I want you to have something to show for all of your hard work and creativity this semester, so I’d like you to put together a portfolio of your best work, as well as a demonstration of the skills that you should have picked up along the way.

I will guide you and show you a great way to do this, but if you prefer to take the information and display it another way (create a website, put together a video, or some other creative use of your talents), that might be fine (check with me). This should be the kind of thing you could take with you to a job interview to dazzle someone with your skills, or prove to your parents that you’ve learned and created a lot this semester.

Your job in your portfolio is to display a range of projects that you’ve created and explain the skills that you’ve gained along the way. You should be demonstrating work completed in Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop, as well as coming up with a few new pieces made specifically for this portfolio.

 

Using InDesign, you’ll put together a multi-page document that combines your best work from the course and describe some of the things you’ve learned and created along the way.

Using Adobe InDesign, create a MINIMUM eight-page portfolio of your best work completed in Graphic Tech. This portfolio will serve as the final exam for this course and should provide you with something useful to document your time here up to now.

All previous projects should be PLACED in this document so you have an editable copy of those files along with the portfolio. The finished portfolio must be properly packaged without any missing links and handed in electronically. You can even publish electronically when done and you may have a printed copy, if you wish.

Your portfolio must include:

• A new title page, created in Photoshop: Title, image(s), your full first and last name, section (class), and graphic design elements that make the page aesthetically pleasing. (Use contrast, high quality, appealing elements, effective colour choices, etc.). You could put together a new composite image or use clipping mask Photo Letters for the title, or use one of your Fun with Photoshop tutorials, or just come up with something interesting in Photoshop! Remember to use HIGH QUALITY images and set up your file to be the correct size and resolution (8.5 x 11, 300 pixels/inch)
• Somewhere in your portfolio (probably the first or last page), you will create a NEW LOGO in Illustrator that has your name AND “Graphic Tech” or “Design” or something along those lines.
• AT LEAST one Photoshop project that you previously completed. (creature, photo letters, trading card, Fun with Photoshop, etc.)
• AT LEAST one Illustrator project that you created. (vinyl cutting, original sticker design, logo design, etc.)
• AT LEAST one InDesign project that you completed. (postcard, brochure, quiz, etc.)
• AT LEAST one other project of your choice. (personal project that you completed, or just another one of the above projects)
• A final summation of what you learned, accomplished or gained from the course. What kind of things have you learned and how could you use these skills in the future? What types of things are you qualified to do/create?

In order to print these properly, they need to have 8 or 12 pages. If you don’t care about printing, you could have a different number, but ideally, 8 or 12 pages would

EACH PAGE will contain enough information to explain the project/process/software to someone who did not take the course. Your parents, relatives, friends not in the course, or a prospective employer should be able to look at your project and understand the following things:

• What was the goal/objective/assignment? What were you supposed to learn/include/accomplish?
• What was your personal goal – how did you figure out what you were going to create/do/accomplish? Was your goal to make something classy, interesting, silly, serious, weird, etc.?
• What steps were involved in completing the task?
• What did you have to learn in order to complete the task?
• What did you struggle with along the way?
• How do you feel about your work in hindsight?
• What would you do differently if you had to do this project again?

Make this as informative, interesting, and appealing as you can. This will show that you learned and accomplished something in this course and will demonstrate some of the skills that you should have picked up along the way. You will get a good mark if you do a good job, and you should be able to bring this portfolio to a job interview to show what a creative and intelligent person you are!

I would recommend setting this up to be Letter size. You can decide whether to add a bleed and cut it out or just accept a bit of a white border. You definitely want Facing Pages for this one:

 

InDesign is one of the most useful and interesting programs we work with. So far, you should have created a Postcard and a Greeting Card. Building on those skills, we’ll build something slightly more complicated, a tri-fold brochure. To make it easy, you’ll complete a tutorial that will show you how to do the project that I want you to complete:

Download these files to follow along with the sample. Those files are “zipped” together, so you’ll need to Unzip the files in order to use them. This is a very common way of delivering files, so you should know how to unzip a folder…

If you prefer to have the files unzipped for you, you can also find all of the files in the HANDOUT FOLDER, although you’d have to download those one at a time or download a zipped file anyway… If you’re really struggling, I could give you the files, if you ask nicely (although I might roll my eyes a bit.)

