So far, I’m having the most trouble getting a shape for my face… so I decided to make a lot more hair and hopefully avoid having to define my face. I’m also kind of having trouble finding a letter to use for my mouth, so we’ll see what happens there.

For the Beastie Boys headline, I wanted to use a font and colors that were loud and a little bit abrasive, because I wanted the headline to reflect the band’s personality. I think the yellow outline makes the headline vibrant, and Stencil STD Bold is a little different, and definitely loud.

For the Notre Dame Cathedral headline, I looked for something elegant, but not so much so that the words got lost in the font. I ended up using Zapfino, and I made the font size larger to make it both more legible and readable. 

For the sale sign, I used a font that is easy to read, and a color that implies a sense of urgency. Hopefully people seeing this sign would be encouraged to spend money quickly before everything was gone! 

The signifier in this picture is the lamp, which could signify different things to different people. For me, it conjures up an image of home and warmth, perhaps reading in a comfy chair. It also signifies light and hope; the large scale of the lamp to the table is symbolic of the importance of these ideas (of light and hope). For some people, the lamp could simply signify a lamp, and the bright colors could add to its symbolization of happiness. 

 I like to play with gradients and patterns, so I used some of the pre-packaged ones when we first started playing around with the shapes. Then I noticed that the patterns/gradients I’d selected were all orange and turquoise; I decided to stick with that color combination because I like complimentary colors (I think that’s what they’re called?). By clicking around I found how to change the line width/color, transparency, and a couple other cool things. I found the warp tool and used that, too… on a square, a star, and I think a rounded-square type object. I really like the explosion thing in the background, which I found under the shapes menu.

aka i don’t know how to use Illustrator yet.