NMIX 6011 | New Media Design

Skills: Photoshop, Illustrator, Bridge, Figma, Canva Pro, The Principles & Elements of Design

Date: Summer 2022

New Media Design explores traditional graphic design topics, such as layout, composition, imagery, and typography, as it builds the foundational knowledge of Adobe Creative Cloud. Students explore modern UX design principles as they apply design thinking and a problem—solving methodology to an assortment of creative final projects.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed my time spent during this class. Coming into New Media Design, everyone – even Leah Moss the Professor – told me that this would be an extremely challenging course to take over the summer and that I should wait to take it. Well, were they right? Sort of…

New Media Design is definitely a challenging course in it of itself. While having students learn industry professional software in a week that takes people decades to master, there is a steep learning curve to the course that requires me and everyone else to dedicate quality amounts of time to overcome them. While balancing another course and two other jobs, I made sure to take my time learning these creative skills that would become an enjoyment and a foundation for my career to come in the next few years.

During this course, I was able to stretch my creativity and time management skills by learning, adapting, and implementing my lessons in Adobe Photoshop, Bridge, Illustrator, Figma, and Canva onto practical projects. Through lessons on typography language and tones to brand imagery or logos, and even the super technical shortcut keys for each program, I have learned so much from this course that I am now able to market and say what I have accomplished. Some of my most struggling moments in this course include the long time spent on tedious adjustments of alignments in illustrator just to find out about quick ways to set presets for repeating elements. Another example would be the amount of time spent googling and looking at my notes for what the hotkeys were for specific tools 😂.

Overall, I am proud of the work that was accomplished during these 4 weeks and am incredibly grateful to have an amazing instructor and workgroup that brought out the best of my abilities. Going forward, I look forward to using Illustrator, Figma, and Photoshop more in my creative classes and personal life, implementing the principles of design into everything I make!

Featured Projects

Project 1 – Postcard: With 30+ pages of notes and 10+ hours on LinkedIn’s Photoshop tutorial, I systematically learned and experienced the ins and out of Adobe Photoshop. Through those learned skills, we were tasked with recreating a vintage postcard. During my process, I decided to choose 2 complementing fonts (a bold serif and script) that replicated the vintage styled cards. I shortly struggled with implementing techniques like applying imported pictures as gradients and expanding the canvas, but I shortly learned how. Afterwards, I decided to transform my text to arc and give it depth. In the end, I decided to remove the gradient that add a weathered look to my final project in order to make the text pop!

Project 2 – Brand Style Guide: Following a short week of getting used to Photoshop, we then hopped into Adobe Illustrator and our second project. While our first project was focused on making a vintage-style postcard, Project Brand Style Guide is a future-facing prompt that challenged us to create a brand that could potentially solve a problem that exists in today’s world. From that thought, we created ARMOGAN, a dynamic skin that will protect people in any weather.
This project was initially introduced to us as something we will mainly create in Canva – a free-online graphic design tool – I wanted to use my newly gained skill in Illustrator to enhance our project and my knowledge. In the many projects that come after this, I plan to utilize Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to increase the quality and efficiency of my work.

Project 3 – Personal Branding Guide: As an undergraduate student taking a graduate level course, I was charged with an additional project to be completed. Project Personal Branding Guide allowed me to take my learnings/comprehension of my previous project and apply it to myself. With a bit of time and thought, I used my skills in Adobe Illustrator to make a Brand Guideline sheet for myself.

Project 4 – Triple Threat (Desktop Web, Mobile Web, Mobile App): Our final project of the semester was spent learning and ideating on the free online vector graphics editor and prototyping tool, Figma. Figma was much easier to grasp a hold of for this project due to us spending so much time on Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. The ability to work on a project in real time while visually seeing my team’s comments and edits truly allowed my team and I to produce a quality project.