Exhibit One

Gear Up: Digital Display

Before Revision

revision note

  • While the green opaque rectangle helps in this design to make the text readable on the right hand side, there is no such support in the original design on the left. In the revision an erase is done of some of the abstract content aware to make the text more readable on the left.

  • Instead of simply making a box behind the text on the left, a diagonal hand erasing was done to follow the original design and still align with the center of the piece and the falling of the leaves.

Background:

  • USUSTAR!'s GEAR UP organization asked the Graphic Production students to create motivational digital displays to be shared with a number of schools around Utah. The purpose of the display is to motivate students to value learning and focus their efforts toward attaining a college education. The GEAR UP students range from 7th grade through the freshman year of college. The program partners with schools in which at least 50 percent of the students enrolled are eligible for free or reduced-priced lunch. The requirements were that the display be 1920x1080 pixels at 72 DPI.

Design:

  • Contrast: Larger areas of cool colors, such as green, help create an effective contrast to bring focus to the text. In addition, contrast a warm, repetitive font style with a singular, bold style.

  • Repetition: Repeating the color of the shade of pink in the left hand text and bottom right hand text. Having a repetitive feel to the soft pinks on the left leading to the center and then the green leading out from the center.

  • Alignment: A left alignment makes the text easy to read and is repeated in both chunks of text. The signature also aligns on the right with the end of the words above. The "be" on the right aligns underneath the end of "hopeful" on the left for a feeling of continuity. "Empowered" aligns with the woman's eye level for emphasis.

  • Proximity: The proximity of the words to their placement on the page shows movement with the narrative of the text. It is forward moving with the woman looking to the right to the "empowered" text, with the additional advising words supporting her graduation cap "before" her beginning on the left. The top left and bottom right text tie the piece together.

  • Font Choice: I chose a Sans Serif font, Montserrat, for the first three guidance sentences. For the "Be Empowered" I stayed within that family with Lato, but chose to contrast with color, size, capitalization and punctuation. Finally, for the signature to reference the quote I went with Mistral to indicate a reference without needing to explicitly state one.

Photoshop and Camera Raw:

  • Simple use of layers to create the overlay green rectangle

  • Used the content aware scale tool to turn a portrait photo into a landscape photo with some abstract edge; added leaves over edges that didn't extend perfectly with the clone stamp tool for a uniform look under the layer of the rectangle

  • Applied the healing brush to the woman's forehead to remove green reflection from original imagery

  • Used the crop tool to add additional leaves hanging from the vines and the spot healing brush tool with color to even out under the tree branch where there were some distracting misconfigurations

  • Used the erase tool to allow for more readability behind the text on the left hand side freehand to follow the lines within the image

Credits:

Original Photo

After Photo