This week on GDII: Flashlights, paper cuts, and books. Lots and lots of books.

Hello!

The past 2 weeks have been very crazy, one because of the quarter coming to an end, but also because  of spring break! I've been very busy, so this is overdue, but I hope it's still relevant.
We got to choose an issue that's happening with people in all parts of the world, and find ways to fix it all. And yeah, long story short, I was really, really excited to choose a topic that's really, really important to me.

And that topic's reading.

Whether it fills your head with dread, takes your breath away with awe, or some other third thing, hold on there friend, hear me out, please. Things are going to get a little tense right about now.

The amount of adults who say that kids and teens have stopped reading as much as before do have a point. In the last 10 years, 

And although the number has dropped a bit more than expected, it's barely scratching the surface. From my experience, tons of teens still read, be it with comics, or their own books, they're always open to reading something they like to pass the time.

But what about our newer generations?

Recent studies from a survey made by Neilson Book data have stated that only 32% of kids read every day, making up about 60% of children reading books every week. There are lots and lots of reasons why kids have stopped reading as much, but some of the main targets called upon by adults are those of electronics taking away kid's wants to read things. After all, kids wouldn't possibly have time to read when they have loads of apps and other things.

The positive of it all is that reading has not died in younger generations. Of the 32%, reading is still one of the few things that can kill boredom next to watching TV.
What IS surprising is the fact that while the amount of older kids reading is few but staying strong, the number of kids who STOP reading when they reach their teens is dropping, and fast.

There are still many ways parents can help these kids to start reading again.

This week on GDII: BEAR ATTACK! *screams* (also known as repeating pattern designs!)

Here's something new for this blog, a whole new project we've been working on for the past 2 weeks!

We were given the task to make a phone case for our phones, and boy did I have a lot of fun choosing the color palettes and drawings for this.
Here's the main things on how the phone case came to be.


INSPIRATION:
So my inspiration for this case came from a lot of things.
And by a lot of things, I mean a lot.

In the beginning I had a whole idea for having an underwater background full of whales and seaweed. And I was really excited because of the fact that whales are some of my favourite animals. But with the time crunch, I opted going for a smaller, simpler design. And that simpler ideas was to use my second favourite animal, a bear.

I got inspired by the animated show 'Shirokuma Cafe', which is a show about a panda bear that's hired to work in a cafe with a polar bear. It sounds really weird, but it's such a lighthearted and crazy show that I can't help but love it.

I was also inspired by other phone cases I saw on Zazzle.com! I really loved the colors for these below, and I liked how the images were clustered together to make a pattern instead of having too many gaps in between. The colors were also really nice!

A few of them are here below! Each of these come from amazing artists who worked very hard to put it on zazzle so go check them out here, here and here!

And now for the...PROCESS:

For me, I know for a fact I have an obsession for color palettes. It sounded really nice too, since I was making the case for myself! So for the most part, I gathered up a lot of color palettes and slowly (a bit reluctantly too) minimized the amount of them all to just 4.

The three I chose came from www.colourlovers.com, and each of these color palettes belong to each artist respectively.

Here they are!

To start everything off, I started sketching some bears. Once I was happy I took a photo of then and took them over to Adobe Illustrator, where I traced it until I was happy with the lines. I messed around with the line colors and later traced a body over so I could pick the right colors and then it just snowballed from there. Lots of meh colors and really cool combinations happened, which was ridiculously fun.

After that I just got all the bears I liked and put the bears in patterns.

As you can see, there were a lot of bears. A LOT of bears. So it took forever to try and fix the colors up to something I liked. A lot of button mashing and layers happened here, some of which I do NOT want to remember. Ugh. WIP below.

And yeah when it was FINALLY done, I set to work at making it a all fit onto the template I had gotten prior. I organized everything and the resulting case design was uploaded onto zazzle again.
Woo!


There was a lot I learned while making this case, a lot of it being to be organized with layers and colors and just trying to make it less complicated than it was already but I was happy. And I still am happy with how it turned out!

So yes, yada yada, thanks for reading!!!

Wrapping up our conserving water ideas and such + hero time!

After all of last week's craziness in getting our sip of what it feels like to design posters for a cause, (in this case the drought problem we're having right now in California), I'm finally back to show you guys the work that we've done in GDII.

We were asked to make a poster design on ways that we could save every drop of water and for that we researched ways that we could save water, brainstormed ways to catch people's attention to the matter and even created posters for it!

Mine's down below!