Follow along with the tutorials here

Complete those videos and create the sample brochure. Show it to me when you are done! You will complete your own, original brochure for marking in the next step!

If you show me the completed brochure, you don’t really need to hand it in. Remember that if you are handing anything in that is created by InDesign, you need to PACKAGE the files!

So far, we’ve worked with two image creation and editing programs, Photoshop and Illustrator. Now it’s time to turn to InDesign and see what it can do. InDesign is the industry choice for creating professional documents of all shapes and sizes.

See what you can create with InDesign

Explore InDesign basics

First up, learn how to create an appealing postcard! I encourage you to do the sample contained in the tutorials:

You will need these files in order to follow along with the tutorial

Click the image below to go to the tutorial, or click this link

After working through the tutorial to learn how it’s created and put together, I want you to DESIGN YOUR OWN! Yours should use the same tools, size, and layout as the sample, but SHOULD NOT RESEMBLE IT AT ALL! Yours should look entirely different.

This should look like the kind of card that you would buy on vacation and send home to some poor sucker who didn’t get to come with you. You’ve surely seen these in a gift shop or at the Forks or something.

I’d suggest using one of high quality photos from Unsplash to create a postcard for a destination that you would like to visit.

Most postcards are 6 inches by 4 inches with a .25 inch bleed. I recommend setting up a .25 inch margin to keep important text and elements away from the edge of the page.

Setup:

You could rotate your card if you wish. You will design a front and a back. The front is usually just a beautiful photo or multiple photos from the place you are visiting. The back contains a space for you to write a letter and a space for you to write the address that you are going to send it to, as well as a stamp (or at least a place to put a stamp). We could print these out when you are done and you could even mail it to someone if you wish!

Remember that in this program, everything goes in a frame. You’ll PLACE your files into frames (File/Place or Ctrl + D).

When you are done, you’ll PACKAGE your file to drop it off!

Check for errors or missing links!

That will create a folder that includes your file as well as any linked files and fonts that you may have included. Check OneDrive for a folder when you are done.

Have fun and be creative. Where would you like to visit?

Samples of finished postcards created by past students:

 

So far, we’ve worked with two image creation and editing programs, Photoshop and Illustrator. Now it’s time to turn to InDesign and see what it can do. InDesign is the industry choice for creating professional documents of all shapes and sizes.

Adobe’s InDesign can do everything that Microsoft Word can do and MUCH more, and it does it all so much better. It’s a souped-up super powered version of your usual word processor. It also incorporates the power of Photoshop and other programs to create one killer creator of documents.

See what you can create with InDesign

Explore InDesign basics

One of the many things that InDesign does much better than a program like Microsoft Word is handle multiple pages. Our yearbook is put together using InDesign and it makes it so much simpler to make the pages look good and organize pages and sections. Using InDesign, we’ll create a bunch of other useful documents.

Watch the tutorials below. Those teach you how to use the program. Much of this stuff you WILL NOT figure out on your own, so pay attention to those.

 

Once you have a logo designed for a customer, one of the most common jobs for a designer is to come up with a business card.

Your job now is to take the logo that you’ve designed, and come up with a business card that would suit that logo/business.

You can start from one of the templates within Illustrator for this one, but you will need to CUSTOMIZE it to match the fonts & colours that you chose for your logo.

CHECK OUT THIS PAGE FOR SOME INFO

Then, take your logo, and design a card using that logo/business. You can make up a name, address, and phone number to put on the card if you like, or use a real one (like the school’s address and phone number, for example.)

