Behind the Scenes

This year, I have learned many things about digital media. I've gotten more familiar with many programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premier. I have worked on countless fun projects, each project challenging me in a new way. Here are just some of the projects that I have worked on:

Table of Contents

Canadian North

Photography - Perrier

Canadian North

Much of this semester was spent designing new graphics for the airline Canadian North. I designed a boarding pass, an evelope to go with the boarding pass, and a luggage tag.

I started off this proejct by researching what vintage boarding passes may have looked like. The original idea was to go for a look that was similar to the "Golden Age of Travel". I created multiple designs, changed the colour scheme, and constantly asked people what they thought looked good about the boarding pass and what could have been improved on.

Eventually I realised that the vintage style that I had been going for didn't seem to work that well. During my research, I had noticed that Canadian North had been going for a modern look for a while, and I thought that I could try to design a boarding pass with a more modern feel to try and reflect their brand identity. After revising a few more drafts, I had come up with this desgin.

It was much easier to come up with a modern design than a vintage one. I was able to follow their brand identity guidelines, which includes the use of their official font, Renalte. This font would have been nearly impossible to use if I wanted to create a vintage boarding pass.

I also moved the barcode from the right side to the left. The reason why i did this was so that it could match up with a specially placed cutout on the envelope. This way, you didn't have to take your boarding pass out of the envelope when you were scanning it at the gate.

I placed the logo on the horrizon as it would look like a "hidden" underline, which would emphasise the logo more.

The background of the envelope was a recolour of a design I had made last year. Since Canadian North was an airline that flew to some of the most northern parts of Canada, I thought that the design that I made of the arctic last year would be perfect.

I had also made a backside to this envelope.

For this art, I had traced an airplane and all of its features in order to have a "prototype" look.

After finishing the envelope, I realised I could have made this look cooler by connecting the front and backside of the envelope to make one continuous picture.

I had some time to spare after finishing the envelope, so I decided to try and make a luggage tag. Making the baggage tag was quite quick and easy as It didn't require a lot of thinking into how I should design it.

The black should be cut out.

I had realised after the luggage tags had been printed that it wouldn't close very nicely. I had originally thought to put a string through both sides of the tag, but this would also lock it unless you cut the string. I would create a better system next time for closing the tag.

Here's how they turned out.

Photography - Perrier

Another big assignment this semester was making a product photograph for Perrier.

Originally I wanted to follow a similar photograph idea as the following:

However, this idea did not turn out quite as similar as the one in the video.

I started off by creating test shots, playing around with lighting, exposure, and mist.

Originally, getting the condensation to stick to the bottle was very difficult. I thought that I could just spray some water onto it and it would stay, but it didn't. After a bit of experimenting, I learned that condensation sticks better to the can if I freeze it. Therefore I put the can into the freezer and left it there for about 30 mins.

I also tried sparying mist in the background, but after playing around with the shutterspeed, I realised that, with the lighting set up I had, I had to keep my shutter open for longer to get a good photo. This meant that I couldn't capture the mist in the background.

In the second photo, I managed to take a photo of the can that I was happy with. Then I imported this photo into Adobe Lightroom. and played around with the colours to make them pop more and be more vibrant.

Next, I brought it into photoshop, and separated the can from the background. This way, i had control over the bottle, it's placement, and the background behind it. Here I centred it, and made the background black.

Next I generated a fog from photoshop and placed this into the background. Originally I wanted to have real mist in the background (as per the original video); however the shutter speed that I used was too high to capture the water droplets in air. Therefore I added them in post.

Finally, i added some colours to the mist, added some text, and the logo as finishing touches.

Here is the final result: