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A Quick Study in Magazine Covers

Bullet-pointed for easier reading.

• The name of my chosen magazine is Popular Photography.
• The title text doesn't use a layer style.
• In fact, none of their cover text uses a layer style.
• The background layer is an incredibly subtle, almost grainy gradient.
• The cover uses asymmetrical balance.

Illustrator Lab 2

I learned how to create custom brushes in Illustrator today; this wasn't completely new to me, as I've made brushes in Photoshop and GIMP before, but the way in which I could use the brushes definitely was.  My first attempt vaguely resembled a sunburst, although the results it generated looked more like a solid wall of smashed spiders (which was actually kind of cool).  My second brush was generated from a set of squares - I think I liked that one better than the first.

Diet Coke Case Study

Although the font hasn't changed significantly, a silver stroke was added around the word "Coke" to make it stand out more (accentuated by the fact that said stroke is "shiny" and therefore draws the eye more than other aspects of the can).  The font is also no longer large enough to give the impression of wasted space (as on the first design) or too small to comfortably read (also as on the first design, but in a different location).

Illustrator Lab 1

Today I tried out Adobe Illustrator for the first time; the interface isn't really that different from Photoshop (unsurprisingly - after all, they're made by the same company), but some of the tool functions were new to me.  After a few minutes of fumbling around with hexagons and colors, I tried the pencil tool, followed by the blob brush tool, and finally the dreaded pen tool.  Out of the three, I think I enjoyed using the blob brush tool the most and the pen tool the least (for reasons that should be obvious if you've ever tried to use it in Photoshop or Illustrator).  Overall, I'd say that this wasn't a bad start to using Illustrator.

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