In Design, students had the choice of a Book Jacket, an Album Cover, and a Movie/Video Game Poster based off whatever their English Short Story, Film project (if you were a Film student), or Zenith project was. I went with the classic Book Jacket starring my jejune English Short Story.
Every student begins by drafting out ideas in their notebook. I’m an even worse photographer than artist, so I decided to draw a book cover that was simple but reflective of the mood and message. I combed over several drafts and I’m ashamed to admit I had to bow down to the Visual Master that is my sister (to get back at that, 2/3 of the original drafts were my ideas).
In the end, the drafts I concluded with were my own designs, which you can see below. The front and back covers tell a story of someone agonizing over a problem by themselves and eventually being able to leave it behind. Both designs are straightforward and easy to draw, but they leave the actual conflict in murky darkness. The use of the masks, which allude to the personalities of the main characters, is also a spot of mystery. All the designs were drawn in Adobe Illustrator. Since the designs were easy to draw, I got to deepen my understanding of the pen tool (which can be used to trace over images) and the gradient tool. The gradient was extremely useful in shrouding Dreamer’s bedroom in darkness. I essentially created a large rectangle and set the gradient from a level of greater darkness to lighter darkness.
Every student also had to create their product in Adobe InDesign. The program allows students to easily map out and print their masterpiece. The Album Cover and Book Jacket required precise measurements since they would be inserted/wrapped around their object. For my own measurements, I chose the bestseller, All About Language by Mario Pei. With my measurements done and my designs figured out, I set about making magic happen. What you see below is the finished product of the front, spine, back, and inside covers.
The Book Jacket below is based off my English Short Story, in which a high school student wants to make friends, runs away instead, and finds the confidence to change in her dreams. The Book Jacket has a running theme of ‘masks,’ which you can find easily on the spine and back cover and is just a little tricky to see on the front cover. This alludes to the ‘attitude’ the high school student pulls on without meaning to, one that is harsh and prickly. Not the greatest first impression, and she worries it will only drive away her crush.
Both the front cover and the back cover tell a complete story altogether. The front cover is self-explanatory; the protagonist, alone in her dark room, worries over a problem in her life. The back cover depicts a half-open door in the mirror of a dresser. Two masks are left behind to hang. The majority of this drawing work took place in Illustrator, an Adobe program. Everything you see was illustrated and written by me. The process was tedious, time-consuming, and full of many little changes, but with some help from my classmates and teacher, this Book Jacket is a final product of pride.
If you would like to read the story I wrote or the Book Trailer I made to advertise it, click the tabs above!
(Disclaimer: Alcora, Florida and the publishing companies you see do not exist)
Below, you can see a mini project known as the Typography. In it, students chose overlapping sets of letters and symbols and placed them upon a grid. Then, with color scheme in tow, students would color in the letters and symbols, changing their colors with every new box. The empty space within the boxes would hold a repeating pattern, such as stripes or shapes. I intended to install a gambling kind of theme to my Typography, but ultimately it failed. Still, all the Typographys are a wonder to look at.
Jumping off the Lyrical Essay from English, the Citizen project took the form of street photography in Design. Street photography essentially forces the average photographer/Freestyle student to wander through the streets with an idea in mind. This idea is based off a quote from our Lyrical Essay. We sketched some idea of a few scenarios that happen in everyday life that might seem devoid of meaning but is actually rich with it from a different perspective. But the photo, edited in Photoshop, is just one half of the project officially known as the Diptych. One half of this Diptych is composed of the photo and the other half is a silhouette composed of the most important figure in the photo (this may be a person or object). That silhouette is filled with the quote we chose from our Lyrical Essay. Does this seem confusing? Then take a look below and you can see what a Diptych is.
My quote for the Diptych was “You look up, into the sky, into her eyes, and they are clear and they are determined, they are shining.” This marks the point in the essay when the narrator, after losing hope in God, finds the resolution to believe again with someone else’s help. The quote inspired the photo you see on the left with the woman sitting by herself before an ocean. The woman represents the person from the Lyrical Essay. The ocean represents their struggles and their turbulent feelings of anxiety, anger, and sadness. Despite being surrounded by the ocean however and being all alone, the woman is still able to remain calm even as a wave threatens to engulf her. The woman is also the only subject in color, which shows her vitality of life and her persistence to continue striving.
To reveal the color of the woman, I made a selection of her figure in Photoshop and then lowered the saturation. The font of the text in the figure was done in Illustrator. By warping the text to fit inside and flow with the figure, it represented the person’s thoughts.
