Font Poem

I chose these particular words out of a poem because they were the most descriptive and I felt they would be easiest to create in Photoshop. Fonts I included in my poem include Monaco, Ruzicka Freehand, Nuptial Script, Ironwood, Rockwell Extra Bold, Edwardian Script, Myriad Pro, Zipty Do, Pompeia, Nyx, OCR A, Oragami, Synchro LET, and Shuriken Boy. For the simpler words such as they, are, and the, I used simpler fonts so as not to take away from the more important words of the poem. For "sky," I used a sky color and used an airy like font. For the first "rain", I used a blue color and then used a font that looked as though it was melting or dripping down like rain. For the second "rain," I used a bambo looking font to convey the feeling of rainforest rain and tilted the word downward to convey the motion of rain. I used a fancy pink font style for the "roses" to convey the femininess of roses. I shadowed "they" with one other lighter colored gray "they" because they is a plural word. The word off is coming off of the word "from" to represent the meanings of the words. "Shaken" is blurry and shaky and "bush" is bold and circular to represent the words. I chose a background with rain droplets and transformed the color into dark gray.

I had a hard time remembering how to create different effects for each font, so I had to constantly use trial and error. One of the biggest problems I faced was creating layer styles until I found out that the blend option had to be changed from multiply to normal. I would have to say I am most proud of overcoming these obstacles on my own and creating a piece that fits the requirements for a font poem.

Contact Sheet

When working on the contact sheet, I noticed that I was familiar with some of the applications within Photoshop. I took a few computer graphic design classes in high school, all of which included Photoshop. I was most familiar with the format/mode and orientation sections, but the others I had less or no experience with.

The resolution row was a bit tricky to complete simply because I had trouble finding a 1200 dpi picture. I searched Google images and learned that once I selected the large picture option, I received 1200 dpi pictures. I choose the striped caterpillar because I felt it would be easier to see if the picture became fuzzier, if I could no longer define the stripes. Once I found a picture, I dragged it into Photoshop, decreased it to one inch in height, and proceeded to decrease the dpi by selecting image size and typing in the accurate dpi size.

The format/mode row was simpler because I have had previous experience with it. I choose a 300 dpi image full of colors to drastically illustrate the variants in color with each column. I began with the RGB color because that is what the image was originally set in from the web and decreased it to one inch in height. I then changed the color to CMYK by selecting image, mode and CMYK. I developed the B&W picture by selecting image, mode, and grayscale from the original photo. For Duotone, I kept the image in the B&W condition and then selected image and duotone. From there, I was able to choose what color I wanted to appear in the photo besides black. I chose pantone red, giving the photo a red tint.

For orientation, I choose a picture with greater length than height from Google. I then typed 1 in. by 1 in. into the width and height toolbar at the top. From there, I clicked on the crop icon on the left side toolbar and dragged the crop tool from the top left corner of the picture to where the crop tool stopped. I then doubled clicked on the selected area of the photo and placed it into the square column. For the portrait row, I did the same, but made the width .75 in. and the height 1 in.

For the framing row, I changed the height of a picture from Google to 1 in. using image size. I then typed in 1.5 in. for the width and 1 in. for the height in the toolbar at the top. I took the crop tool and chose a spot in the center of the image. I then double clicked the selected area to zoom into that specific area. I proceeded to do that three times for each column.

For the content row, I took a picture of a violin off the Flickr photo website. After dragging it into Photoshop, I selected the crop tool and focused on a specific part of the violin. I kept cropping from the original photo until I got down to a specific detail on the violin that wouldn't be recognizable unless the representational photo was seen first. I shrunk the photo down to 1 in. in height each time I cropped it.

For the purpose row, I chose a journalistic style photo offline and shrunk it to 1 in. in height in Photoshop. For each column, I took the original photo, went to filter, and choose a specific filter technique I wanted to use. The filters I used were palette knife, colored pencil, and neon glow.