Introduction

Throughout this unit in Design, we focused on using Design to tell a story, whether that was from a marketing standpoint in creating packaging for a product or highlighting important creative aspects of storytelling through a movie poster and book jacket. Through each of these projects, I further developed my skills in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign. Additionally, this unit allowed me to expand on my Worldbuilding narrative project from English, which was a creative challenge, but a valuable experience. This has definitely been one of my favorite units in Freestyle so far because of the creative freedom I was allowed to have and the quality of my finished pieces.

Product Design

The first project of this unit was the Product Design project. I had to develop a product and its company and create accompanying logo and label designs. I’ve always liked commercials from RedBull and the concept of “RedBull gives you wings”, so when this project was introduced, I immediately thought it would be the perfect chance to expand on and make my own energy drink. YOLO is built on the idea that you only live once, so you might as well try all the things you want and learn from your mistakes while you do it!

To start this project, I had to create a mood board that contained images and existing products from which I planned to draw inspiration. I also included the color palette I planned to use in my design.

When I initially started brainstorming for this project, I had a very different style in mind for how I wanted my logo and label designs to look. I went from a more classy minimal beach vibe to a vibrant ENERGY design that better matched my message. When I started working on my project, after trying out various fonts, colors, and effects, I settled on my current look.

Movie Poster

Our next project was to create a movie poster based on the narrative story idea we’d outlined in English.

In English, I had the privilege of working with two of my close friends, Felicia Wagner and Avani Chabbrah, and we decided that we wanted our project to be a dystopian story. Our story is set in the year 2056 and begins in a dystopian New York pro-life patriarchy governed by men. The Senator’s daughter our main character, Tara, is forced to run away in secret and uncovers a family connecting different parts of NY to the center of an underground rebellion.

I created a mood board for the project using multiple other movie posters and images from which I wanted to take inspiration. When brainstorming ideas for my poster, I was heavily inspired by other dystopian minimalist posters and their color schemes. I wanted my poster to look like one you would walk past in a movie theater.

Ultimately, I’m very happy with how my poster turned out, and I learned a lot from this project.

We later experimented and explored the new and adapting AI feature in Adobe Illustrator. Although this step was a little challenging because of how specific my prompt needed to be to get an outcome, I liked that overall, being able to use AI was very cool.

Book Dust Jacket

The final part of the Narrative Unit was to design a book dust jacket again using our English worldbuilding projects.