Typography

 

What is typography?

Typography is the art of using text for a creative purpose, examples of this include greetings cards, books, posters, newspapers, and fine art pieces - the outcome must be appealing to the eye and the text must generally be east to read. Due to the fact that the text must be easy to read the typographer must carefully select aspects of the text such as; font, colour, size and positioning.

 Each of these must be considered when thinking about the audience and purpose of the typography, for example a poster will use bright, loud and bold typography in order for it to stand out in a cluster; where as newspapers or textbooks are usually formal prints, that tend to be printed in black and white.

Photoshop intro - layering and affects.

 

Photoshop introduction.

I used Photoshop for the first time and decided to work with an image that I had drawn and also one that I found on the internet, I layered these up and added various affects until I was happy playing around with the new tools.

Before.

After.

I used tools, like crop, colour balance, saturation, opacity, contrast, layering and more. My favourite tool to use was opacity because I like the way that the two images fade into together and make it seem like one, I use this image to fade out because it looks as if Mickey and Goofy are looking out at former version of themselves.

I also used a variety of gradients to play around some more with my image and the use of colour, there are a range of grandaunts and effects like these; such as negative, sketch etc. I like the outcome of this image because there is no way that you can tell part of it was drawn, or layered and it looks like the two images belong together.

Gradient edit.

Given more time I feel I will be able to develop my work more and experiment with a variety of techniques, such as embossing photos, creating digital images, working with a wider variety of colours and more. I feel as though as though I have only just start working with Photoshop, and there are still many tools and effects that I will be able to use on future work.

Digitally enhanced photos.

Digitally enhanced photos on the internet.

I studied the way that digitally enhanced images are used in everyday life; to advertise, emphasis and create artwork. Digitally enhanced art work is work that has been uploaded onto a computer and editing using specific computer software like Photoshop, the effects can very fro layering, sharpening and enhancing brightness.

I have collected some images below that evidence my research on digitally enhanced photos – my first image could be used for tourism photography and advertisement, the idea would be to change the colours, contrasts and lighting in order to portray the ideal image for the outcome, this is used in advertising for holidays and scenery because it makes the landscape look more appealing to the audience.

My second use of evidence for digitally enhanced images was magazine and make up photography, these images are enhanced and photo-shopped to make the subject look like society’s idea of “perfect”. These images influence consumers across the globe into purchasing these products in order for them to conform to an ideal.

Thirdly, these processes can be used when creating a background for film advertisement, these are often succeeded through the use of digital media and green screens, the person us usually real, but can be digitally created, and the scenery, active background and bright packaging are deliberately placed there via a computer in order to sell a product and make it look exciting to the consumer.

Album covers often incorporate this method of enhancement and editing so that they may portray an individual and unique idea for their style of music, this often tells the consumer whether or not they will like the music they are about to purchase. This particular album cover portrays light and contrast well and draws the main attention to the centre of the album cover.

This image of a comic strip has been edited with computer software, the is a before and after picture that shows a changed in size, lighting, brightness, sharpness, colour, and the removal of writing from the original comic strip. You can see clearly from these two images that the second version is more clearer and has a lot more definition that the first, this shows how digitally editing can help to improve upon images in way that pencils, paintbrushes and art supplies can not.

Oliver Ponsonnet.

Oliver is a French digital artist who works with portraits of transformed men and women into portraits of creepy, fantasy nature. I love this work because the transformation is natural and the outcome is dark and mysterious leading you to question the meaning. The portrait is called “Mr.Bone” and is considered to be a practitioner of medieval voodoo.

Jon Measures.

Jon Measures uses a variety of techniques within his work, including mixed media and heavy range of digital imagery, there is a a huge variety of layering, colour contrasting and texture that all together depicts the history and environmental atmosphere through the use of popular culture (popular logos, food chains, landmarks) and colour.