DO NOT hand in a business card that looks like the template/sample! Change the colours, fonts, images, and text to suit your project. Your creative logo should be on there somewhere. The colours and fonts on the card should ma

One of the most common jobs for a graphic designer is to come up with a company/organization’s logo. Once a business has a good logo, they can use it to help build their business, and a good logo can go a long way toward building brand recognition and helping to get the word out about a product or service.

But what is a logo and why is it so important?

There are different types of logos as well. Some are more detailed and descriptive, and some are extremely simple.

Should you continue on with Graphic Tech next year (and I sincerely hope that you do,) you’ll do a lot more logo design and there will be more to consider. For now, you can be as creative as you want.

If you come up with a great logo, it might even look good on a shirt or hat or bag or coaster or…

What makes a great logo?

You can even technically use whichever program you want. Logos could be made on InDesign, I suppose, but Photoshop or Illustrator would be the best choice. Illustrator, in particular, is what we would use to make a proper logo because a professional logo needs to be scalable, so having a vector graphic is essential for commercial use.

Later on, your logo would have to be fully original, but for now, you could incorporate elements from places like Unsplash or The Noun Project.

If you want to see samples of logos for inspiration, I recommend looking at Brands of the World.

Illustrator tips/tutorials:

Build your logo with basic shapes

Add text to your logo

Essential techniques for effective logo design

Build a logo (step by step)

Combine shapes to build a logo. (step by step)

 

If you want more logo design tips, I like this video as well:

Here’s a quick and easy project where you could take home a mouse pad with the design of your choice on it. Everyone will design one (for marks). You do not have to put your design on a mouse pad unless you want to and you meet a few simple conditions. Your design will only be put on a mouse pad if:

• your file is dropped off with the right name and it is the right size
• you have finished your earlier assignments and dropped them off correctly
• your parents have paid the $10 course fee
• you aren’t a pain in the neck

This same process could be used to apply a design to other items, which we can discuss.

The actual mouse pad is about 9.25 inches by 7.75 inches, but we make our design a little bigger so it covers the entire surface and there are no blank spots around the edge. Part of your design will be cut off on the finished product.

Set up your file: 9.5 inches by 8 inches, 300 pixels/inch, CMYK color

you can choose whether to create your design the wide way (Landscape):

Or the tall way (Portrait)

Once you have created the file, SAVE it in your OneDrive. As usual, make sure that OneDrive is running on your computer!

You can create the artwork yourself using whatever program you wish. As always, we want the quality of the artwork/photo to be as high as possible. If you want photos, I always recommend Unsplash, if you want icons, use The Noun Project, and if you want logos, visit Brands of the World. If you insist on using Internet images, make sure you know how to limit your Google search to Large images (REVIEW.)

Once you have created or found the images you want on your mouse pad, make sure you Place Embedded:

Depending on the image and the orientation of your canvas/background, you may need to resize the image. I’m using a tall image on a wide background, so I’ll need to resize it a bit:

Grab one of the corner handles and pull diagonally to resize. I need to make my image much smaller than my actual canvas/page:

You can add as much as you want to your design! Add other images, icons, or text, if you wish. Have fun and be creative!

Once you are done, you should, of course, save your Photoshop file, but you will not drop off the original file!

You need to drop off an image file that is not .psd. You can use .jpg or .png, but I prefer PNG. To create that image, go to File/Export/Export As…

You shouldn’t really have to change anything in the box that pops up. Yours should look like mine (with a different design, of course.)

Once you are done and have dropped off a .png, you could, if you wish, raise your hand and ask me to check that you have completed the conditions at the top of the page. If you meet those conditions and I have enough supplies available, I will print your image and show you how to apply it to the mouse pad.

