GRAPHIC DESIGN
DEANNA MACDONALD 1
ABOUT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 PUBLICATION DESIGN . . . . . 7 Paula Scher Exhibit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Wired Magazine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Montreal This Week . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Santropol Roulant Report . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
POSTER DESIGN . . . . . . . . . .17 Conference Poster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Good Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Love Cherish Marry Die . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Lunar Calendar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
BRANDING . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 La Berlue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Trapeze Circus School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Preparation H . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
PERSONAL PROJECTS . . . . . 35 Study Buddies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Imaginary Inc. Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38
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OH, HELLO THERE. MY NAME IS DEANNA MAC DONALD.
Community and communication are the two values closest to my heart. I believe if we all improved in these two areas, as individuals and as a society, we would solve a lot of problems. These values have influenced the type of design I love to create: publications, posters, newsletters, and page layouts. In the future, I want to work in the publishing or non-profit world. If my work is tied to art, education, or a cause, I feel fulfilled.
PAGE LAYOU PUBLICATION ARE MY JAM.
UT & N DESIGN .
I BELIEVE IN COMMUNITY AND COMMUNICATION.
My design style is bold, colourful, and geometric. I love playing with abstraction, repetition, grids and shapes. I believe my job as a designer is to take a concept and find the best way to communicate it to its intended audience in the shortest amount of time possible. If this can be achieved playfully—even better.
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•01 PUBLICATION DESIGN 7
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PU BL ICAT I O N
D E S I GN
PAULA SCHER EXHIBIT Software: Adobe InDesign Objective: Design a pamphlet about a Paula Scher museum exhibit. Include examples of her work and some background about her history and achievements while emulating her style. Process: Paula Scher is renowned for bold designs that play with typography and layout. This museum pamphlet is designed to do the same, while remaining easily digestible for the musem visitor. A bold orange-red is used throughout the document to make titles, pull quotes, and small details pop. The body text is in small, bite-sized columns that are often rotated at angles that make them interesting to look at but easy to read. Each blurb is accompanied by an example of Scher’s work. The pull quotes play with typography, making use of font weights, spacing, and different paragraph alignments. The front and back cover design does this as well, as the mirror-image back seems to be ‘cut out’ of the front cover, emphasizing the idea of letters as shapes to be played with.
PU B LICATION
D E S IGN
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PU BL ICAT I O N
D E S I GN
WIRED MAGAZINE Software: Adobe Photoshop Objective: Create a magazine cover for a well-known magazine, recreating the same look and feel that magazine is known for. Photograph a fellow student to feature on the cover, using cosmetic retouching. Process: WIRED is a tech and culture magazine, so I chose to make my model into a sort of cyborg by separating her face from the rest of her body and adding a circuit board behind. Makeup, lashes, and brows were all added in Photoshop.
PU B LICATION
D E S IGN
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PU BL ICAT I O N
D E S I GN
MONTREAL THIS WEEK Software: Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop
Objective: Design a 4-page layout and masthead for a weekly tourist publication called Montreal This Week. The publication features a different theme each week, so the design should be adaptable while remaining consistent. Include 3–5 articles, an events calendar, a list of hotels, and lots of eye-catching images. Process: There are many local tourist brochures available, so for the masthead I decided to focus on what differentiates this one from the others: not that it’s in Montreal, but that it’s specifically about this week. The colour of the banner behind the logo changes with the theme each week and becomes the main design colour throughout the publication. The inside layout features cutout photography, pop-out boxes, overlapping elements and heavy drop shadows to make a layout exciting for the eye. The stories are short and punchy. While there is a lot going on on the page, it is designed to make the reader want to actually read and look at everything.
PU B LICATION
D E S IGN
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PU BL ICAT I O N
D E S I GN
SANTROPOL ROULANT REPORT Software: Adobe InDesign Objective: Create an appealing report for local community food organization Santropol Roulant. Process: This report relies heavily on large, beautiful photography of food and people to make a warm, friendly publication. Mauve, teal, and lime green are used throughout. These colours relate to food without being too literal—the Roulant puts out several different documents every year, and it would get very repetitive if they were all leaf green all the time. The typeface used for headers and call out boxes is a friendly hand lettered font called ‘Timothy’. The circle shape that houses the logo on the cover is repeated in the layout design as a photo frame and a call out box to highlight different statistics. I also separated different facts and lists from the main body text into teal rectangle call out boxes to make the important information stand out, and make the whole document more inviting to a reader.
PU B LICATION
D E S IGN
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•02 POSTER DESIGN 17
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PO STE R
D E S I G N
CONFERENCE POSTER Software: Adobe Illustrator Objective: Create an eye-catching poster to advertise Vanier's annual Francophonie conference. Process: The halls of Vanier College, like any cĂŠgep, are covered in posters. To compete with all of that noise, I went for a poster design that uses large, bold typography and two simple, bold colours. The colours and geometric patterns make the poster fun and inviting, while the slightly crooked orientation of the layout gives the poster (and its content) an energetic punch. This bright, friendly poster definitely stook out on the hallway bulletin board. This poster was created as part of a competition, and was chosen as the winning design.
POS TE R
D E S IGN
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PO STE R
D E S I G N
GOOD COMMUNICATION Software: Adobe Photoshop Objective: In two hours, create a thought-provoking, dynamic design using only letters of the alphabet. Process: I decided to increase the challenge and use every letter of the alphabet once and only once. I was inspired by the type of communication riddles that float around on the internet, like the one wrehe eervy ltetr ohetr tahn the fsirt and lsat ltetrs are mxied up, yet you can sitll raed the mseasge. I wrote out the message ‘good communication is everything’, removed any and all duplicate letters, and used all remaining letters to create the ‘frame’. I wanted the design to use a jumble of colours, but I kept them all neutral so that the main message, in white, pops out. Only after I finished the design did I realize that the poster has a dual message: good communication is everything; good communication is everywhere.
