This and last week, I continued designing the logo and course graphics for the spring class Agentic Software Engineering. We’re coming up on the deadline, so I’ve been working on finishing up finalizing the design. I’ve been working on developing several different designs to give the client as many options as possible. Right now, we’re still decided which logo to move forward with, but we should have it finalized by today or Monday.

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Initial Concepts

Final concepts

Course Graphics Concepts

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While I waited on feedback from these course graphics, I’d work on designing the 2027 STA presentation poster. We scrapped the original design since we felt it was too similar to a previous design and switched to another idea. I was tasked to portray an environment that was like a “behind-the-scenes” area (or technical room) for game shows, with the shows playing on the screens with our STA’s inside them. After confirmation of the concept, I began working inside illustrator to design all of the assets and designs I will need when I begin inserting the cut-out photos.

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Original design. From left to right; Concept, initial Illustrator implementation, edited from constructive feedback

Design version 2. From left to right; 4 versions of concept sketches, 2 versions of Illustrator implementation

Design version 3 (current version), concept sketch

Illustrator implementation, work in progress

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I’m glad to be working on these projects and gaining the experience from them. I’ve been enjoying learning many new artistic skills and being able to express my creativity. I look forward to continue working on these and future projects.

I submitted the finalized version of the STA classroom support poster and have been assigned new projects. One that I was just assigned to do this week is making classroom graphics for an engineering class. They’ve requested a custom logo and I have been tasked to design it.

The client stated that they want the logo to represent “computer hieroglyphics”. First, I simplified the task. Some of the words I gathered from their request are “communication”, “engineering”, and “tools”. So, using those words, I researched symbols that represent those words. From there, I used those references to help me design similar ones with a more hieroglyphic look. To be honest it was quite difficult especially since I don’t design logos too often, however I made sure to make as many concepts as I could before getting into details.

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First wave of concepts

Second wave of concepts

Third wave of concepts

Final wave of concepts

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I’m now working on a prototype within illustrator to see how it would look inside the program. That’s all that I have to share for this week.

This week’s and last week’s focus has been STA posters as we finished up the cut outs. I began finalizing my portion of the poster, and today I finally submitted the final files. I will show my process below of months worth of progress.

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I was tasked with designing the poster for the classroom support STAs inspired by the “Guess Who?” board game. I decided to go straight into Illustrator and start designing.

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Inspiration and references

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First prototype. Students shown are placed as placeholders, they are not current classroom support STAs

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My art director and I were happy with what I produced, however this was not the initial idea for the design. They wanted the game board to be displayed with the students as the game pieces. So, I recycled what I could (such as the title and background) and scrapped what I didn’t need to start a new version.

In hindsight, it was not a good idea for me to immediately start in Illustrator without sketching up a few different concepts and confirming with my director. In future projects, I will always produce several concept sketches before moving on to more details.

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Second version

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I liked the playfulness this version gave with the angled board and varying game pieces, I feel like it gave it a more natural feel. Unfortunately, this would not work for this group of STAs since there were between 15-20 students. So again, I recycled what I could and made another version.

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Third version

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I angled the board to face more forward and added several more game pieces. We were getting closer to where we wanted this poster to be. I tried to keep the playfulness and natural feel to the board, however I could not figure out how to line up the game pieces properly while using Illustrators 3D and bevel tool. So, for one last time, it was back to editing.

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Final reference photo

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Final design

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We finally decided on changing the board to face head on. It would make organization and unifying much easier rather than worrying about getting an accurate perspective. Since I had to redo many things in this project, I’ve learned to keep designs simple until there has been confirmation to move on. It was a lot of repetative work, but I’m satisfied with the end result.

Hello, I’ll start where we left off last time. Last week, I was assigned to design the STA presentation poster. I was tasked to design a game show audience environment. After gathering my references, I concepted a few designs in Procreate. Because there are so many STAs, I had to make sure that there would be several spots to add in their photo cut outs.

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Initial concepts

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After speaking to my art director, we decided to go with the second design the student photos will likely be straight-on, which would possibly cause problems if we were to go with the first one. I cleaned up the design, added more seats, ad created several variations.

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You may notice mistakes, such as backwards lettering. I focused on designing these as quickly as I could while still delivering the idea clearly enough for my director to understand.

This week I received feedback on these designs, and while the colors are a good choice, this design is too close to another one made previously by another designer. So my new task is to create concepts of another design, one that does not match another design already.

For this blog, I will be sharing some work that I’ve done both last week and this week. Last week, I ended on sharing my progress with some trainings I’ve been doing. After showing the progress I had made on my logo, I’ll be showing the final logo animation and some mock-ups.

I’m happy with the end result, however I will need to wait on feedback before officially finalizing this project

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For my next training, I chose to practice some painting in Photoshop. I’m already familiar with digital painting in other programs such as Clip Studio and Procreate, so I wanted to see how my skills would translate.

I was tasked to paint the provided reference, which was a red tea pot. I first started by painting the silhouette of the tea pot, added the shadows, highlights, and details. I did not spend too much time cleaning up since this was just practice.

I was next tasked with finding my own reference and paint it using what I had learned. I decided to choose a simple black and white image of a vulture I found on Pixabay. I find it easier to paint in black and white rather than color. The first image is the reference, the second image is the painting.

This was definitely my favorite training project and I’m pleased with what I created. I hope to do more paintings and illustrations like these in future projects.

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As of right now, I’m learning how to create a custom website in Figma. I don’t have access to the concepts I created or what I have done at the moment, so I will have to show you another time. However I can say that I have been having a lot more fun than I thought creating a website of my own.

Besides trainings, I have been assigned new projects. One of them is creating the STA Presentation Poster. I’m running out of time writing here (again) so I will have to show you next week… again. I just have so much to share, it’s impossible to share it all within 30 minutes. Thank you.

Other than making some minor adjustments and edits, I finished everything I could do with the voting PSA animations this week. I’m now waiting to hear any edits or adjustments that may be needed before the official release of the PSA’s. In the meantime, I spent a lot of my time working on my trainings on Knowledge Base.

I first started with making pixel art in Illustrator since it was something new for me to try and seemed the most fun. I decided to make some artworks on my family’s pets since the tutorial used a dog as an example. I made 4 variations of each pet, each time experimenting with Illustrators generative color palettes. I had fun playing around with it and creating some unique color combinations.

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Next I learned how to make an 8-bit animation in Photoshop. It’s a simple and quick way to make a small animated piece. I wanted to make something a bit unusual, so I cropped a mouth and animated it to look as if it were laughing.

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The next training (and probably my favorite) was designing and animating a logo for myself. I wanted to go with my online username that I use for my art accounts, Kodicthyo. I also wanted to portray one of my characters that I created and have had for several years, Nyx. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I was struggling with the animation portion, however I’m glad I continued to push through the frustrations because I learned a lot of new things that I never would have learned had I not pushed myself.

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I’m out of time here, so I will have to show the rest of my projects next time I come in. Thank you for reading, as always.