Notes: You need Flash to view this (sorry, iPhone and other non-Flash enabled users!) and you can click to see the portfolio in full screen, much like a Youtube video. In fact, it looks nicer in full screen. Navigate the document by clicking the arrows to the right and left of the pages.

Sweet! I approve.

In conclusion, trees with pink flowers are awesome.

Speaking of the new year, I rang in 2009 at C’est What, a restaurant/bar/all around cool place in downtown Toronto. Pool, poutine, and awesome people were involved, so it was a really good time.

Every time I see a pool table I think of The Music Man. Anyone with me?

On another note, I’ve already completed my first poster design of 2009, and I’d like to share it with you!

For this poster, I used both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.  In the past I was more of an exclusively-Photoshop kind of girl, but nowadays I really do like Illustrator a lot.  If you couldn’t tell, I created the happy ghosts in Illustrator.  I love vector images (which is what you’re creating in Illustrator) because you can blow them up to any size and they retain their smooth edges.  This is because the images are actually based on mathematical formulae instead of pixels.  It seems that math has come in handy in the real world after all!

♥ Dara

Sorry, friends, readers, strangers, and bots that are perusing my site!  I’ll chalk it up to starting school and settling into a new routine.  If you don’t know, I am taking Graphic Design courses at a certain college in Toronto.  They’re definitely interesting!

Here is another poster that I created a little while back:

One positive thing that I can say about design school is that I will never take computers for granted again!  Most of our work is done by hand, so we draw thumbnails by hand, collage by hand, and draw fonts by hand (!!).  Crazy stuff!

♥ Dara.

Here is another poster that I designed for a Printing Press show earlier this summer. I made this poster long before the last one I posted. In retrospect, I should have posted this one first and the other one second. Shhh, don’t tell anyone!

♥ Dara.

Since I was to create a concert poster and not a camera show advertisement, I put a little something, also known as a (bass) guitar, in the camera lens.  I also had fun with the halftone look of the camera.  I’m really interested in learning more about screenprinting, and I’ve always liked the aesthetics of something that’s been printed in overt, visible halftone.  I plan on experimenting with that more in the future, hopefully culminating in learning how to screenprint for reals.  In the meantime, I print my own stuff (t-shirts mostly) by stencilling, and I’ll write more about those projects in an upcoming post.