PO S TE R
D E S IGN
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PO STE R
D E S I G N
LOVE CHERISH MARRY DIE FILM POSTER Software: Photoshop Objective: Create a promotional poster for an imaginary film. Make the poster reflect the film’s genre. Process: I chose to create a poster for a 'critically acclaimed' psychological thriller. I wanted the poster to feel chaotic, but enticing. Repetition, overlapping elements, and transparency are used in the visuals and typography to achieve a soft, colourful chaos. I left an airy frame and a lot of white space to make the film look like it is on the festival track, or part of the Criterion collection. The name of this imaginary film comes from a book by David Rakoff.
POS TE R
D E S IGN
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PO STE R
D E S I G N
LUNAR CALENDAR Software: Adobe Illustrator Objective: Create a calendar to show the lunar cycles of 2019. Process: I wanted a way to know what the moon was up to at any given time. This simple lunar calendar shows the eight different stages of the moon, including eclipses. It is intended to be printed using a Panetone metallic gold ink for the golden full moons. I wanted the calendar to be minimal—there are many lunar calendars that exist, but they often look like scientific grids full of numbers and coordinates. I removed almost all gridlines, and the months are denoted by their lowercase letter. The legend at the top explains what stage each moon symbol represents.
POS TE R
D E S IGN
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•03 BRANDING 27
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BRA ND I N G
LA BERLUE Software: Adobe Illustrator Objective: Design a logo for La Berlue, a brand of handcrafted, wooden objects. The logo should reflect the company’s values: playful, imaginative, and the highest quality. The logo will often be laser cut into the products, so it needs to be effective at a small scale. The client wants to stay away from all symbols and colours associated with wood. Process: Playful typography is paired with abstract geometric shapes to convey that La Berlue is a creative brand willing to explore. Each shape represents one of the values communicated by the client: a base rectangle for reliable quality, a squiggly line for playfulness, and three dots, or an ellipses, for imagination and continued exploration. La Berlue creates many products for children as well as adults, so the logo needed to appeal to both. The colours chosen for the brand are blue, teal, and yellow. The colours are bright but soft, fun but sophisticated. The colours are only ever meant to be used as accents to add a pop of colour here and there. The client loved the logo and requested stationary, business cards, and web design reflecting the same style.
B RA N D ING
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BRA ND I N G
TRAPEZE CIRCUS SCHOOL Software: Adobe Illustrator Objective: Create a logo and brand identity for a circus school for all ages. Process: The main challenge here was to avoid logo shapes that were too obvious. I wanted to create an abstract brandmark that implied trapeze movement without being literal. I took the simple shape of a trapeze—a triangle—and played with it to try to show movement in a still image. The five overlapping triangles imply that the shape is swinging from left to right. This logo is at its best when printed with a metallic ink or foil. The typeface is the art deco ‘Cocette’, paired with a simple, light Gill Sans. Paired together, the logo conveys elegence and simplicity, just like a trapeze artist's performance.
B RA N D ING
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BRA ND I N G
PREPARATION H Software: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator Objective: Pick from a list of products and create a print ad using a visual metaphor. Process: Researching past Preparation H advertising revealed that the company doesn’t mind poking fun at their product, so we decided to create a loud, playful ad campaign. Thanks to emojis, the peach has become a widely accepted visual metaphor for a bum. We chose to show the peach from an unusual angle. The bright colours paired with one large, simple image draws the eye in, and the tagline brings home the idea that this is an ad for hemorrhoid cream. This ad was designed for large format display, such as a bus shelter ad or large format lightbox.
B RA N D ING
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•04 PERSONAL PROJECTS 35
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PERSO N A L
PR O JE CT
STUDY BUDDIES Software: Adobe Photoshop Objective: Create a photo composite with elements of fantasy using light and shadow to convey as much realism as possible. Process: Every element in the photo comes from a different source. They are all pasted together in photoshop, and light and shadows have been used to glue them together realistically. The life of a design student consists of a lot of late nights of creativity and imagination. I wanted to push this idea in my photo composite. One of my favourite commercials as a child was the PSA about house hippos (search it on YouTube if you’re unfamiliar—it’s worth it). The PSA features small hippos living under sinks and in closets that come out at night. The aim is to teach kids not to believe everything they see in advertising. I imagined an entire safari of animals that only comes out at night to shuffle through your papers or curl up to the warmth emitting from your computer screen. I added space imagery in the window to boost the feeling of other worldliness.
PE RS O N A L
PROJE CT
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PR O JE CT
IMAGINARY INC. FORM Software: Adobe InDesign Objective: Create a bureaucratic, retrofuturist print form for the fantastical company Imaginary Incorporated. Process: My goal with this form was to have a piece of paper that initially looks heavy and bureaucratic, but once you start to even skim the content, which is full of both legalese, nonsense and fantasy, the whimsy jumps out and makes you want to know more. To create the retrofuturist look of the forms, I chose a background colour to imitate the pale pink of carbon copy paper. The typeface is Futura, a font which was originally marketed with the slogan “the typeface of today and tomorrow�. Keeping notions of proximity, similarity, and line height in mind, I played with different types of questions to make the process of filling out the form enjoyable rather than monotonous. The content includes a mix of practical information [name, address, sleep habits] and whimsical questions that could have everything and nothing to do with a dream [What was the last thing you ate? Have you ever been in a helicopter?].
PE RS O N A L
PROJE CT
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