design shows off some of Swift’s albums and qualities through a typeface just as unique as her signature. The typeface known as Lindsey Signature is nearly identical to Taylor Swift’s signature which is one of the reasons I chose this font to represent the artist. It is also known that script and cursive typefaces are highly personal giving this portrait a hand-drawn look. To be effective, the typography choice needed to represent the chosen celebrity or artist. I think my design is successful in accomplishing this because of the personable nature of the artist and their music. It is not just her signature that defines her style but the love and thought that goes into everything that she does. The elements and principles of design were used to leverage the color and contrast of the text and the background to create a subtle, soft figure. The line tool in Adobe Illustrator was used to create the curves of her hair and face that the text lay upon. The most unique feature of this artifact is her skin and how the straight lines look like a different texture when compared to the rest of the image.

TOWN: A Chinese Restaurant Sitemap and Website

This sitemap and website were designed for my final project in graphic design for the web where we were to create a website from the bottom up as we began with the sitemap to get a feel for the layout. The purpose of these skills is to improve our web designing skills as many graphic designers will need to work with website design in the crafting of their portfolio website. The intent and message of this website design project was to create a website for the Chinese Restaurant, TOWN. There were few parameters other than color palette and typography that coordinated with their logo for branding purposes. The functionality played a big part in the effectiveness of our websites as the class focused on coding and combining it with CSS. The element and principle of design that is prominent in this project is contrast for the color palette contains a variety of tonal values. The content is also aligned with a hierarchical grid which provides great unity in the design and between every page of the website. The most unique feature of this artifact is the hamburger icon menu as this took me a good amount of time to learn how to code. For this assignment, the effectiveness was based on the functionality as it was not a requirement to be the best at using CSS to make our website the prettiest visually.