Final Summary

When I first mentioned my final project to my mom, she was more than willing to be my client. She runs her own business, Acadia Laser Creations, and came in wanting a business card for the laser engraving side of her work. 

My experience with this project was very positive. I learned how to take a client's specifications and find a way to put them together in a visually pleasing manner through a process of drafts. As the design was to be somewhat minimalistic, my initial drafts left little to be tweaked. However, my mom is a creative person and as such she was really able to suggest revisions and help me play with the design to her liking. Through this, I learned how to take a suggestion/critique and apply it, even if it wasn't necessarily what I wanted.

The client-designer relationship between my mom and I was naturally a bit less professional than it would've been had we not known each other, yet we discussed this project in a business-like manner. We would sit down as needed with my laptop in front of us, and we'd discuss the design, mess around with it together, and then decide on what I could try to add to it. I learned how important communications are between the client and designer, and how it goes both ways. Although what she wanted was ultimately what was to be, that didn't limit me from proposing ideas and suggesting layouts that she hadn't originally thought of. 

The culminating final product was better than I had expected it would be. While learning how to take my resources such as fonts and images and utilize them as needed, I was able to compose a design that was largely to my client's liking, and then completely to her liking by the time it was done. It was a great experience to have to be able to directly work with a business owner, and really cool to have created a product for her to professionally use.

Success!

After sitting down with my mom again last night, we tweaked the card to it's final look, shown below.

We messed around with the sparkle part a little bit, testing out different colors until we decided on white as the best option. We played with the layout a little bit more, justifying the byline to the right and removing the line from the design. 

I think the overall look it achieves is great. It's very minimalistic, with a simple background and the same font/color throughout. It also looks as though it was burned into the wood, which is something my mom does do. Having the sparkle part works not only to further that representation, but also adds a little bit of variation to the card that makes it a little more interesting.

My mom would like to print them, so hopefully I'll be able to upload a photo of what it looks like printed sometime soon! 

Adding a Sparkle

One way my mom asked for me to try and edit the design was to add a little burst of light to the end of the 's' in "Creations" as I mentioned in my last posting. After about an hour of messing around in Pages, here's the result:

I had a lot of trouble making it work, but I actually kind of like the way it looks as an element on its own. This wasn't necessarily a make-or-break-it feature on the card, as we decided to try it out more experimentally. In relation to the entire card, I'm actually not entirely sold on how it looks.

However, my mom will be the one to make the final call, so we'll see how that goes! 

Revisions

Last night I sat down with my mom and showed her the few drafts I had put together. For a while, we played around with them, making little changes such as rearranging the text, adding on her name, and changing some of the sizing of the fonts. The big change we made was to take the shadowing off of the fonts. Originally, I had added that to make it look as though the writing was burned into the wood, but we found that it looked much better and clearer without that shadow. We wound up with a couple of options, both very similar.

I asked her if there was anything else I should to try to do, and as it's a card advertising the laser engraving side of her business, she suggested making it look as though the last 's' in "Creations" was finishing being engraved with a little burst of light. Below are the quick sketches she made of what she might like it to look like, although if I can't get it to work she told me not to worry.

Overall, the process has gone very well. My mom was very pleased with the design after we tweaked it, and I definitely like the results as well. I'm excited to continue playing with it, but I think that even now it looks much better than I thought it would!

Needs Assessment & First Drafts

My mom and I sat down last night, and I asked her what she wanted in the business card design, from the information to the overall style. My notes from that discussion are here:

Today, I was able to take her suggestions and formulate 6 basic business card designs. They're all very similar, but a few characteristics are tweaked between each of them. I tried as best as I could to fit my mom's requirements, finding a wood-pattern background on Creative Commons and applying some shading to make the lettering look burned in like she wanted. There were a couple of items from our discussion that I couldn't fit in, but as this is a first draft, when my mom and I go over the options I can always go back and add those parts in to her bidding.

Overall, I like how the card looks, especially how the lettering looks with the background. I can only hope my mom feels the same!

General Description

The business I'm connecting with for this final project is Acadia Laser Creations, owned by my mom Jenny Perruzzi. It's a creative retail business specializing in laser engraved products, handmade greeting cards, stamping and scrapbooking supplies, and other unique gifts and souvenirs.

At this point, it seems like my project will be a business card, and she's already suggested some basic design ideas of what she'd like to see. In the next few days, we'll start working out specifics and I'll begin the design.

When I presented the project to her she was very excited, so this should be really fun! I'm definitely looking forward to experiencing this process.

Body of Text Poster

Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun is one of my favorite books. Months after reading it, a lot of the poignant imagery and ideas stayed with me. So when it came time to choose a portion of text to create a poster with, I knew I wanted to use something from it. The passage I used is probably my favorite out of the whole work, because of the unique perspective it provides on war. The image I chose for the background is actually from the cover of the book, which was neat to combine with the text.