Design Quickies: This is NOT My City (Album Cover)

My younger cousin is intelligent as hell, funny, witty, and 100% her own person. She has her BS (no jokes, please) in Architectural Preservation from TU (what, what) and is working on her MS in Library and Information Science at DU. She’s awesome.

With that said, she also has some of the most quotable one-liners known to man.

One Christmastime (I guarantee it was last year), my boyfriend, and two cousins took a trip out to Bethlehem, PA to visit the annual Christkindlmarkt over in Christmas City. On the way to and from, Yenny kept firing off these phrases that were responses to things we were talking, about, but totally left of center, yet completely on brand. It got so funny with what she was spewing out, I started a new page of notes on my phone just for those sentences.

I said aloud, “Yen, all of these sound like song titles. This can be an EP.” We all laughed about it, and of course she questioned me as she always does. To be fair, though, some of these titles are not things that have physically spilled out of her mouth, but are definitely things she wouldn’t hesitate to say or that relate to her quite well.

WELL, almost a year later, I finally got around to making it happen. Now, this is entirely an inside joke, and for Christmas, to celebrate the “one year anniversary” of these quotes, my boyfriend suggested we get the album cover printed as an LP and instead of a record inside, create a photo album just for her. I think it’s a smashing idea!

I sent a screenshot of the front and back covers to her older sister, who was in the car (she was driving!) when all of this took place and she got a kick out of it. Even told me she’d have to nudge her sister to pre-order it. ;)

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Elements:

  1. Photo of Yen - taken by me at 2018 Wawa Welcome America Party on the Parkway, Philadelphia, PA

  2. Alley stock photo found on Google

  3. Typefaces used: Rock Salt, Myriad

  4. FBI Anti-Piracy Warning logo (downloaded as SVG from Brands of the World)

  5. Republic Records logo (downloaded from Google)

  6. Parental Advisory logo (downloaded from Google)

Time taken: 2 hours

Programs: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop

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Poster: Alpina B7

Project: Serif Vs. Sans Serif Effectiveness in Advertising
Type: School Project
Class: ADV5503 Persuasion and the Marketplace
Photographer: Kevin Nguyen (Photos used with permission.)

Two posters designed for an experiment to determine whether serif or sans serif typefaces are more efficient and effective in eliciting positive emotions in print advertisements. The subject of these posters is one of four; only two were present in the experiment.

Each set of posters were set in both serif and sans serif type (one family each) with varying weights.

Media Kit: The Phillyfoodaholic

Meet Alyssa Laufer, AKA the Phillyfoodaholic (@phillyfoodaholic). She kept her social media presence as a food critic a secret (not really, it just never came up) with our newly formed friend group for a while. When she let it slip that she managed an Instagram that had over 1600 followers and was the reason she was able to try a lot of varying foods throughout Philadelphia, we all immediately followed her for support (and to drool during and after class).

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Welcome to Animal Crossing

330+ hours later, today, I have a 5-star island, am quickly learning all of the hundreds of villagers’ names in the game, getting upset over people plucking my flowers without permission, and eagerly awaiting the next big update, which promises us crops, from what I gather.

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Hobbies of Quarantine

Quarantine. It’s something we associate with lepers or someone who is insanely contagious….aka lepers.

But, alas, the good lot of us in the States and around the world are in quarantine to help flatten the curve, as they say.

Things are different. I’ve more or less slowed down my job hunt, as no one is really hiring. Their postings are on auto-renew for the most part, while other are looking for cheap labor or are scraping together work to create a job. Both are good for those who are just starting, but for me? I need to pick up where I left off.

Anyway, while enjoying this newfound time at home, I was able to finish up my spring semester at Temple, thus knocking out a whole year of graduate school with only one and a half left. I was able to maintain my 4.0, so I’m looking forward to doing it again in the fall. I also picked up a new hobby, which I’m going to turn into sales in my Etsy shop: creating wax seals.

The idea is to illustrate greeting cards and sell a card, a similarly decorated envelope and a self-adhesive wax seal as a bundle to those who enjoy buying those things. An example is the card set I made for Mother’s Day for my own mom, as shown in the photo on the left.

Tied in with the wax seals and card illustrations is embossing. I watch a lot of creative stuff on Instagram and see a lot of people who hand-letter using embossing powders and heat-transfer foils. They looked neat, so I decided to try. I’m only as far as embossing, though, I haven’t made it to foils yet, but it’s coming!

Alongside those things, I’ve been trying to read more, but being sucked into the Animal Crossing hole has sort of commandeered that extra free time I had. The good news is, I’m coming upon a duration of boredom with the game, so reading may reclaim that spot for a few days. The book I’m currently engaged in is called Eyes of the Grave, written by a high school friend of mine, Chelsea Callahan, with whom I still keep in touch. It’s an interesting fantasy about a woman, Rebekah Devereaux, who is partnered with her estranged husband on a murder case where she sees herself as the murderer in these visions she gets when she touches the skin of the other person. I’m not giving this story any justice, and I’m sure I butchered the story a bit, but it’s worth a read and is only $10 on Amazon. I’m a little over half way finished and am pretty pumped to read the rest to find out what happens.

There’s been some freelance work sprinkled in here and there. I currently have a media kit I’m working on for a friend, a new logo design for a mobile cigar business, and the usual EGD stuff.

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Finally, I’ve been super interested in racking up as many certifications as I can until things “go back to normal”, or at least, as normal as they can be. I finished up my HubSpot Academy social media cert today, so that’s exciting! I totally added this onto my LinkedIn page. I also found that Harvard University is offering free courses, so I’m going to be working on one course at a time with them. I won’t get a verified certificate (though you can for a fee), so I’m just “auditing” the class. Wonder if it made more sense to pay the $90 for a certificate… Anyway, my first course will be in computer science! It was between advertising/marketing and computer science for me when I was deciding what graduate program to pursue, and in this case, ADV/MKTG won the fight. But this way, I’ll be able to learn about CS and maybe have enough background to achieve something bigger in the future!

I’ve opened up comments on this post because I want to hear what all of you have been doing this quarantine season!