Can You Kern?

My graphic design teacher had assigned us to do a kerning game. At first I had no idea what kerning was or what it meant besides providing space in between letters to make them more spread out... (mostly to fill up space). But through the game I realized that it is more than that. Kerning has to be balanced between all letters. And most of the time our brains can space things out pretty well but it seems that the computer can do it better. Kerning interested me so I, of course, decided to google it. The definition of kern in google is:
verb

1.

adjust the spacing between (letters or characters) in a piece of text to be printed.

Next was a wikipedia cite about kerning. They also informed me that in a well-kerned font, the two-dimensional blank spaces between each pair of characters all have a visually similar area. And that there are kerning values for every different letters. So after finishing this kerning game my score was an eighty-six. Of course needing to improve on my even spacing between letters.  

eMagine

On Saturday April 5th Olathe Northwest High School hosted the 10th annual eMagine.
eMagine is a media festival that high school students can enter their art for web, animation, video, and graphic design. The categories for graphic design are typography, manipulated photography, print media, and vector graphics. I entered in all of them but I reached the top five in the Vector Graphics. Vector graphics is tracing or drawing art, photographs, items, etc. on the computer. Vector graphics is necessary for many graphic design students. As I got the news of the top 5 vector graphics I started becoming nervous. They showed the top five art and I thought I was surely going to lose. They announced 3rd and 2nd place. And as the suspense grew and they announced first place and I won! I won a certificate and a pixel art piece. Here is a picture of me and my award. And also the piece that won first place.

Saul Bass Inspired Movie Posters

My class discussed this week Saul Bass and the elements of a great movie poster. We needed to create a movie poster inspired by Saul Bass. The creative boundaries were the movie before the 1970s, 3-5 colors (2 of which are black and white), and 2-3 "things" that tell the story of the movie and create a design. I chose the movie Mary Poppins. I was inspired to do this form the recent release of the "Saving Mr. Banks" movie. My design includes the pattern of Mrs. Poppins purse being the design of the umbrella, the oh-so famous umbrella, and the lesser known kite tail. The kite tail signifies the last song that Mr. Banks joined in with the children. In "Saving Mr. Banks" the song "Let's Go Fly a Kite" is when the writer of Mary Poppins leaped for joy!The writer did not want Mr. Banks coming off as a mean old man but she for Mary Poppins to save the father, not the children. That is why I decided to make the umbrella have the tail of a kite.
In Saul Bass's poster for "The Shining" he places the image of a face into the text. Just as I have placed the texture and pattern of Mrs. Poppins bag into my umbrella. I included the kite tail for the same purpose Saul Bass created a money sign in the "Bonnie and Clyde" poster, to tell the under lying story. Please click all for better viewing.

Google.com

The project was to google google. Here are some interesting facts I learned about Google. 

In 1995, the creators Larry Page and Sergey Bin met at Stanford. In 1996, BackRub was born. This search engine operates on Stanford's severs for more than a year. 1997, Google.com has begins it's journey to worldly association. Named after the mathematical term "googol" the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google reflects Larry and Sergey's mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web. 2000, They  announce the "Mental Plex": Google's ability to read your mind as you visualize the search results you want. Thus begins our annual foray in the Silicon Valley tradition of April 1 hoax. 2011, The "Google Art Project" lets you virtually tour some of of the world’s best museums and explore high resolution images of tens of thousands of works of art from 40 countries. The famous logo is made up of the colors, red, blue, yellow, and green come from the primary colors and primary numbers. 2,4 repeat colors. The logo is also created by the Cantull typeface designed by Ruth Kedar.