Original Bottle/Can Logo                    

                          Original Paper Logo                                          

For this assignment, we had to redesign the recycling logos that are placed on paper and bottle/can recycling bins all over campus. In the end, the best recreations will be chosen to actually replace the logos. Especially since this was a competition, my group and I worked extremely hard on this project.

We knew from the start that we wanted to do some sort of collage, mostly building off of the webpages we had cited earlier as types of designs we liked. Our first decision as a group was to collect scrap paper and empty bottles, empty cans, aluminum, etc. to help us with our collage. Though we had a general idea of what we were going to do, the following day was purely experimental, therefore we were excited that we ended up producing pleasing results. We organized the crumpled paper on one side of the hallway and crushed bottles and cans on the other. Luckily, Imani had an iPhone that had some really cool photography applications on it. We were able to use effects on the pictures we took to make them look even better. Finally, we got a picture we were happy with for each and called it a day.

Trying to get the words to stand out on the pictures was a little difficult, especially since the pictures were both so colorful. Using plenty of shadow and outlining, we finally made them legible. We also decided to add a symbol to the logo that would help people know exactly what the bins were for without even having to read the text: a recycling symbol. Using Photoshop, we cut out the background and changed the color of a recycling symbol we found online. This was the final touch!

When we finally finished working, we all took a step back and admired our work, pretty proud of what we had accomplished. Over all, this project was really fun and exciting; it took what we had been learning in class and applied it to something important in our everyday lives.

Thanks for everything Imani, Maddie, and Aubrey!

The first image is the "Bad Ad" that I chose to work with. As you can see, it's pretty much a disaster. The alignment is chaotic, there is very little contrast, the image of the soldier continues outside of the border, and fonts don't relate at all. This ad definitely needed some redesigning.

The second image is my recreation of the "Bad Ad." First of all, I knew there had to be some sort of organized alignment. I decided to center the first and last two lines, but then right align the center two because of their location in relation to the image in the background. For contrast, I decided I wouldn't include color because that was one thing I didn't like about the original ad (the way the image of the soldier stood out even though it wasn't the most important part). Instead, I used grey, black, and white to contrast. I bolded the most important parts of the text and made the image of the soldier a lighter grey to help it fade into the background (because it's large size already made it stand out quite a bit). For fonts, I understood that who ever made the original ad wanted to portray the event as fun and exciting. I chose a font to represent this, and then for the more straight forward information (like date, time, etc.) I stayed within the same simple font family to make the ad less chaotic. In changing all of these things, I think, if nothing else, the information is clearer (more direct) and the ad is more pleasant to look at. I hope you like it!