SEMESTER IS DONE

Here is the final template for my milk bone packaging, scaled down, of course

 Also, I decided to make posters for my family for Christmas, a fun and cheap way for a graphic designer to give presents!

 To my mom^

 To my brother^

To my dad^

Milk Bone packaging

Here is a preliminary execution and design for the redesign and packaging of milk bone dog treats. Each flavor of the variety pack has a different compartment, shaping it into a dog bone.

Book Cover Project

The Bell Jar: a dramatic and emotional semi-autobiography written by Sylvia Plath. This book takes you through a journey of a young woman battling severe clinical depression. Studying psychology and taking a class focused on the specific diseases associated with the psyche, I wanted to take the reader into the brain of main character, Esther Greenwood with this book cover design.

The heavy, dark blue background symbolizes the void and emptiness Esther is feeling in her life, and the pink spine symbolizes the life she wishes to live (with pink being a beautiful, girly color).  The fig tree symbolizes the life Esther yearned for, however the unreachable figs on the tree represent each path in life she wishes to choose. At the base of the tree lies a distressed figure, Esther, as she cannot decide which path in her life she wants to take. The colored lines inside the tree are beautiful individually, but together they show anxiety, along with the sporadic design they convey. On the spine shows the huddled figure inside the bell jar, the symbol Esther gives to her life of containment inside this disease.

Preliminary Sketch

I decided to pursue my fig tree idea and here is the sketch I will be rendering on Illustrator.

Book cover selection

 

I chose The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath to recreate the cover for because this was my favorite book from high school. The way the author takes the reader into her mind with her struggle of depression is eye opening, so I want to take you into her mind with an illustration from the book cover. 

Using this quote for inspiration:

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.  From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.  One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.  I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.  I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."  ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Chapter 7

 

 The struggles Plath faced to fit into normal society is very apparent here, so I want to illustrate the fig tree with Sylvia's form being surrounded by the roots in an overbearing form. The top of the fig tree with have oddly colored figs with silhouettes of symbols of the society Plath wishes to have: a husband, writer, professor, etc. 

Final Poster

 

My final Iron and Wine poster in comparison with my scanned preliminarily sketch. I wanted to use a contrast of naturalistic imagery with geometric forms and lines.

Event Poster

An Iron and Wine concert is coming to the Tabernacle on November 11, so I wanted to do a concert poster for this. Iron and Wine has a very mellow, natural sound, which goes along with previous concert posters made for them. The hand drawn, illustrative quality of these posters inspired me, because I have always loved designing elements with geometric lines and an abundance of color. Also, many of these posters have animals and other nature scenes, so I want to play on that, but not entirely copy these.