I know what you did last summer (part 1)

Oh man, what a busy summer! The word “vacations” wasn’t part of my vocabulary during the last months. I worked full time as a support designer for the IT department La Cité collégiale revamping the website, doing updates and some designing. But in addition, I was designing the new album of French-Canadian singer/songwriter Paul Demers during evenings and weekends. I also designed my brother’s bachelor party invitation as you can see in a previous blog entry.

As my 5th semester quickly approaches, here are some of the things I designed during the summer. NOTE : I will be adding a blog entry for the new Paul Demers album when it comes out.

Graphics (organisational chart)

I redesigned an ugly organisational chart created in MS Word into something more visually attractive. It may or may not be use.

Back to school banners

One of those banners may or may not be chosen for the school homepage, but I had a lot of fun experimenting with photoshop.

HDR photography

I did some photography of the campus to refill the college’s image databank and experimented with High Dynamic Range (HDR) toning with some of them. I kept the effect subduded to enhance the image and not make it surreal.

 copyright 2011

School project S4 – Advertisement photography

In this project we applied basic photography theories for advertisement. I believe the hardest part of the project was finding an idea and a good tag line. Since I played Clue’s Colonel Mustard for a classmate website, it inspired me to make a “French’s” mustard ad based on the very popular murder/mystery boardgame. The tag line for this ad is basically the part of the gameplay when you make your accusation… the killer, the room, the weapon. The ambiance is achieved by a simple black and white photo where I kept the yellow of the mustard for contrast. The ad is very simple, but gets the attention. I made two different versions below.

 copyright 2011

School Project S4- Photographer research

For this project we had to research an internationally known photographer and create a brochure/pamphlet about him for a fictional exposition.  I chose Yann Arthus Bertrand who is mostly famous for his aerial photography. Having been a cartography specialist in my previous career, I’ve always been fascinated by aerial and satellite imagery which I was working with every day. That’s probably why his photographs caught my eyes. I had seen some of his photos at the book store without really knowing the artist behind the camera. I discovered a man who has always been passionate for adventure and nature. He wanted to immortalize amazing landscape mostly inaccessible to the general public. Living with nature has developed in him a bond which is now expressed in the environmentalist he has become.

He is mostly known for his book “Earth from above” and his free documentary “Home” (93 min).

You can see my brochure here. (drag the lower right corner to turn the page of the flash book)

 copyright 2011

School project S4 – Natural light portrait

For this photography project we needed to get familiar with a borrowed DSLR camera and use natural light to take portraits of our teammates. This was the first time I used this kind of camera and all its manual functions, so it was very challenging for me especially when I usually only use point-and-shoot devices. I believe the result is quite good for my first photo shoot. All photos were taken in one of the school’s staircases with large windows.

 copyright 2011

School project S3 – Board game

For this illustration project we had to pick an existing board game and make it more interesting. We had the choice between, Clue, Monopoly, Pay Day, Risk, Snakes and Ladders, Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary. I chose the latter, because the original board game had a very simple design.

My idea was to create a board full of doodles and illustrations that could be used in certain cases during gameplay or just to add some fun. I wanted the board to look like an actual game of pictionary, not a boring path of aligned squares on a dark background. I decided to make the path of squares as real post-it notes since you are always drawing on little pieces of paper. I even included a coffee stain to make the illusion more convincing, as if you were playing on a table make out of doodles. To create contrast, I kept the original letters (categories) on blank colored squares to make sure the path didn’t compete with the white doodle background. Each of the 104 illustrations have been numbered and the answer sheet is available for player. I’m sure you can guess most of them. Click on the image below for a closer look.

 copyright 2010

School project S3 – EUFF poster

This is the first real competition the 2^nd year students had this semester. We had to submit three poster designs for the 25th European Union Film Festival here in Ottawa. I actually finished in 2^nd place! Here are my three designs.

The first one is promoting the discovery of european cinema. You can see the movie reel hiding behind a sheet of paper with the European Union logo. The paper is torn in the shape of the country included in the European Union. This is a photography based design. Only the text and some lighting effect were added with photoshop.

The second poster was the second place winner. The design is fairly simple. You can see the silhouette of the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa, with huge light columns coming from projectors behind the building. The light column are forming the roman number XXV (25) for the 25th anniversary of the festival.

The third was hand drawn in photoshop with a Wacom tablet. It is a James Bondesque style poster. Instead of a gun, the femme fatale is hidind a 8mm camera behind her back. I’ve made two variations of the poster.

 copyright 2010