Unlocking the process

Now that my semester has ended, I’ve had time to work on some projects that people have asked me to do.

Christian Challenge, a student club at UofA, is starting a series next semester that explores the different facets of identity. The title is “Unlocking Your Identity”, and I was asked to design a poster for in-dorm use, and small fliers to pass out. My concept for the poster advertisement was to have all different sorts of keys that are clearly unique. I thought that probably the easiest way to do this would be to find a whole bunch of photos of keys, remove the backgrounds in Photoshop, and turn the keys solid black. After working on the first key (of nine), I wasn’t satisfied with how the final image looked.

I usually try to avoid drawing. It’s not easy for me, it’s really time consuming to practice, and things rarely come out exactly how I want them to. Even though I try to skip that step every time I design something, the design ends up looking better if I draw first.

Before a couple years ago, I didn’t understand how people went from the sketching process to the computer stage with scanned images. I would see pencil sketches, then I would see computer-generated gradients on the sketches, and it really didn’t make sense to me.

I scanned my drawings, then traced over them in Illustrator. When I was done, I could rearrange and resize the keys however I wanted. The imperfection of my drawings carried over and are even more apparent in my tracings (double the trouble—I’m not great at using the pen tool in illustrator either). Originally, I had perfect outlines of keys in mind, but after they were done I realized that they have more personality if they’re not perfect. People aren’t perfect either.

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