Personal Logo

Design Stages:

 

Audience

My audience of this piece is my class, my professor, and myself. 

Idea

The idea of this piece was to create a logo, using black, white and Gestalt's theory. The logo is to be something that can identifiable and have my personal initials within it somewhere. I am using the initials "TN" and am picking various things that I like. I will use Gestalt by creating blank gaps in between black shapes to have a "full" image.

Summary

While there were plenty of ideas I could have come up with, narrowing down my options in the end became a bit difficult. In the end, I did finally pick the logo design I did like the best, and finished it to the best of my ability.

Bottom line

At the end of it all, this was a good exercise in pushing to think outside of the box and the result was pleasing.

Layout Stages

 

Thumbnails:

Sketches 1-15

Sketches 16-21

Sketches 23-31

Rough

 

Sushi Rough

Mushroom Rough

Comprehensive

 

Final Design

Vectorized Sony Logo

Raster RGB and INDEXED increased resolution quality comparison

 

Indexed:

This version is more pixelated compared to the RGB version. In this image the .gif stayed in indexed color mode as the resolution was changed. Because of this the program could only pick between 256 colors to make up the color differences when changing.

 

 

RGB:

This version is less jagged and a bit smoother compared to the Indexed color version. In this image the .gif was converted to RGB color mode before the resolution changed. This allowed the program access to 16.7 million colors to fill in the spaces.

 

 

 

 

High quality RGB Converted to Vector

 The process of getting a better looking vector image from a .gif has some easy steps.
     1. Try and have it the size you wan to begin with.
     1a. If that is not possible, convert color mode to RGB and change the resolution to be the size you needed
    2. In Adobe Illustrator or other Vector based software, select High Fidelity Photo on your image trace options 

Old Version

New Version

The difference?

The difference between the two images shows why either having the correct size, or converting and changing resolution, is needed. In the old version the file had been too small and as a result the vector image looks bad especially compared to the new version.

Vector File Size Comparison

Simple Trace

There is not a lot of points when compared to the high fidelity trace. Since it's a simple vectorized image it takes up only 2.3 MB

Complex Trace

This vectorized image has a lot of points and therefore is a much larger file. 7 MB.

Curved Line

This curved line only has two points in it and takes up 1.6 MB

Ai: Rasterize Vector Logos

Apple Logo:

I opened the image in Adobe Illustrator and using the process I had before with my self portraits, traced the image and expanded it. I traced this logo using the High Fidelity Photo option. Afterwords I used Save for Web and selected and saved it as a .gif with 256 colors.

Batman Logo:

As before, I opened and traced the image. This time I traced it with 3 Color trace option. I then went to Save for Web and saved as a .gif using 8 colors.

 Firefox Logo:

This time I also traced with the High Fidelity Photo option and when I saved it I saved as a .gif 256 colors.

Sony Erickson Logo:

This one was a bit harder to work with. After scaling the image to a proper size it was extremely pixelated. I traced the image with multiple settings before deciding on Low Fidelity Photo option as the High Fidelity was grabbing too much of the pixelation and using it in the image trace. I saved this image as a 128 color .gif

Vector Self Portrait

What is a Raster?

A raster image is any image made up of pixels.

What is a Vector?

A vector image is created using Adobe Illustrator, or similar program. It is based off of a mathematical formula to create images, not pixels.

Converting Raster to Vector

After opening your Raster image into Adobe Illustrator and scaling it to the proportions you like, select the image and click on Image Trace on the tool bar. Click on the drop down menu will give you alternative options on how you would like the image to be traced out. After the image has been traced, select it once more and click on expand on the tool bar. The image is now composed of vector shapes.

Process with visuals

Original PSD file

I took my self portrait and manipulated it in Photoshop until I had the desired affect. After saving it as a .psd, I opened a new document in Illustrator and placed the image inside. 

3 Colors

I selected the image and from the drop down menu selected 3 Colors. It traced the whole image and filled in in with these three colors based on the major colors it recognized.

6 Colors

While I had liked the three colors I was curious to see what it would look like with the other options as well. For this one I chose the option 6 Colors and as before, the program chose the 6 most prevalent colors of the image to trace. Later, I would work with this one more.

16 Colors

I chose the next option 16 Colors and it chose the 16 most dominate colors from the image to trace. It does provide a bit more in between colors, I liked the 6 color one for the second part of the assignment better.

Modified 6 Colors

Using the image created from the 6 Color image trace, I expanded the image which gave me the vector shapes I could freely modify. I went through and manually selected specific colors and filled them with a different color, changing the color scheme of pink-purple-green to almost all cool colors. I also modified the points on some of the paths, changing how the outline of the images were as well as moving the whole shape back or forward to create a gap between the colors.

Pen Tool

Shapes in Adobe Illustrator