There were so many things to do for this project, but to start it off I chose to create a superhero to defend those who need water the most! It took me forever to actually come up with a design and color palette and to stick with it, but I feel super relieved on how it all came together!

This week on GDII: Conserving and saving water...why?

Why it's cause for concern in communities?

• With all the climate changes happening right now, the water reservoirs will be experiencing a shrinkage all over, including Sierra Nevada.
• More and more people are expected to mover over to California by 2050, which means an even SMALLER amount of water for each and every person.
• There is a big problem happening with the systems used with delivering water, mainly with being too outdated or changed by the environment.

A few things we can do:

• First of all, RAISE AWARENESS to the issue happening to us. It is very important to get everyone together to try and find ways to save water.
• Then we can all do our parts in taking care of our homes safely by changing to a water conscious community.
• And most of all, speak to the ones in charge of the government to encourage everyone to save water!

For family households?

• The average family of 4 wastes 881 gallons of water per week just by flushing the toilet.
• 10% of homes that have leaks waste about 90 gallons of water or more per day.

A few MORE things we can do:

• Water your lawn only when you need it.
• The most common, turn off the faucet when washing your hair or teeth. You could save 5 gallons!
• Try to reuse the water that falls from the sinks, shower, and lawn for other things!

But...teens?

A lot of people think that teenagers wouldn't care for any of these things, that with all the schoolwork and stress we deal with on a daily basis, we don't even consider water being on our top priority.

There are lots of things that we worry about, but thing that we DO see is how badly our community has been affected because of these shortages of water.

We're no strangers to seeing our parents' bills and can see how the water one keeps going up, and up, and up.

Everywhere around us we can see that because of the drought we're having here in California, things are changing; plants are wilting and dying, people and animals hardly want to be oueven water in ponds at parks are being used to supply people's needs for water.

We've been limited in the ways we can use water, and unless it rains as much as it did during the Great Flood, we're going to have to find ways to use our water wisely.

Hopefully we all just realize that.


Sources:

• http://www.saveourh2o.org/content/conservation-why-and-how
• http://www.charlottesville.org/index.aspx?page=1681
• http://www.sscwd.org/tips.html
• http://www.epa.gov/WaterSense/pubs/fixleak.html
• http://savethewater.org/water-facts/

LOOK HERE TOO!
 (just a little extra thing but it's so so so so cool! I want to get Adobe Muse so badly, its not even funny ;3;)

This week on GD: Pictograph - Making a Cupcake!

Hello there, long time no type! 

This year's been all sorts of crazy but its getting better, and hey, we're doing a lot of cool things in the second year of Graphic Design.

Last week we pushed it to the limit in creating 12 little icons for our pictograph project!

Pictographs are just simple little icons used to represent things (ex. olympic sports), and for this project we had to choose a simple theme and 3 simple colors that'd go along with the theme.

The theme I used to create my pictograph centered on baking a pink chocolate cupcake, and all of the steps it'd take to create it.

One of the biggest inspirations I had in making these were from the handle of one of my best friends, Brissia. Since she's gone to college this year, it's been tough to keep in touch with her, but I really do think about her a lot. (We live a bit close to each other, she's just a state away in Arizona after all!)

She really loves sweets and the color pink so I decided to combine both things and make this about her, just for the fun of it. And boy, did I have fun.

There were a lot of nice choices for this project, but these three up here are by far the best in the rest.

The first one was so much fun to do! I experimented with the swirls inside of the piping bag, and chose the colors for the sprinkles, it was a dream.

The second one was a bit more on the complex side, the angles were a bit of a struggle to make but I managed to make all the outline on the inside of the pan without going too crazy.

The third one was really nice too, I found out how to make the lines noticeable, but not so much as to take away from the whisk.

Next comes the concept art.

With all ideas comes a very, very, very long process in coming up with pictures and then building upon it.

In the beginning, I had a hard time choosing what kind of pictures to use in it. 

At first I had an idea of using only food supplies, but then it changed to the utensils used to make the food, and finally I decided to just go ahead and combine the two. I ended up drawing them into my sketchbook and later scanned them onto my Mac and it pretty much went on from there.

From finding the right color scheme to doodling some chickens to keep me going, this took a lot of thinking. And I'm happy to say that it actually came out better than I expected.

The refined version of my pictograph series took a while, but it's finished down here! I played with my three colors and designed a nice little oven to go along with it, the inspiration for it being the ones above in my concept art.

I am really happy with how the final product turned out!

It's simple to understand, stays in the 3 color scheme and has a really cute cupcake for the cherry on top.

Let's see what we make this week!

Until then, stay sweet!