For my portfolio, I wanted a simplistic aesthetic that represents me while still being a little quirky and different. My favorite color is yellow so I incorporated it throughout the design and kept the rest of the color palette simple to make it pop. My logo has a hand-written font because I wanted to balance out simplicity with a little bit of uniqueness. Though the logo is just my name with some stars at the side, I wanted it to capture my personality and style. The stars add another pop of yellow while representing brightness and ambition.

In my “writings” page, I wanted to keep the columns’ design relatively straightforward. I added in yellow, gray and white overlays to the pictures to represent my color palette. For my “designs” page, I added in the yellow font to unify the color palette due to the presence of conflicting colors in my images. I played around with the layout a little and made some images larger than the others just to switch up the design and add some quirkiness. My homepage is also relatively simple and includes links to the writings and designs pages. I also added in a quote from Spongebob at the bottom, just to add in another tie into my personality. I wanted my portfolio site to be simple, clean and easy to navigate through while still adding some little touches to signify my personality.

I received a good grade on my open project however, looking back at it now, there are some things I would like to change. First off, I would turn down the opacity of the background just to make sure that my text and images don’t collide as much with it. I think a softer, more pastel pink would have gelled in better with my design. Secondly, I would try and improve the symmetry of my design by ensuring that all the blocks of text and the respective images for each section are as close in length and size as possible.

I know I tried making yellow the stand-out color in the palette but looking back, I would sprinkle some more yellow throughout my design just to establish a uniform theme, along with a less busy background.

For my open project, I decided to do a social graphic. I strayed a little from my running Bon Appetit theme just because personally, being surrounded by so much COVID-19 related anxiety, I wasn’t feeling as inspired to create a food-related graphic. Instead, I decided to incorporate all the COVID-19 information and quarantine tips I’ve seen in blogs and on social media to create a suggested daily schedule.

I kept my background super simple so that it wouldn’t detract from the overall graphic. However, I made it pastel pink and cloudy to introduce a sense of calmness as light, airy colors are known to be stress-relievers. I also added a yellow sun up top because I wanted the color yellow, another tone that signifies happiness, to be the tying factor in my design. Yellow is spread over throughout and just to bring it all together, I added a bright yellow sun to introduce coherence. The rest of my design was quite simple – I wanted a flowy, easy to read font with pictures that looked like sketches to add a quirk factor. I used this article by UNICEF Serbia to draw inspiration but switched it up a little to make my design more suitable and attractive for young professionals.

I received really good feedback on my design overall. My professor liked the chalkboard effect and the images I chose for my social graphic. If I could change anything, I would reduce the amount of words and make the design more cohesive by having the same amount of text accompany each food group. Though I like the more raw and whimsical effect of my graphic, I would also organize the images around the circle in a more symmetrical way.

Overall, other than tweaking the elements a little to add more cohesion in my design, I would also work on having my images emulate more of a chalkboard effect because I feel like a few of them look more cartoon-y than hand drawn.

For my social graphic, I chose to run with my ongoing Bon Appetit theme. Bon Appetit is a food magazine so I created a graphic that represented it. I used a black and white background because Bon Appetit’s design is very straightforward and simple. I wanted to expand on my information graphic topic of food anatomy by making a graphic of the general food groups. Since it is a more information-heavy graphic, I wanted to offset the blocks of words with colorful food pictures to create a balance. I also went with a chalkboard theme because I wanted my graphic to emulate a learning environment. I also wanted to make it slightly quirky by adding the various arrows and using a font that looks handwritten.

Green, yellow and red are the predominant primary colors I used in the graphic because they closely represent natural food colors. Choosing and finding pictures was once again a challenge because I didn’t want realistic-looking images. To go with the raw, chalkboard theme, I wanted images that looked hand-drawn and hand-painted. I also wanted to keep the overall design simple to make these images and the information pop. Adding all the various colors over a gray-black background, in my opinion, makes the text blocks on the sides pop more.

I liked my overall design and received good feedback on it from my professor. Looking back at it now, I would have liked to make it slightly more detailed by providing a more comprehensive description of the nutritional values of the various foods I mentioned. I would also like to play around with the background a little. Though I liked the way the white background made the colors of my design pop, I have been thinking of other creative ways to bump up the design elements in my infographic. Maybe some dispersed chalkboard marking throughout? I would also like to include shadows underneath/behind the images in my design and play around with the placement of the blocks of text to make my design look more cohesive and uniform.

For my infographic, I wanted to keep up with my running theme of using Bon Appetit as my publication. In keeping with my GIF, this infographic is about the calorie count in a burger. I wanted to keep the background white and relatively simplistic to make the colors pop. I downloaded a font from Dafont for my header. One of the challenges I faced was finding pictures of the individual ingredients that meshed well together. To introduce a sense of uniformity, I used image trace for all my images.

I wanted to keep the design simple and compact so that there weren’t too many competing colors. This matches Bon Appetit’s aesthetic which is very clean, yet incorporates some bold colors.

I received a very positive feedback overall. The professor and my classmates lauded the simplicity of my design and commended my use of clean imagery and basic colors as they went well with the publication I chose. However, after playing around with Photoshop and checking out some other designs, I would like to build on my initial design to add more frames and a Bon Appetit logo. Adding just a few more layers would elevate my design. I like its overall simplicity but would like to add some extra condiments to the burger to introduce some complexity into the design. However, I understand that it may be hard since I already had a difficult time finding images for the individual components of my burger.

My GIF was for Bon Appetit Magazine. For me, Bon Appetit has a polished and sophisticated aesthetic which I wanted to capture. It is a food magazine so I wanted to bring out that in my GIF. It is also formulaic and non-experimental in the best possible way – it relies on structured recipe guides and traditional food photography which adds to its appeal as a premiers food magazine.

For my GIF, I wanted food to be the central focus. I also didn’t want cartoon food as that really doesn’t fit Bon Appetit’s polished, more mature aesthetic which is why I went with real food. The GIF shows a burger being made which goes hand-in-hand with Bon Appetit’s focus on food recipes. I wanted the color palette to be simple so the burger could take center stage and use a simple idea to really convey my magazine’s aesthetic.

The feedback I got for my moodboard was overall very positive. My classmates and professor liked the color palette I chose and lauded my use of circles as a persistent theme in the pictures that I used to add a sense of uniformity. They also liked the pictures that I used and my design of the color swatches.

However, I did notice that most of my classmates had their publication’s logo in their designs. I didn’t think that this was a requirement and my inclusion of a black-and-white logo detracted from my overall design and color palette. In hindsight though, I do think I should have played around with various logo design templates and included the “Bon Appetit” logo so that it gelled in well with my moodboard.