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Tonight’s Photoshop class introduced me to a whole new world! We will be using Wacom tablets for the class, and although I had a little trouble at first, I can see how they could become totally addictive.
It’s frightening how much Photoshop has to offer - I’m a little overwhelmed but I think the class will help make it seem a lot more friendly. Tonight we mostly played around. I could have doodled and drawn squiggles for the full three hours, but we also checked out gradients, all sorts of brush options and other basics to get us started. We’ll be covering all the essentials, including a “must-attend” class on layers.
OK, it’s late, it’s time for the Daily Show, which I have not seen nearly enough lately, and after that I need to catch up on missed sleep… (I feel like my face has finally started to age in the last little bit - I just noticed it the other morning and was shocked!)… tomorrow will bring a final decision on the serge-or-not-to-serge issue and I hope to bring you pictures of the wool blanket progress!
I’ll be honest, I don’t know much about logo design “theory” beyond knowing when I like what I see. However, Brand New from Under Consideration is a terrific blog that presents logo re-designs and makes some really thoughtful points about design choices. It really pushes how I look at logos and their type (particularly when logo change is associated with identity and branding changes) and I really enjoy taking a peek now and then.
Their latest post is about a new logo re-design for Animal Planet (above) - there’s a whole concept behind it, a bigger identity shift, but I’m still not sure I totally get the “m” on its side. Teeth? I do like the simplicity, boldness and color selections in the new logo, and am glad we’re past the more literal original (picture of animal + picture of planet = animal planet).
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Waaah! Last night featured a miserable little Michigan winter storm that made the roads incredibly bad. As I called CCS repeatedly - “seriously, you’re not cancelling classes?” - I slowly made my way downtown, cursing most of the way. Crawling past spun-out cars, stalled cars, accidents and tow trucks, I muttered about how my first InDesign class better be good.
And it was fine.
I think the best part about the InDesign course will be the assignments. It’s the Adobe program I feel most confident about, having loads of experience with PageMaker already. So when I learned we’re going to design some brochures, book pages and even a little magazine sample (plus get them all press-ready), I figured that would be a great opportunity to create some portfolio work. While the sleet froze into thick ice on the roads outside, we all typed the word “type” over and over in our first InDesign page and practiced changing the color, rotation, gradient… and created boxes and lines. Nothing earth shattering, but I’m going to hang in there and withhold judgment for a little while longer. (The weird part was that our teacher encouraged us to use Arial - am I wrong or isn’t that Microsoft’s hack version of Helvetica? So why aren’t we using Helvetica in InDesign on the Mac? Just thought that was weird is all.)
No posts yet today because I’ve been working on my thrift-store wool sweater blanket! (And trying to relax my shoulders and neck - so sore after last night’s tense driving.) I took some pictures of the progress and if they aren’t blurry like most of my others, I’ll post some before the weekend! Now I’ve got a big stack of grey and black wool rectangles of varying sizes and need to figure out if I’m going to serge the edges, try to felt them a bit more (so they don’t ravel) or experiment some other way…
