These design challenges were assigned to us (us being myself and my classmates) early on in the program. These challenges were to be used as self teaching tools for those who hadn't worked with the Adobe Creative Cloud prior to this program or as a refresher for those that had.  

The image seen below of the tessellated shapes was one of the first challenges we were given when recreating Alexander Girard designs. This challenge was not only about shape building, but also making sure that everything was lined up properly in order to duplicate rows and columns to create a seamless pattern. Just a few weeks after completing this assignment I had gone out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant and the back of the booths had this design in it which was fun to see out in the world! (Original on the left, design challenge in the middle, booth back on the right.)

While these all look similar and seemingly perfect, the work submitted is not 100% error free. This challenge honed in on making sure the right properties were selected. In this case, I was doing a lot of shape building with weighted outlines instead of just the shapes themselves. This caused gaps between some of the tiles as they were tessellated across the space. 

This month was another Alexander Girard recreation; this time we were working on both straight lines and curved as well as knowing when to punch out holes in shapes and when to lay them across each other. Between the original on the left and the recreation on the right, it looks as though these are the same image, however if you were to look closer, they are just a bit different.

During this challenge I was working on not creating so many lines and points within my work so that each design is a seamless recreation from the original. I was also working on distinguishing punching holes in the image vs creating shapes. For example, the eyes in the birds. Punching a hole works fine in this instance because the background is white. However, if I were to place this image on a neon green background instead, the birds' eyes would change color and that's not what was needed. It's important to take these thoughts into account when designing and where the design is going to ensure the best possible outcome. 

The first task in month 3 was to recreate this vision board for Harvest, a locavore restaurant. The reference image on the left is shown with the watermark and the recreated image is on the right. The process for recreating this spanned a few apps in the Creative Cloud suite: InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. Being able to pull images from multiple programs to bring them into another one is important in the world of design. Images needed to be shaped, background cut out, and text added. 

The biggest difference between the two images below is that there is a box around the word "Harvest" on the recreated image that shouldn't be there. The main takeaway here is that it's always good to check your work, double check, and then check again. It seems as though this minor detail slipped through the cracks. That was noted in my feedback and it was made a point to triple check my work moving forward. 

The design challenge for this week of month 4 was to create a Spotify style add for Lucky Dog Rescue Orlando. This ad needed to be approximately 30 seconds, have voice over, background music, and an image the consumer can interact with. Before this program, I was used to working in video editing softwares so this wasn't out of my wheelhouse. Once I had the voiceover, I knew exactly what sort of image I was looking for. I had researched Spotify ads and determined that simple was best and that's exactly what I did. I hit all the important notes and delivered a solid ad for this faux company. NOTE: This design challenge wasn't a recreation, therefore there isn't a reference image or video to add here.