MUST READ: My Postcard BIO

Doing this postcard was a little difficult for in the beginning of the project. You ever begin a project and you find it difficult to begin but then after you finish it, you can do it with your eyes closed. That’s how I felt when I completed this project.

When this project was first posted, I quickly skimmed over the directions and didn’t read it correctly. I thought we had to make a postcard for a state. Since I recently visited Houston, Texas I wanted to use a picture of myself standing next to a palm tree. I thought it would be a perfect picture to show of the nature of Texas. I wanted the poster to some what look like a realistic postcard from Houston, so I googled image search Houston postcards to give me some ideas of what I can do. A lot of postcards had images of the city downtown buildings showing what the city has to often. Other postcards just had Houston in big bright letters, with the state flag. I grew fantasied with that. I begin to sketch out some ideas that I could do. My first sketch was designed in the state flags. My second sketch was juts a regular postcard with a sideways triangle on the side. In the triangle I was going to make the colors of the Texas flag with my picture on the outside.

I went back to google to see what writing was on most of the post cards, it was mostly “greetings from” in a soft cursive font. I decided to go about my idea. I opened Illustrator and clicked on the rectangle tool and changed it to the polygon tool. I had to change the number of sides from 6 to 3. I click on the blank page to make my triangle. Since Texas state colors, are blue, white, and red; I wanted to make my triangle those 3 colors. I use the color swatch tool and use the gradient tool to blend the tools together.

I went back to looking at Texas postcards and seen that there state shape is a star. I decided to make a star and use the 3 colors in the star instead of the triangle. I then went into Indesign to finally begin my postcard. Since I was writing about Houston, I wanted my font to be something that would be used for a cowboy movie. I used Rosewood std at 92 font. I made it large enough that the word Houston would reach one end to the other. I used the same font character to write Texas but I made the size a little smaller. I then inserted the star I made from Illustrator and place two of them on the side of the word Texas. For “Greetings From” I used Brush Script Std. font at 44 font size. I also slanted it at a 16 degree angle. Since this was a “Houston” postcard, I wanted to include the picture of me with the palm tree so I then clicked open Photoshop to crop my picture. When I went back to the directions, I read that we had to do a biography postcard (don’t know how I miss that) which really upset me because I just spent 3 hours on this postcard. With everything I did was wrong, I was back to square one.

With the Houston post card 90% completed, I figured I’ll just change the words to my name and add a biography. I changed Houston to my name using the same font and size. I then couldn’t use the star I had made so I then just made a swirly circle in Illustrator. I saved that as an eps. file to place it on Indesign. I had a brown background for my Houston postcard and that color didn’t suite me. I changed the color to a light blue blending to white. I then look at the picture of me and didn’t like it as biography picture of me. I went to look for a more professional  picture of myself. I uploaded a picture to Photoshop and changed the resolution to 300, crop out all the extra stuff and saved it as a tiff file. Once I uploaded it to Indesign the picture was very blurry. Wasn’t sure why because I did every step correctly. I did this for 3 other photos and they were also blurry so I just stuck with my palm tree photo. With sticking to the palm tree photo, I notice I had a white box around my picture that I couldn’t get rid of no matter what I did in Photoshop so I felt as if I couldn’t use a color background. 

Since the box around my photo wouldn’t go away, I worked with it. I used a white background so my picture could stand out. Since my postcard needed a lot of colors, I decided to use many colorful shapes and lines. I made 4 color triangles in illustrator and added them. I made 6 lines going diangle. I then separated my biography and placed them in 4 different boxes. I made the boxes colorful. I went back into Illustrator to make another circler swiler thing. When I was finished, my work looked like a drag queen show.  

When brought to class, my teacher didn’t like it and said the postcard would receiver a failing grade. I had to change everything. My teacher taught me how to get rid of white box. I got rid of the box, edit my picture a little bit more to where you can only see me and the palm tree and no background image. I then took away every colorful design (the color boxes, the lines, the multiple triangles). I made a light lime green color background. I kept all my font characters and sizes.