Design Portfolio

​Welcome to my Design portfolio.

This portfolio showcases my design skills and applications, including Canva and Adobe Creative Cloud (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator). 

Introduction to Rhetoric and Professional Writing: Infographic

Summary
For this infographic on what you could do with a creative writing degree, I created it for a specific audience, including at least 4 content sections and 2 visual representations of numeric data, and incorporated credible sources. The purpose of this assignment was to demonstrate my ability to tailor my major across a plethora of fields and what Creative Writing graduates can do in the professional world.
Reflection
As a student who's always heard the nonsense about Creative Writing majors being "useless", this infographic made me realize that I have many transferable skills. As long as I embody the mindset of continuing to move forward in my professional endeavors, I will be perfectly fine. Canva has been a great resource for designing and creating graphics, and there's ample opportunity to grow my design skills. At the end of the day, design has lots of learning curves towards it.

Desktop Publishing: Document Redesign

Summary
For this assignment, I redesigned a document and improved its design principles using Canva. I wanted to make this into a fun flyer for a punk rock concert. The band names are in a punkish style, while the important information is simple. I chose the colors for this document based on how closely they aligned with the values of punk music. I implemented CRAP principles by contrasting each band name with the time and location of the event, using repetitive fonts and colors, and aligning the band names to the left of the document. I incorporated proximity to ensure each of my texts and images was measured by how close they were to each other.
Reflection
I had a lot of fun with this assignment. There's an art to keeping white space at an appropriate level when redesigning flyers. I absolutely adore punk music, so I had a LOT of fun with the visuals and style of this flyer. The original document was terrible. You couldn't see the band names; the band names were all over the place, there wasn't any cohesion, even a theme going on within the piece, and many more issues I won't discuss here. I find myself making design mistakes that end up making the final cut, as they can be the one thing that makes a document look great unintentionally.

Desktop Publishing: Photoshop Editing

Summary
For this assignment, I was tasked with downloading the images above and fixing the issues with them. In order, I was tasked with blurring the background, whitening the teeth around his eyes, removing the person approaching in the background, removing the red tint from his eyes, and restoring an old photo by removing the scratches. I was tasked to fix all of these issues in Adobe Photoshop. This assignment illustrates my ability to use Photoshop in several contexts and allows me to showcase my abilities and capabilities as an editor and designer in the Adobe programs, including Photoshop.
Reflection
Photoshopping is super easy, like REALLY easy. When I went into the Photoshop unit for this course, I presumed that I'd be overwhelmed with the number of details that I'd be incorporating into these photographs. In reality, a lot of these were REALLY easy changes. I wish that I'd known about Adobe Photoshop before. A lot of the minor issues in photographs, like that annoying red tint you get when you do flash photography, or even restoring old photographs, are made into such simplistic tasks when you're working with Adobe Photoshop. Simple, yet very fun assignment.

Desktop Publishing: Postcard
Summary
For this assignment, I was tasked with creating my own postcard using the fundamental skills I developed in Photoshop, showcasing imagery and text to convey the relaxing place we all call Antigua. I also created a thought process and description of my creation stages in my written process description to the right of my postcard. I will let you read through this process description in lieu of my summary.
Reflection
I wish there were more I could've added to my postcard, though I'm still pretty happy with the end result. I thought that postcards had to be a complex document, though that's not the case. I had a lot of fun creating this postcard, and I feel I hit on a lot of elements, especially the sunset from Antigua and the letters, which contain pictures I actually took during my time in Antigua last year. Fun project, and I enjoyed sharing my perspective.

Desktop Publishing: Logos

Summary
In essence, this project asked me to take an existing basic brand identity and create a variety of new logos for it. I had to choose a client, Stickynotes, to create a primary and secondary logo, a logo mark, and a business card for them. Stickynotes was a stationery store that sold a wide range of writing and planning tools, such as rulers, pens, pencils, and more. The client asked for several colors rather than shades of black, white, and gray. I was also intentional about the logo being directed towards teachers and fun, featuring several stationery items purposefully grouped together. I designed these myself and made use of iconography and image throughout. The business card and client are made up, and below my logos is a process description.
Reflection
​I've never felt as intimidated by an assignment as this one, but it's a really good thing. Throughout this class, I found myself stressing over perfecting my design choices and justifying why I designed the way I did. However, I also recognized that making these logos is simply a learning experience. I went as far as to draw the ruler and pencil myself, and when making the logos, I went for a teacher vibe. Typically, stationery stores have many customers who are teachers because teachers need supplies such as pencils, pens, rulers, and more. I wanted my logo aesthetic to incorporate a feeling of playful, experimental, yet intentional 'mess'.

Desktop Publishing: Magazine Spread

Summary
Since I am very interested in journalism, this assignment was the perfect step in learning how to design a magazine spread in Adobe InDesign. I will emphasize that I did NOT write the text; it is from a previously published article in TIME magazine. I was responsible for designing a magazine spread, using the given text, finding visuals to support it, and creating it in Adobe InDesign. I created a two-page spread and included a main image, two secondary images, like a smaller image and a vector icon, an article headline, a deck, a byline, a pull quote, and I utilized the entire document of text. I also incorporated a folio with the magazine title, publication date, and page numbers at the top of my magazine spread.
Reflection
​Since one of my certificates is in Literary Journalism, I was quite intrigued by how magazine spreads are designed in Adobe InDesign. I'm very glad that Desktop Publishing covered this topic, and I learned a LOT about what goes into creating a magazine. I feel as if a lot of people don't recognize the technicalities that all go into creating a magazine spread. Fun fact: the title of the article was unintentionally made to be outlined in blue and have green text. I've had several moments in this class where I accidentally made a design choice and decided to keep it. Sometimes, it's not about having the perfect plan in place. It's about going with the flow and recognizing that you'll be unintentionally making design choices that'll be worthwhile in the long run.

Desktop Publishing: Brochure

Summary
My final assignment for Desktop Publishing was to create a brochure in Adobe InDesign for an organization, nonprofit, or small business of my choosing. I was required to integrate a mixture of logos, visuals, and text into a 6-panel document. I created a brochure for my fraternity, Tau Kappa Epsilon, with the primary purpose of recruiting new brothers and informing the general public about who, what, and where Tau Kappa Epsilon is. This brochure is incredibly valuable in informing the general public about what Tau Kappa Epsilon is and why one should rush for TKE. For reference, I used TKE's style guide and online resources to gather some of the visuals/logos for this assignment, and I used the TKE Instagram.
Reflection
I had such a fun time with this assignment. Initially, I was going to do a marketing brochure for UFB, but I chose to do one about my fraternity instead. As someone who thought he'd never get involved with Greek life, I feel my brochure is a great segue for those unfamiliar with it to possibly try it out. I wanted to create marketing materials for my fraternity, especially since we're one of the smaller chapters on the UC campus. I felt it was an interesting choice to limit the brochure colors to charcoal grey and cherry red. However, with all the visual elements and text, I feel that my brochure is one of my best design pieces to showcase in my design portfolio.