Blog 7- March 15

Designing a Digial Portfolio-Chapter 7
Cleaning Up: Chapter 7

Baron shows us a successful working process, narrowing down problems with digitized art (tonal problems combining and editing size and resolution, sharpness) and he says that these issues occur in both still and motion pieces of work. He shows you a sequence that is helpful in order to edit issues wiht tone, color, resolution and sharpness.
Choosing a file type-this section is helpful, because to me i always see the various different file types and never know which one is best, for a particular type of artwork. "You should select the form that best suits your purpose at each stage of your working progress".
TIF: photographic or continuous tone files
EPS: illustration and publishing
AVI/MOV: onscreen moving image
GIF/JPEG: image compression formats
PDF: for publishing
MP3:sound

NEVER EDIT A JPEG--! okk!--because they are efficiently compressed

Tonal Values/ Brightness and Contrast: images can suffer from bad contrasting and color shifts, you can adjust these with the histogram chart that regulate the distribution of brightness and contrast.

The cheat sheet (pg 124) was helpful for image editing purposes, as i often see these terms when im working with an image, but am not 100% sure of which to use at certain times.
Color Casts: this helps fix your photo and make it appear the way you intended it to, i have used the variations option before and found it helpful.
Stitching:helps merge two images together, you can merge with stitching software, or by hand
Editing Problems Away:
Moire-"happens when the dot patterns of offset printing clash with the pixel grid, you can eliminate or decrease moire simply by finding a sweet spot (an angle where most of th screen dots dont create pixel patterns)".
Line Art- since lines are for the most part only made of black and white, they can sometimes break up into bitmaps when scanned. using a higher resolution and scaling down the line art helps as well.
Backgrounds- you may not always have to have a background but a good one can help the piece stand out. Baron uses an example from So Takahashi's Terminator ashtray, showing how it was "beautifully shot on a neutral background"
Cropping- "to be safe, before you crop or resize any file, save the file you've been editing and crop a copy"
Sharpening- only sharpen if the image really needs it, you should NEVER sharpen a file that is already compressed! thanks, Baron.

Building a Design Portfolio 40-74

Job Hunting: Cold Calls
I remember hearing about this last week, with our visitor who graduated 5 years ago. Taking posters, flyers from companies, remaking them, and presenting your idea, and hopefully (fingers crossed) having them accept it.
The notes and guild lines for cold calls was very helpful and interesting to read.
The tips for resume was helpful too, because right now I have my resume typed in Microsoft word, and I know I have to change it to InDesign eventually, but I havent finalized my idea just yet. I liked the final design however created by Judith Aronson. The Cover Letter portion of this chapter helped me too, it says "in your cover letter, try to gently encourage the reader to look at your portfolio".
THANK YOU NOTES: can show your appreciation for them taking time out to interview you

Promotions: by mail, I like the idea created by Janet Odgis
As I was looking through the promotions, I saw a logo that I really liked. I have tried a design like this in the past, and am curious to see what would happen if I took another stab at it. The designer, Hirokazu Kurebayashi took his name and in all caps, had it broken up and spelled out within a circle. I have done this in fact before, and now seeing it in a professional light, makes me want to do it again. My name is long, just as Kurebayashi is, so maybe ill attempt it again.
I loved looking through the various PDFs and posters created for certain events. My mind is racing with ideas now.