In my first year with the graphic design program at Mt. Hood Community College I was able to focus from the start on most of the skills I wanted to learn through the program. learning vector art was a big reason I started college, as well as learning a more formal design process and adapting it to my tattoo process. I also love lettering and wanted to learn the typography side of things, as well as how to implement font making into my repertoire. Here are some examples of custom lettering projects from year one and what I learned from them 

CROM BOLD – GD160 Typography Systems 

Typography Systems was the first-year class I was most excited about, as I focus on custom lettering in tattooing and am motivated to learn typography and try my hand at making a font. We were required to build our font around an archetypical character, and I was lucky enough to get Conan the Barbarian. While I think this font could work well as a display font, the lowercase letters still need a bit of work before the font is ready to be used. I would love to use this as a basis for a comic book title or album art though. It was a great exercise in font creation. 

TIMBERLINE GIN LABELS – GD165 Digital Illustration 

Digital Illustration focused on drawing vector graphics. I found it very easy to start implementing Adobe Illustrator into my more geometric tattoo work and I like creating vector art when it comes to simple iconography or lettering. I had a harder time turning my illustrations into vector art and found that it was easier to create high quality raster illustrations to image trace & refine by hand. These gin labels were drawn in procreate, then I recreated the label and gin name with Illustrator’s pen tool while using image trace for the fruits themselves. 

KOJIPOP PRIMARY & SECONDARY PACKAGING – GD152 Concept, Creativity, Unity  

As an avid beer drinker in a city of breweries it was a pleasure to take a class revolving around beverage package design, especially because of the overlap between designing for a 3-dimensional object like a can and designing for a 3-dimensional object like an arm. Kojipop was a fictitious soda I produced revolving around the novelty of using koji to naturally sweeten the beverage. By working the beverage around a parent brand and developing market research to target an audience through demographic and psychographic analysis I was able to produce branding that felt very much out of my style that nevertheless fit the brand and audience. I was able to use my skills at custom lettering for ideating a unique logo.