Photoshop: Markus Burke

Another approach to the movie poster assignment.
Markus is a deeply enthusiastic young man. His initial idea for this image incorporated a dozen small images and tried to tell the whole story of the film in one poster.
It didn't work.
After discussing his ideas, he came to an awareness of the power of suggestion.
He created an image that's about motion, energy and wild pacing.
Most significantly, he created an image that makes effective use of the program and says more with less.

 

There are still some legibility issues, and the novice's love affair with filters is evident. But Markus made giant strides in his understanding of design on this image.  

He learned that control of the tool is better than using it as a toy, at least if you aspire to be a professional.

Photoshop: Anthony Weis

This is as much about the layout as it is the control of Photoshop, which is as it's supposed to be.  This is a poster design for a fictional film of David Mack's Kabuki, one of the best designed comics of the last 20 years, and that's saying a lot!

This design is clean and effective but poses some intriguing challenges. The support text gets lost a bit in the white space, as it's light on light at that point. However, the polarizing solution, the inversion of the background color, offered below, makes the masks in the sun/Japanese flag less effective. I tend to prefer the white background, and want to find a way to resolve the text issue.

Consider the black background version below.

Anthony Weis is a challenging student, in the best way. He questions ideas, is eager to learn, works very hard and has a natural affinity for the arts as a discipline. He genuinely cares about developing a stronger aesthetic. He's also unusual in that he began his education training to be a pilot, and is double-majoring in digital art!

Photoshop: Tracey Logelin

Tracey is a talented designer with an eye for precision and aesthetics. Her work and her attitude were always very professional.
This piece was done for a very direct assignment, a thematic collage in Photoshop. She chose to forego the usual mundanities and explore a theme less travelled of late.

My only problem with it was that she used a satellite dish for an old time radio antenna! Still, the contrast of the sepia and the grayscale works well, and draws the warmth out of the cool grays.

Tracy is still hard at it. She graduated about a year and a half ago, and we had an e-mail exhange recently about issues around Web clients and designers.

Fpr more on Tracey, visit her MNArtists page.

Graphic Design:Business card, Kou Lee

I can't recall which class Kou was taking when he created this work. I believe he had just completed Graphic Design and was in Pre-press.  I do recall commenting on his ideas.

This was submitted for a design contest. It won!

Kou just graduated. His body of work is substantial, versatile, controlled, elegant and quite impressive. Look for further postings of his work in weeks to come!

Until then, to see more of Kou's work, go to his impressive website, Magiq Umbrella.