"Designing With Type" Design a Personal Web Page Concept

Mr. Michael Delahunt

Graphic Design 1 & 2
The 2nd
"Designing with Type" Assignment:
Design a Personal Web Page Concept

This one-page document will promote you to potential employers and clients -- people you want to hire you to design for them. It will include an image of you, your name, and biographical information. It will function much like a resumé, professionally selling you for your graphic design services.

You will submit it electronically, and you may post it on the Internet.

Your assignment is to

1 Produce a picture of yourself which will become a focal point of your page. Use a current photograph of yourself, digitize it, and creatively alter it in Adobe PhotoShop Elements. The goal of this picture, as with the rest of the page's design is to portray you as smart, creative, and business-like.

2 Design a typed image of your name that displays the qualities you most want your clients to see in you. Consider using one of the name designs you created for this quarter's third assignment.

3 Write a text of a short description of skills you are offering your clients. It must be 75 - 100 words.

4 Find a great quotation that helps to convey your philosophy of life or of design. Be sure to record the byline of the person who made this statement full name, nationality, when alive, and an identifying characteristic (not necessarily in that order). One source for quotations about art concepts can be found in ArtPage.

These four elements will be the contents of this document, and should then be creatively laid out using the skills you learned in the previous lesson -- "Working with Type in Adobe Illustrator."
These skills include:

Create type in containers and along paths.
Import text files into type containers.
Adjust type attributes and formatting, including the font.
Leading, and paragraph alignment.
Wrap type around a graphic.
Create stylized letterforms and outlined type. (Optional)
Create type masks.
Save the file in PDF format.

5 Create a new folder on the student server in the folder with your name. Title this folder "Personal Web Page Concept."

6 Obtain the photograph of you. It must be a current photograph. In order to alter it in PhotoShop, you must either use a digital photograph, or scan it at home or in class, and save it as a PhotoShop file in the folder you just created, "Personal Web Page Concept." Make some creative changes to this photograph, but retain a significant degree of likeness to the way you really look, and "save as" in a file format ". jpg" or ".tiff".

7 Save the design of your name, the texts of your short biography and your quotation as three separate files in the folder for this assignment.

8 Make several pencil sketches in which you draw a variety of layouts of the four elements you need to put into this one-page design. (These must be handed in with a print of the final design.) Choose the most promising layout as the basis of what you will further design on the computer.

8 Start Adobe Illustrator.

9 Choose Open > New and create a file you name "personal.page", selecting the color mode RGB, and setting the artboard size at width of 8.5 inches and the height at 11 inches for a "portrait" orientation (or reverse these dimensions for a "landscape" orientation.) Select Adobe Illustrator format and append the .ai suffix to identify this file as made in this format. Save this file in your "Personal Web Page Concept" folder.

10 Embed the PhotoShop file into your design. Choose File > Place > Users > [your graduating class] > [your name folder] > Personal Web Page Concept > [your photo].

11. Continue to produce your design making sure to employ each of the techniques listed after step four above. For information on how to perform these tasks, refer to the "Designing with Type" instruction booklet you followed in order to produce the Tai Chi poster.

12. As you design, consider how you can best use each of the elements and principles of design. For example, decide to design the page either in black and white or in a color scheme of your choice.

13 In order to use the skill "creating type masks", consider using a texture image. You may use one of the images posted here. Or you may search the Net for Web sites that offer images to tile as backgrounds on Web pages. Whatever image you choose, hold your mouse button down over it, select "Download to disk," and save it to the "Personal Web Page Concept" folder in your folder. Or you may produce a small original image for your mask by using Photoshop.

13. For the PDF version of your page, choose some words or images to make into links to other Web pages and / or email addresses, so that if a person sees your design as posted on a Web server, they can either click on links to relevant Web pages or initiate an email contact with you.

14 Finish before the Deadline -- end of class February 12 -- and place a copy of your final product in the drop-box. Title a copy of the file you've completely retouched "[period 1 or 2] webpage [last name]" and drop it into Users > Assignments > Graphic Design > drop-box. One fifth of the 100 points you can earn are for turning this assignment in by its deadline.

Return to Graphic Design Course

ArtPage has thousands of articles about art terms used in art production, art criticism, art history, aesthetics, and art education. I created ArtPage for my students, to help them increase their understanding of art concepts, readings, writings, and conversations. Some of the hyperlinks found on the pages about my elementary art program will take you to ArtPage articles about terms on these pages.

I have taught art at three elementary schools in the Paradise Valley Unified School district (northeastern Phoenix and north Scottsdale) from 1986-. I began publishing information about my classes on the Web in 1995. I taught at Pinnacle High School during the 2001-2002 school year, and posted these lessons that year. I will maintain them as time permits.

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