Gene Ripper

I love finding something to use as inspiration and taking parts of it to make something of my own. I just saw a Dell campaign that used this design:

A couple of summers ago I was employed with ARUP, a medical testing company in Salt Lake City. As part of the internship I wrote a program I called gene ripper that took the manual annotation and curation of genetic mutation data and automated huge parts of it. It was a fun project that people actually benefited from, and someday I hope to do more with the idea, as it filled a great need. I took Dell's hip, sleek design and made my own twist:

Still much that I could do with this (I'd like it to be a little less busy, and I'm not sure if I like the black around the edge or not), but I think that Dell has a great campaign going on. Textures make the world go round and sure add a lot to a design.

Any suggestions on how to make it even better?

Improving Some Pics

I cannot overstate the awesomeness of the 'open in Camera Raw' option in Photoshop (I believe that you have to download an add-on to Photoshop in order to use it). When you 'open as', and choose camera raw, you have a plethora of tools available to play with in a simple format before you go to the usual editing screen.

You can much more easily adjust the overall colors, the lighting, the contrast and clarity ... and you don't have to do it one at a time! (the big menu on the right)

While there are some other things I did to touch up these photos, that was definitely the start. I love photoshop!

All of this color from the sky is actually from the photo, I just had to bring it out.

It's amazing how darkening the background/edges makes the photo stand out even that much more.


And my favorite:

It's just like light boxes were added to the shot. I've recommended it before, but Scott Kelby's 7-point System is great (and the book is available on Safari Tech Books, which you can get for free if you are a byu student)!

I love adding color, taking away shadows, and given picture the pop that they need to go from the oh-just-another-picture to wow-that's-a-great-looking-pic. I've still got lots to learn and loads of practice to do, but I feel like it's coming along.

Obamanation

It's no secret to many people that I am political junky and in the next few days I'll post about the design work I'm doing for the political blog that I'd like to launch. I was never a supporter of President Obama, but I think that the President deserves or respect and support. This past week, however, the President's attitude about the 'stimulus' bill has floored me. He's made repeated statements about how horrible our economy is and that if his big bill doesn't pass there will be a catastrophe. Should something be done - yes. Should the American people be scared into supporting a bill that is not well put together and just gives money and power to the government? No. Anyway, politics are for another forum, but because of this, I decided to put my design skills to a little work.

So I took this famous depiction (from here) of Obama:



I took some text from an article during the campaign about taxes and Joe the plumber, and then Rudy Giuliani's great quote from the GOP Convention,

"But that’s really a false choice. Because “change” is not a destination, just as “hope” is not a strategy."

Put all of that together, with this great tutorial on making a poster from words from photoshopstar.com, and you get this:

(click on it to see the full detail)

My way of expressing what I feel. I hope that this whole situation straightens itself out and that whatever legislation does pass actually helps get America back on its feet and growing again, but we'll have to see how the chips fall.

Very fun design technique, with lots of possible applications.

Family Picture

So when we were in Hawaii with the Moe's, we had some great family pictures taken by the beach. We really liked the way one turned out, but because of the hot Hawaii sun, we all had to be in the shade and the sunny background was washed out a bit.




My mother in law ask me to tweak the photo a bit and see if we could bring out some better colors and such. So I set to work, loaded the photo in RAW format (go to open as ... and one of the top options is RAW) so that I could easily tweak with the exposure. Because of the difference between the foreground and background, I loaded the photo 3 times - once for the people and front, once for the sky, and once for the trees. I had to bring up the exposure and bring out the whites to get the people to look a little more like we were in the sun; then I had to bring down the exposure and bring out the blue to make the sky look like it really did in Hawaii; and finally I just had to tweak it a little to make sure the trees retained their color as well. Using masks and the pen tool I carefully staggered the layers, and I was pretty happy with the end result.



We're in the shade still, but you can see us. The sky has the blue it needs, and overall I think this is a way better looking picture. Amazing what a little exposure manipulation and combination can do.

(to see the real difference between the people and sky in the photos, you have to click on them and see them full size) :)

Typography and Resume

This week I read the book Non-Designer's Design Book, by Robin Williams (not the actor). I was amazed at how much I really knew nothing about design. She goes through some basic design principles with the acronym CRAP ... Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity. She also soes through some basic typography principles. I never realized how much lining things up, and using two different styles of typography on a page could really bring out the design.

So after reading this book online through BYU's databases (great resource for anyone with a byu route-y id), I decided to try and revamp my resume, that was in pretty dire need. This is my old resume:



While I feel like it was decent, I online used one font (Garamond) for headings and body text, I centered each of the dividing lines, making it so that they didn't line up with the body text, and used little if anything to distringuish between headings and body text (just slightly bigger and bolder). So to change it, I decided to line things up better, use a different font for body and headings, and make more contrast between my headings and body text (as well as trim down the actual content). I was pretty happy with how the design came out:




I still want to add a black and white head shot below my name, but other than that I think I'm ready to go job searching (well, actually give this resume to one place already interested in me). I'm excited to see how else I can put my little bit of design knowledge to use!

Twitter

So I found a new hobby - Twitter! Twitter is a social network and micro-blog that allows users to send and read updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text posts of up to 140 characters.

So while I've been getting acquainted with twitter and a few people I know on there, I found out that you can make your own custom background for your page. And so I decided to get somewhat creative and have fun.

I wanted to do something a little classy, so I took one of my engagement pictures (I flipped it in the final background).

I stretched the background to cover the entire screen, erased the lighter part around me, added a paper texture included in photoshop and sunrays from a brush I have (both the texture and the rays were set to 'overlay' to let the background color show through the texture and brush). I used some cjust font to add my info, and put the logo I made for my (hopefully) future webdesign site, tweaked a little to match better.

All of that, and I ended up with a background I was pretty happy with.

(click on the picture to see the actual site)

I haven't done much with photoshop for awhile, so it was good to get my fill again. I'm loving twitter and encourage everyone to take a look at it. It might not make sense when you first hear about it, but once you get the hang, it's a lot of fun.