Here are a few fun tutorials that will help you build your basic skills in Photoshop:

Once you click each link, look for the button that says “Begin Tutorial in Photoshop.” Clicking that will open the file and instructions right in Photoshop

Get to Know the App

Get to Know Layers

Add Text and Shapes to a Photo

Boost your Core Skills

Completing those tutorials will help you get used to the program and will help you to complete your next few assignments. You do not need to hand these files in, but completing them will be beneficial, and you may be asked to show them to me if it seems like you don’t know the basics.

For this project, you’ll need a series of high quality photos that will help you spell out a word or two. You’ll take those photos and fill in the letters that spell a word or phrase of your choice. Here’s an example:

Start off by creating a new blank file. I’m making mine the size of a standard piece of paper,  8.5 x 11 inches, but I’m putting it in Landscape orientation, so my measurements will be 11 wide and 8.5 tall. If you want to make yours 11 x 17 or 8 x 10, that would be fine.

Don’t forget to immediately save your work with the proper name in your OneDrive folder:

This is actually pretty simple. First, find a typeface that’s pretty big and blocky. You need a nice, thick, bold letter. Start off by making a letter in the top left corner:

PUT EACH LETTER ON ITS OWN LAYER!

You can copy layers (Ctrl + J) or alt + click/drag to copy out the letters until you have something like this:

Again, make sure that each letter is on its own layer!!!

Start by selecting whichever layer/letter you want to start with. Select the letter/layer.

Go into the File menu and choose Place Embedded…

Find your first photo and put it on top of the letter. Rename the layer.

You can move or resize the photo so that the most interesting part is right over top of the letter or move/resize later!

Right click on the letter and choose Create Clipping Mask

‘

Or… use the Layer menu and choose Create Clipping Mask’

You’ll notice that there’s a little downward arrow next to the layer icon:

And the photo now takes the shape of whatever is below!

You can move or resize the photo layer to get the most interesting part right inside of the letter:

Keep doing that until you fill all of the letters

Your layers panel will be staggered, with each photo “clipped” on top of a letter

Place another photo in the background and adjust that

You’ll notice that the really colourful letters don’t contrast with the colourful background, so use those Layer styles/effects. Select a letter layer and click the little fx button on the bottom of the Layers panel

Play around and find the right layer style for you. A Stroke makes a lot of sense to me:

Putting a fairly thick, dark stroke around a letter makes the shape stand out. Make sure the Preview box is turned on and move the panel so you can see what you’re doing. Play with the settings until you get a look that you like:

Once you find a Style/Effect you like, you’ll notice a little fx on the layers panel

If you want that same look on other layers, you can hold the Alt key and drag it onto another layer!

Have fun and be creative with this one!

Once you’re done filling your letters, feel free to find more photos on Unsplash to create different Photo Letters/words or use a camera to take photos around our school to make your own Westwood letters!

 

 

 

We’ve been working with Illustrator over the past little while and one of the most difficult, but most important concepts to pick up is combining shapes to make a clean outline that can be cut out of vinyl to make a sticker or a shirt.

Not only do you need to put something together using shapes, but you have to figure out how to combine shapes or cut pieces out so that each different coloured piece can be cut out and put together separately.

Here’s a quick and easy challenge. I want you to draw a simple picture of a snowman, kind of like this:

But… here’s the tricky part, you need to be able to go into the View menu, turn on Outline

And see something clean and simple like this:

If you have a whole mess of overlapping lines, it isn’t right and you’ll have to fix it because it wouldn’t cut out properly.

You could draw something else if you want to instead, but make sure it incorporates the same tools and ends up with the same, simple outlines for the different coloured pieces. There are no points for creativity here. It’s either right or it’s wrong!

In order to do this, I recommend learning a bit about the Pathfinder options:

Here’s a good writeup (the video is way too fast for me): https://design.tutsplus.com/tutorials/illustrator-in-60-seconds-how-to-use-the-pathfinder-tool–cms-25572

Official Adobe info: https://helpx.adobe.com/ca/illustrator/using/combining-objects.html