Using scale, rotation, and gradient, there is an illusion of movement. (Coming at you or moving away from you?)

Storyboard project for university. Team members created the imagery for the story, and I animated it in Flash. Coming up with the timeline overall, and timing each little piece of every image to work together and create tension and tell the story was a challenge, but very enjoyable.

Pattern I put together for a class, combining Greek, Turkish, and Chinese patterns to make something new.

Diagrams I can’t say have been anything I can do yet. But they are wildly fascinating. I suppose that’s the order-lover in me. Everything connects and has a purpose. I remember the first time I went to New York City (alone!) I was petrified of how I would find my way around with the subway. But after about a day, I was almost an old pro at it. Any time I found myself lost, I’d go to my map and work my way out of where I was. That handy diagram definitely eased my nervousness about getting lost. In fact, it got to the point where even when I was lost, I never felt any anxiety at all. I felt that confident that I could read that diagram and go anywhere. Can’t wait to go there again with someone I know and feel like the knowledgeable tour guide!

I pretty much lived on the F train! (Not literally.)

I’m a rules person, myself. I like things that make sense, a pattern, a clear purpose. That could be why I like building websites and hand-coding all the CSS. I like making all the rules and abiding by them. I like making things work and be cohesive and make sense to the general public. Going “outside the box” and trying to do anything random usually doesn’t get me very far and it’s definitely outside my comfort zone. But when I see it, I typically enjoy it and can be impressed by something being done a way I would never have thought of.

An older project where we had to take tools and arrange them in varying ways using rules, such as repeating and rotating.

I still struggle with randomness. But since I know it’s something that challenges me, I do like to face it head-on sometimes.

Creating Photoshop effect of text creating an image. (It's one of my cats.) It was a challenge to let go and be random with the text placement to create the image.

I remember much much much earlier in my design career, trying to figure out how to draw a cat in Photoshop for the first time. When you use a tool like Photoshop for the first time (or even the first hundred times), it can be daunting, and I was unsure of where to even begin with drawing a cat illustration. Then my instructor introduced me to the concept of layers. It was the first time it hit me that, particularly with computers, you kind of make each piece individually, then layer them all together to create a complete image. Start with the body outline, then the eye outline, then the pupil outline. Placing each one on top of the other. And with the wonder of Photoshop (and Illustrator), you can even move and adjust those layers as you go along.

A more recent example of something simple I made with layers.

Now of course I see in my art history books all the designs of long ago, when there were no computers. Where posters, for example, had to be printed layer by layer. It’s fascinating to see how far we’ve come. Now, of course, we can get far more detailed because our technology allows us to do so.

Transparency

A step beyond layers is transparency. Again, something that never occurred to me until I was actively trying to understand design and make my own things. A whole new visually interesting world comes about when pieces of layers can have varying alphas and create something new out of the same parts.

A photography project making use of opacity to put multiple images together to create a message/idea.

I was a bit thrown off at the word “youth”, as I thought it meant children (hi, I’m getting too old! lol). So my original idea of having a soccer ball with the black panels stylized as black handprints didn’t quite make sense. When the group explained they meant youth as in college kids, I had to rethink. We decided we’d do some flat white-on-dark-brown circle icons. I wanted to do something with snowboarding since this is Duluth MN, where it’s winter pretty much always. Unfortunately, the shape of a snowboard doesn’t lend itself to being an obvious symbol, so I went with a ski lift.

The icons my groupmates came up with:

The next part of the assignment is for each person to come up with a web design using our icons and theme. This was mine:

I wanted to do something simple that highlighted the icons. Another groupmate had a more interesting design, and something I could have more fun building, as it had some potentially complicated parts, so I built his. I have that uploaded to angelakoskela.com/GDI

As someone who’s already built many, many… many websites, I made an effort to try some new coding things I haven’t done before. Must take advantage of any opportunity to expand my skills! It was fun coming up with cohesive icons for a single project, and seeing how vastly different our ideas could be, but still come together and work.

Illustrator “sketches” and ideas:

Website design in progress!

Client wanted something of a “hub” for multiple New York City comedy clubs. Website needed to consist of 4 main categories, as well as multiple sections that were to be added as needed.

I opted to have the website powered by WordPress, for ease of editing.  This way, we could utilize the Page and Category functions to add new sections. The blog grabs feeds from multiple different sources and updates automatically.

New York Comedy World

Brainstorm

I thought about what I’d like to include in my booklet. Recipes, shopping lists, photos. I then worked out how many pages I would want based on what I’d like to include, and organized it by Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Dessert, and Snack sections. Here’s a thumbnail sketch:

Moodboard

I decided on fonts and colors (red and yellow: hungry colors!). I thought about how I’d like to present the photos and thought a “Polaroid” style would be fun and fit the quick-and-easy feel  of the recipes. I put together a moodboard:

Final Project

Part of the assignment was thinking about how all the sections and information fit properly within the page-facing booklet format. I had to add and subtract parts to keep within the multiples of 4 pages to make a complete booklet.

(PDF)

When I think of module, I think of the Unigrid System for brochures created by Massimo Vignelli. What a great way to ensure consistency and cohesiveness among an infinite number of topics while still allowing for a lot of flexibility in the amount of information and graphics.

Not to overuse my typography project, but part of the hierarchy assignment was also to design within a grid. It’s a clear example of me working within a grid and experimenting how I can use the grid to make something interesting to read.

I also experimented with breaking the grid in my 2D Design class.

Hierarchy was achieved through use of space around items, flow from top to bottom or left to right, size of type (within 1 or 2 points), use of uppercase and lowercase.

I experimented with the “top to bottom” rule in the first piece I put together by putting the primary info under the secondary info, but setting it as more eye-catching with a larger type and uppercase heading.