For this project, I struggled trying to find a way to encompass the complexities of PCOS in a simple and useful logo design. Eventually, I landed on a teal Venus (female) symbol surrounded by ten circles, with only one of those circles being filled with pink. The Venus symbol represents the idea of womanhood, since PCOS is an ailment that only affects women. The circles represent ten women, with the pink circle representing the one in ten women that are affected by PCOS. Finally, I chose teal to be the main color in the logo because teal is the color widely used for PCOS awareness and representation.

As far as research goes, I was looking for symbols that practically speak for themselves but are easy to recreate and identify. This is how I landed on the Venus symbol to represent how PCOS affects females. Originally, I was looking at ways to incorporate the silhouette of a woman, but felt that a Venus shape would get the same message across without over-complicating the design as a whole. I already knew from prior background research that PCOS affects 1 in every 10 women, so I chose to include this element as well since it seems so substantial.

When I began sketching my ideas for the logo this morning, I bounced between several ideas. At first, I tried sketching comic versions of a uterus to show that PCOS deals with the reproductive system, but nothing seemed to look or feel quite right with that idea. Next, I started sketching silhouettes to try and communicate a similar message, yet still became frustrated when the sketches turned out too busy or complicated. Finally, I regressed down to the widely known sign for women: Venus. When I first drew the sketch of my now complete logo, I felt that it was lacking some important element. After sitting down on Illustrator to actually create my logo, I realized that what was missing was color and balance (which illustrator will give you when your untrained artistic side will not).

For the actual synthesizing of my logo, I started with a blank web document on illustrator. I used the ellipse tool to create the main circle of the Venus symbol. I wanted the circle to be hollow, so I made the stroke to be 10 pts and left the fill empty. Next, I used the line segment tool to create the vertical and horizontal lines to cross one another and complete the shape of Venus. Once the main focus was established, I created a larger circle temporarily using the ellipse tool and placed this around the main shape. Then, I made a smaller circle and placed this on the temporary circle. I used the rotate tool to help place the same circle every 36 degrees since I wanted a total of ten circles. Once my circles were all placed, I made sure they each had a consistent stroke of 4 pts so that they weren’t too thick. Next, I deleted the temporary circle I had used for a guide and was left with a circle made of circles surrounding my main shape. Finally, I made the stroke and fill of one circle into a high-contrasting light pink.

Surprisingly, I didn’t face too many challenges with this logo project once I got past the concept stage. Coming up with an idea (even this simple) proved to be difficult for me, but I actually had fun bringing my sketch to life once I got onto illustrator.

For this initial stage of the logo design and development, I wanted to represent several things about PCOS through my sketch. I chose to use the female symbol because PCOS only affects women, and there are ten dots surrounding the symbol with only one circle filled in, representing that one out of ten women have PCOS.

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Here are the five images that I completed by following the Illustrator tutorials on our class website. The frustration with learning this software is no joke, and its definitely easy to find yourself off track when using a different software version as the tutorial, but alas! I did it!

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This graphic design project has been engaging to say the least. From collecting the images to creating a draft, and then hearing feedback to improve the initial design, I really appreciate the way this project was set up.

When I initially created the draft of my project, I didn’t have a clear end goal that I wanted to reach, and I think that was pretty apparent by the sub-par image I ended up with. I had the idea to cut out images and pair each of the cutouts with a specific caption to explain the relevance. During my draft stage, I thought that using colorful captions against a highly contrasted and blurred background image would help the captions to “pop” more, but now I realize that it looks a bit tacky that way. I also left each of the cutout images without borders or drop shadows, which contributed to the choppy and unpolished look of my draft in the beginning.

After posting the drafted design on my blog, I waited for the constructive criticism to roll in from my peers. Each piece of feedback that I received was both helpful and considerate of my own hopes for the design, which really helped me feel better about the revisions I ended up making. From the four girls in my group, the most common pieces of feedback included the following: using less color for the captions (or one uniform color), framing the captions, outlining cutouts, and using a less busy background. Some other pieces of feedback included making the center cutout of myself larger in size since the focus is on my personal experience, as well as adding a brief explanation of PCOS for those that may not know much about it.

For my final draft, I stuck with the idea of a magazine cover approach. I still believe that this is one of the most effective ways to communicate several pieces of information quickly, while holding onto viewer engagement. I used the same images as my draft, most of which were taken with flash to help ensure each image was focused and sufficiently lit. This time around, I chose to use a photo of the Palouse hills as my background instead of the streets of WSU because I really liked the suggestion of using a less busy background in order to direct more attention to the pieces I’d be focusing on. I changed the hue, brightness, saturation, and levels slightly to give the hills a more green look which would help bring my final piece together. Next, I used the pen tool, magnetic lasso, and quick selection tool to create each of my cutout elements. After cutting out each image, I used the drop shadow and stroke features on the layer style tab to add a white outline, helping each image have more substance over the background. Each photo was outlined in white which I countered by outlining each caption in black. For the captions, I liked the idea of eliminating a lot of color, so I decided to go with a classic black and white approach. With white rectangles that contained black text and were outlined in black as well, I think the captions of my final draft look much cleaner and well thought out than what I had for my initial draft. Finally, I also decided to add a short excerpt that briefly describes what PCOS is. This simply gave the full name for PCOS and defined it as a hormonal imbalance, which would help provide important context to readers that may not know otherwise. This context helps my graphic design to be more effective, as people would better understand the relevance of each image.

I am much happier with my final draft of this project, and greatly appreciate the feedback from my peers that helped me reach this final design. This project was structured beautifully and I hope it was just as beneficial for everyone else. I think my new graphic design project is much cleaner and well put together. Time for Unit 2!

Photo of myself is credited to Jenny Griffin, who captured the picture in Ocean Shores, WA on June 24th, 2019.

All other photos are my own intellectual property and were taken by me on my phone.

For our first topic-oriented project, I decided to make something reminiscent of a magazine cover. I felt that a magazine cover was the most efficient and effective way to communicate the basic symptoms of PCOS to an audience that may otherwise not be aware. A magazine cover will give readers a basic rundown on the stories contained inside, and that idea was easy to follow for a syndrome with such a wide variety of symptoms. For this project, I chose a few of the symptoms that I’m personally affected by most and decided to highlight those since I have my own experiences with each of them.

In all honesty, I didn’t do much research to come up with a design layout for my project. Instead, I just used concepts learned in my other classes about writing for the media and decided that a headline-esque approach would be the best way to capture attention quickly. I’ve also (like most people) seen magazine covers down grocery store aisles my whole life so I’m relatively accustomed to the basic layout.

In an effort to reduce clutter, I made sure to cutout each of my utilized images so they could be dealt with separately. When capturing the pictures, I also used flash so they could be better lit and focused as well. In an effort to maintain contrast between my text and the background, I gave each body of text a solid color background to work with. I also used one consistent font throughout the design so as not to confuse viewers.

Each of the photos used, I captured myself on my iPhone to avoid any copyright disputes. The only exception is the picture of myself in the middle of the image, which was taken on my iPhone by my good friend Jenny. After taking the photos themselves, I went into PhotoShop and got to work. First, I clipped each of the images into cutouts that I could arrange against the background. While working on the design, I struggled a lot at the beginning with remembering the tools I learned in the tutorials. When I was confused or lost, I simply checked back to the tutorials page for a refresher.

Photo of myself is credited to Jenny Griffin, who captured the picture in Ocean Shores, WA on June 24th, 2019.

All other photos are my own intellectual property and were taken by me on my phone.