Critique: Valentine's Day Gift Guide

This week, the big thing I was working on was an illustration for my VOX department, Insight.  The big lesson I took from this project was to work a little at a time and plan ahead.  I say this because I knew what I wanted to do, but I had never done much in Adobe Illustrator before and was really intimidated by the prospect of doing a bunch of icons by hand.  But once I finally got started it really wasn't that bad.  That brings me to another lesson.  Over the past few years, I have come to rely on  tutorials to fill in my Adobe Design Suite pitfalls.  However, this time around I was trying to go that route and just started getting more overwhelmed by all of the steps and whatnot.  Finally, I stumbled across a video tutorial and found it incredibly helpful.  Of course I have used video tutorials in the past, but I have never had such a big project to work on before so it just made the learning curve so much more manageable.  Instead of spending the time trying to understand the diagrams and instructions on a written, step-by-step tutorial, I could just watch a quick demonstration and be on my way.

In the end, I really like what I ended up with.  There are still revisions to come, but I think my icons look pretty good and I am now very confident using the shape and pathfinder tools in Illustrator.  I still leave a LOT to be desired with the pen tool, but there are lots of video tutorials for that.


In the works:  Simplicity!  That is what I will be moving onto this week.  Simplicity is a photo story shot by a Fundamentals of Photojournalism student about a woman who gave up nearly all her possessions.  I am really looking forward to designing this story.  I cannot wait to read the story and see the photos.