Category Archives: J. Blahnik

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I enjoyed the animation project, it was a lot of fun learning the basics of After Effects. For this assignment, I took the fish from my Gemini Publishing logo and made them swim around, accompanied by water drops.

To begin, I used the pin tool to create a puppet effect on the tail and fin of the first fish. Then I changed its opacity on the timeline to make it appear like it’s coming up to the surface. I made a copy of this fish layer and reflected it to make the second fish. I changed the opacity of this fish to make it come up later in the animation. Combining these two layers made it easy to make the fish swim in a perfect circle because all I had to do was rotate the object 360°.

For the text layer, I wanted it to have the same effect like it were coming to the surface, so I put a mask on it and changed the feather to do this. The “water drops” are created using the radio wave effect. I messed around with a lot of the settings to manipulate the shape of the waves, notably the expansion and frequency. I changed the life span of the wave so that it would fade out like the ripples in water. I added a distortion effect to this layer to make the fish look like they were underwater, with how their shape was being contorted by the water drops.

The audio was pretty easy to do. I faded the background music in and out in Audition, and I cut up the original audio of the water drops and placed them in the timeline to match up with the ripples. This was my favorite project this semester.

Conceptual Magazine Spread

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The entire conceptual design unit was a challenge for me. I found it difficult to come up with powerful concepts relating to the stories we were given. For this magazine cover I chose to work with a story that explained how wearable technology, once thought of as something that would change how we live on a day to day basis, was underwhelming compared to it’s expectations.

The design for the cover depicts a waiting room, with several wearable devices sitting in chairs to convey the message that these products are not exactly ready to change the world quite yet. I chose to use Times New Roman typography to reflect the vibe of a bland waiting room. I used some images I found online for the story section and repeated the design of the jawbone to make the cover cohesive with the second spread.

It was challenging to find a way to fit the sidebar story onto the second page, considering how long it was. I am satisfied with how the main story fits in horizontally at the top, I felt like the “Epic Fails” story looks clean, having an entire block to itself. This has been my favorite project so far, I enjoyed making the magazine spread for the London Underground story in Graphic Design I, so I was excited to see that we would be getting a chance to do it again.