Selected Classwork

We got a new instructor for Art 606.

Our previous instructor had taken the view that all students are newbies, so she stuck strictly to the basics. She was a very good teacher of the basics.

However, the basics tend not to be particularly flashy. And graphics is a competitive field.

Our new instructor took the view that what we produced in class ought to be the beginnings for a portfolio which would be useful for getting us hired by someone. So he dove right in and started us on some of the flashy stuff, expecting us to fill in the basics as we went along. For the third course in a series of three that was a perfectly valid approach.

We definitely hit the ground running. As of week #2 we found ourselves building .gif animations such as those found on the web.

They are commonly built using the Timeline function in Photoshop. The procedure can be a bit hairy, but these turned out reasonably well. We were told the one in horizontal format above is called a “leaderboard”, and the vertical one to the left is a “skyscraper”.

The business doing the advertising; Jekyll + Hide, does not actually exist. Our first assignment was to work up a Creative Brief for a company “branding” project. This could be either a redesign for a company that really does exist (one of my classmates did a redesign for the Trader Joe’s Market chain), or it could be for our own use (another classmate based his project on his band), or it could be for something completely imaginary. Such as mine was.

Jekyll + Hide is an apocryphal company that does custom leatherwork, with an emphasis on Steampunk designs. Their graphics were very flashy.

These “brands” all stuck around for a while since the semester walked us through several stages of designing various permutations of advertising materials for them. Posters, billboards, social media pages, and mockups for smartphone apps and websites (although I ended up doing my website designs for a different company, one that really does exist.

I ended up drafting out a reasonably complete identity for Jekyll + Hide, who I ended up refering to as “those leatherworking lunitics from Berkley”. If they existed, I reasoned that an artist’s co-op in Berkley would be a likely sort of place to find them.

The images used to represent J+H and their work were collected from the web. If any of the images used in the project are in fact the property of anyone who finds these pages, I assure you that this was an educational exercise, generating no income whatsoever, and no disrespect to the copyright holders is intended. I also hope that they are not readily accesible to bots, but I cannot count on that. It is to be hoped that bots are not interested in stealing images out of .pdfs. It may be noted that various apocryphal “sources” have occasionally been ascribed to the images in the accompanying .pdf of the semester’s final project. These should all be regarded as fictional. Jekyll + Hide did not produce these garments. Jekyll + Hide does NOT exist.