Paradicing

Design Process

During the creation of my draft graphic design piece, I allowed for the images themselves to direct me in how I wanted to present the message of “Take the road less traveled.” While my singular design consists of multiple layers, images, and text, as a whole, it brings the viewer to a road of uncertainty and adventure.  If we were to dismantle my graphic design it would consist of three photographs that I took on a trip to the Pacific Palisades in Oregon; one captures a majestic sand wall and all its natural textures, the other a winding, bare, almost ghostly road, and finally, a photograph of mountains that sit above water with a beautiful clear sky. Combined, I’d like to think the image is that of a majestic road beyond and through the mountains, leading my viewer to our next destination of uncertainty and adventure. I tried to align my design’s intention with the Gestalt theory in mind, which our readings describe as “…an image consisting of numerous elements, that “while we form impressions “…derived from the individual objects, but “has a separate meaning based on the unified whole.” 

Elemental Significance

While different images completely, the three photographs I chose to include in the draft project share visual similarities of warmth in tones that I found visually pleasing when blended together. The combined warmth of the photographs provided an intentional invitation to a particular place in time: a warm, dry, silenced, unventured land. Paradicing.com’s purpose is to expose and invite my viewers/readers on a journey of uncertainty, discovery, and excitement through food, travel, and wellness, which brings me to the text included in my graphic design: “Take the road less traveled.” For the purposes of advertising, my website is aligned with the core of adventure. This idea of taking “the road less traveled,” has been my guiding light in life and has aligned with the lifestyle that I lead as a flight attendant and mother. So, it only made sense that my draft design includes this saying, which pays tribute to Robert Frost’s, The Road Less Traveled.

Technical Execution of the Design

          I started this design with three photographs as described above: Mountains, Sand wall, and winding road. The mountains have this boldness in color, which immediately led me to have in the foreground. Using what I have learned from our previous tutorials, I placed the three images in the order that I wanted them to be layered. Removing the sky from above the mountains with the magnetic lasso tool, I placed the mountains in the front. I then cropped each photo so that they were aligned to where I wanted them to be layered. I used the sand wall photograph as a texturing layer to the image to give it a blending and dreamy effect. However, I wanted the railing of the road to take precedence in the completed design to move the viewer’s eyes toward the dreamy road. To accomplish this, I selected my sand wall layer (while having the road layer visible) and used the magnetic lasso to trace the road rail and removed that selected portion from the sand wall layer. This brought the road rail forward for the viewer while keeping the road textured and dreamy. During the layering process, I lowered the opacity of the sand wall over the road to have it melt into the image to create a more seamless transition between both photographs. I intentionally, left the opacity of the mountains to 100% so that it remained a bold element to my design. While the design includes a lot of intentional placements and editing, the overall product is seemingly simple, clean, and in tune, which is why I decided to keep the text as simple as possible. While the text includes great meaning and pulls the elements of design together, I really wanted the photographs to speak for themselves. Additionally, the format of my website is that of a clean, minimalistic design and I wanted my design to align with the website.

Self-critique

During the process of finalizing my graphic design, the class and I were able to receive peer reviews from one another. This assisted my reassessment of my finalized graphic design. After reviewing the comments from my peers, I was able to see my graphic design draft with a pair of new eyes. While they agree that my image is aligned with the Gestalt Theory and keeps to my intention of simplicity, there is room for improvement. Emily suggested that I bring the road more to the forefront as the road is a key element in which ties my graphic design together in “taking the road less traveled.” I could not agree more. I hadn’t noticed how faded the image of the road was in comparison the overall graphic design. Additionally, Emily pointed out that I may want to remove the brush design behind the text to keep with my simplistic theme and let the photographs speak better to my intended message.

After, reviewing the feedback from my peers I was able to see my graphic design in a new light and wanted to immediately work on enhancing the design. My intentions in moving forward were to focus on the text, the road visibility, and the overall look of my blog post.

Let’s make some changes!

The main things I wanted to fix with my graphic design was the text and the road’s visibility. I started first with the road. By selecting the “sand wall” layer, I used the magnetic lasso tool to select the road and remove the transparent sand wall from the image to further highlight the road. While doing this, I was able to identify spots that were not picked up previously and went in with the eraser tool to clean up the transparent “sand wall” layer from the road and road rail to provide a cleaner and more visually pleasing product.

Secondly, I wanted to fix the text. The saying did not seem to flow as seamlessly as I wanted it to with the over all design. So, I removed “Let’s” and finalized on my text reading as: “Take the road less traveled,” with an emphasis on “less”. I was able to accomplish this through changing the color of the word “less” to a brown featured in the over all design. Additionally, I wanted to bring more of a shape to the text to bring all of the individual photos together. I decided that the “arc” tool would work best as it is aligned with the photographs landscape and would give an additional mountain to the photograph by intentionally placing the text near and above the mountains to draw the viewers attention to the mountains in the foreground. I decided to change the font style to one that reminded me of billboard fonts I would see as child on road trips to compliment the overall design. While I kept majority of the text white, I wanted it to be legible as well. To accomplish this, I selected the “sand wall” layer and used my eraser tool to lightly erase the transparent sand wall background to bring the font forward visually.

Finally, I wanted to provide more attention to those beautiful mountains in the foreground. I did this by selecting the “mountains” layer, pressing shift and the up arrow button to adjust the placement of the mountains revealing the water at the bottom of the image.

Blog Layout

Something I would like to still work towards is enhancing the layout of my blog so that it is more aesthetically pleasing. I created a featured photo section of my digital design draft that looks amazing on my homepage; however, when you click on the blog itself there is a massive, displeasing view of my graphic design prior to my actual blog post. I would like to figure out how to remove the tagged image from the top of my blog but keep it linked onto my homepage. After a lot of research and trial and errors in CSS coding, I think that I have found that I cannot remove this massive image without upgrading my account to the premium option.