Safe sex - one love

It's a use of metaphor.
But definitely a straight and friendly way of presenting
"SAFE SEX"

Safe sex Poster with type faces

"If You've Had Two Sex Partners" and "AIDS: Get the Facts" represent a common didactic and informative approach to AIDS educational posters that does not use images to supplement text. Their respective content and approach, however, are dramatically different. This poster from the Texas AIDSLINE makes reference to a metaphor taken from Surgeon General C. Everett Koop in the mid-1980s. Koop and other public health educators suggested that in terms of the epidemiology of AIDS, having sex with someone was like having sex with all of their previous partners. At a moment when the dangers of promiscuous sex were being emphasized, this metaphor had the power to even invoke fear of serial monogamy.

http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/VC/B/B/F/V/

Among hundreds of images that demonstrate the effects to prevent HIV-AIDS, respectively in the topic “Safe sex”, this poster stands out and attracts me much due to its special and attractive method of presenting the main ideas. Essentially, having no pictures enclosed does not mean that you lose the crucial parts to exhibit your points. In my opinion, this poster even says a thousand words better than the usual ones.

Text creates image

Just playing with the text and making a visible picture.

Text excercise

Really, it was not as easy as I supposed to create such a logo, a text like this one. Although the layout of this text is simple. Nevertheless, it made me get stuck in dealing with the letter “L” and “R” apparently as I created more curves and lines with pen tool. No matter how hard I tried, they still did not look like the same as the original. Maybe I should take a look back and improve my techniques after all. I also realized that those two letters were put too close together. They may stand there to remind my mistakes regardless

Blend exercise

It is true that I was not used to getting familiar with brush tool in Photoshop before. Nevertheless, I found it quite interesting to go and do some blend exercises like these above. Now the brush tool may not make me feel strange to know how to apply and find the nice ones on the net (as long as they are treated as references). Yet we still need to be aware of not abusing this kind of tool due to the redundancy and silly parts that may appear. Consequently, I tried to limit the number of moths which are only put on the left side of the second picture.

Mac vs PC

An interesting advertisement of Mac that I found on the net, this aims to the great benefits of using Imovie compared to PCs in such a funny way of metaphor.

Font consideration

After learning the rules of using fonts as a critical issue in design, I looked back this poster which was made for an entry of my Dim1’s visual diary. I thought the layout had no serious problem with my idea of creating. Nevertheless, the text and title were made randomly as these were the last process and did not take much time for me. Therefore, perhaps I got a mistake of not purposefully choosing and putting the fonts. Now it is time to review what I have done and be aware of this aspect in the later work.

Gestalt exercise

This is the layout I made for the Gestalt exercise as a class activity. Overall, my arrangement of text and image is quite simple. Nevertheless, I suppose that the viewers will definitely find it easy to follow and read the contents. Moreover, the title may get their attention at the first sight since I intentionally made a dominance of the word “Sex Life” as they are put in the middle, huge and have colors which are discriminated from each other. In addition, I also tried to fix those two words by using the kerning function in Illustrator.

Desaturate

In Dim2 class, I have learnt a method to create this kind of image and color. Nevertheless, it was a little bit complex as many steps had been taken in order. Consequently, I found some similar techniques on the Internet but the way to do that was much easier and still works well.

· Layer->Layer from background

· Duplicate Layer.

· Image->Adjustment->Desaturate

· Use History Brush Tool to recover the colorised area.

It may get viewers paid attention to the main point considerably although the tip is such simple.

Besides, thanks to my old friend who took this photo. Now he is living in Orange County, LA.

The Sun

After experiencing many logos of the sun, I came up with some ideas and made this image. During the online research, I found some things interesting about the sun such as the history, names and the convention that designers usually exhibit in their logos.

At first, it is now hard for me to remember all the words which are used to describe “the sun”: Solar, Helios, Luminescence and so on. Moreover, I observed that white color is used in most of the logo backgrounds, but there are still some exceptions for black, deep brown, etc. In addition, it is clear to see that lines is the crucial element which many designers take advantage of and easy to distinguish from the moon.

I had the background of my image filled with black to represent the universe. Therefore the sun is made by using hot tones of color such as red and orange, also creates a high contrast actually. Besides, I used straight lines to express the sun lights and hoped that it may help people realize the sun without any doubt. Furthermore, in my opinion, the colors can not only illustrate the temperature but also the shape of a human iris.