Digital Applications - Sebastien Nikolaou

Sebastien Nikolaou is a graphic designer with a focus mainly into illustration and typography. I personally like how his colour palettes always seem very effective, with colours complementing eachother in all of his designs. 

A lot of Nikolaou's work tends to feature collages. I like this effect of layering up many different textures images and shapes and is a technique I have always wanted to improve on personally. For example in his `grmin!' peice there is a combination of mixed media and shapes, all layered up in the centre, against a neutral, blank background, which effectivlely draws the eyes attention.

Typography is another heavy feature in Nikolaou's work. The majority of his fonts tend to be very bold and the majority of the time sans serif. He creates an interesting and bold effect by using contrasting colours. Or, for example in his `tonic' poster, he has used both gradients and individiual coloured backgrounds behinds each peice of text in order to draw the eye to the bolder artist names. I personally like the effect all of the gradients create in this image, as well as again the collage style with many vector shapes all built up behind the main image. Again, the texture just finishes off the image, giving it a less flat and plain feel.

 Another effective technique is that used in his `Animals' image, where the colours of the image behind are the fill of the text, only darker, which brings the text forwards and makes it stand out, rather than blend into the background. 

Digital Applications - Research and Inspiration

I began my research by gathering together a range of inspirational posters which I personally like the the look of and the techniques used throughout. I want my design to be quite typographically focused therefore I looked into a range of posters with similar intentions. This is a way for me to get my ideas and motivation flowing and to help me decide which kinds of routes I would like to go down with my designs. Again, I must keep in mind the skills and techniques learned throughout my digital skills lectures therefore I can combine those with the inspiration from these posters and begin to create some initial ideas for my designs.

Digital Skills - Walls Ad

This weeks digital skills session was all about typography styling using adobe illustrator. This involved using skills such as tracking, kerning, 3D options and getting to grips with the appearance palette. This was a very helpful session to me as I was previously quite unfamiliar with the appearance palette. I learned how to add new fills and strokes behind or in front of the text to create the effect shown above. This technique is great for commercial adverts like the one I've designed as it really stands out, as do the bright and bold vector shapes. This also gave me an opportunity to practise my previously learned skills with creating the vector images within illustrator and also placing the image in situ.

Digital Skills - Blackberry Ad

This weeks digital skills focused on the shapes tool, pathfinder within illustrator and the transform options within photoshop. Working with vectors is not a strong point of mine so I enjoyed getting to grips with them throughout this tutorial and learning more about the pathfinder tool. Learning these skills is making me a lot more comfortable using illustrator and are very simple yet effective skills for creating some very successful designs. Once I had finished my design in illustrator I then put it in situ using photoshop and learned some new techniques such as adding the gradient shadow and the sheen effect to make it look much more realistic.

Digital Skills - Adidas

Digital Skills - TopShop

Original Imagery

This weeks digital skills used Photoshop again, and worked on photo and colour enhancing. This was useful as I learned a couple of things which I didn't know I had the ability to tweak so easily, such as the background colours of original images. These a great techniques for fashion or product images as it helps to enhance certain sections. 

Digital Skills - ABSOLUT

This was my first digital skills task and it was produced using photoshop. This design included using brush tool skills, quick selection tool skills and also layer masks.

Using layer masks is a technique I personally dont tend to do a lot throughout my work but is extremely useful can can help to create some really great designs so becoming more familiar with them throughout this was very useful to me. I liked this final design and would work well with a range of different flavours/colours and could easily be changed just by altering the hues.