About Me

My name is Edith Chan. I am a designer and illustrator based in Seattle, USA. I love dreaming, writing and drawing. Pencils and paint brushes are my magical wands giving my imaginations form. I was born and brought up in Macao, the first and the last European colony in China. Living in Macau gave me the opportunity to explore western and eastern arts. I have spent most of my life in this little city, until 2007 I moved to the United States and started this blog to document my adventure in America. You don’t have to be a Blogger or Google member to leave comments. Please take a moment to let me know you were here. Thank you and have a beautiful day!

Showing posts with label Fuel Your Creativity. Show all posts

Typography Class - 2

The Typography class is finally over. Some people described the class as a boot camp, and it’s totally true. By far, this class is the most intensive class I have ever attended. During last quarter, I have made numerous sleepless commitments in order to complete my projects. Here, I would like to share some of the interesting projects with you:

1. Personalities of Types Project

In this project, we were required to use different font, size, color, and composition to express six emotions, actions, holidays, and countries, respectively. The whole point of this project is for students to better understand the characteristics of various fonts, so that we would know how to pick a font for a design in the future.

I have fallen in love with this project. After this project, I started observing and analyzing every font I came across in daily life.

2. Page Layout Project

This was a page layout project which required students to incorporate what we have learnt about Typography into a one-spread magazine design. This project gave us hands-on experience on how to create and organize different elements on a page. The challenge of this project is to create three different concepts by using the exact same elements. Irene wanted us to have a taste of the real world experience where clients always prefer a designer to provide more than one concept for them to choose from.

3. Book Cover Design Project

My final project is to design a book cover for the Typography and Composition class. Interestingly, no requirement or specification was given to the students in this project. Irene said that it was harder to work with a client who doesn’t have any preference than a client who can outline what he/she exactly wants. Therefore, I had to do my own research on potential audiences and industry trends before I could start the project. Finally, I was able to create a trendy looking book cover design that caught the eyes of the whole class.

Throughout this class, I have not only learnt typography, but also how to conquer difficulties as a professional designer.

Read More 0 comments | Posted by Edith Chan

Typography Class - 1

“No, no, no...the letter A is too far away from the letter R!” I didn’t feel comfortable with the unbalanced spacing of the letters when I looked at the logo “PRO ART” on my exercise book. I am not usually frustrated by these kinds of things before. However, after attending the Typography class this quarter, I have learned more about types and became more critical when it comes to typography.

Typography is the art and technique of arranging, designing and modifying types. It plays an important role in graphic design and is an essential skill for every designer. We can find typography everywhere in our life. But have you noticed that every element of a type, including font, size, color, spacing, angle, etc. is used for a reason?

In the first Typography lesson, the instructor, Irene, told us the history and traditional technique of typography. Listening to the evolution of typography, and all the weird typographical terminology, like upper case, lower case, leading, etc. suddenly made sense.

In the class, I also explored typeface anatomy. I never imaged that even a simple letter would consist of so many parts, like serif, crossbar, bracket, counter, ear, bowl, loop, hairline, etc. In order to understand the characteristics of different fonts better, Irene taught us how to trace different fonts with markers and tracing paper. It was fun to experiment with the most traditional method of creating and modifying fonts. Nowadays, even though there are so many advanced designing programs, tracing by hand is still the major method for designing and modifying fonts.

I had a lot of fun with my first kerning and tracing assignment. I look forward to my next lesson.

Read More 0 comments | Posted by Edith Chan

Making The Leap From Enthusiasm To Professionalism

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Everybody wants to find their calling in life. But having faith in what you are most cut out for and what you must do in life are far more difficult than it sounds.

Last month, I finally went back to school for a Graphic Design program, by which I hope I can develop the necessary expertise to ultimately make my dream a reality.

Read More 2 comments | Posted by Edith Chan

Fundamental Visual Elements – Form and Space

A graphic designer is analogized to a good cook. Because graphic design is a process of transferring intangible concepts into visual communication by using various design elements, such as lines, shapes, textures, words, colors, etc. Those elements just like ingredients of a delicious meal. And a good graphic designer should know how to manipulate various design elements to make a powerful visual communication, just like a good cook knows how each ingredient tastes and how various ingredients work well together.

Hence, my first graphic design class was to learn various visual elements. Below is my first assignment, Black Square Problem, which was about utilizing form and space for visual communication. It required to use black squares of the same dimension, then create a graphic image that best expresses the meaning of each of the following words: order, increase, bold, congested, tension, and playful.

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The following is the thought process behind each of the graphic image I created:

1. Order - After some preliminary sketches, I came up with the final piece, which shows a crossroad looked at from above. The black squares can be seen as cars, interaction of four roads, or a zebra crossing. It’s a matter of open interpretation. The order of the black squares (cars) ensures smooth and safe flow at the crossroad.

2. Increase – I have used the principles of overlapping, direction, illusory space and contrast in size to create a 3 dimensional visual effect. When you start seeing the image from the bottom right corner, it’s an increase in height like a skyscraper seen from below. When you go from the left top corner to the bottom right corner, then it’s an increase in size and show motion.

3. Bold – The black square stands out from the white square because of the high contrast of the white and black colors.

4. Congested – I was inspired by the game Tetris when I designed this imagine. The tube is made by the gap of two big black squares, which were cropped to fit into the frame. Congested is shown in a way that the small squares failed to fit in properly.

5. Tension – The image shows that a little square leans against the corner of the frame, bearing a giant black square oppressively. It depicts the tension we get when we are overloaded with excessive burden.

6. Playful – Seven black squares (negative space) are spread into a flowery shape. To enhance its playfulness, part of the form jumps outside of the frame, and the overlapping of the 2 black squares on top switches to white (positive space) with a transparent effect (you can see through the frame underneath the squares). The tangent of the negative-positive space is an eye-catching point, which will draw your eyes to them immediately, then the white line will send your eyes through the detail of the flower, and eventually back to the tangent.

Read More 2 comments | Posted by Edith Chan

Edith Chan

Hire Me

Currently I am available for freelance work. I am located in Seattle,WA but not necessarily limited to the area, I work with clients from all over the world.

Should you need identity, animation, graphic and web design work, please feel free to contact me. You may find more about my portfolio on www.EdithChanDesign.com

About Me

Typography Class - 2

Typography Class - 1

Making The Leap From Enthusiasm To Professionalism

Fundamental Visual Elements – Form and Space

Edith Chan

Hire Me

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