CCAD — ADVE 2291: Digital Design Lab 1
Project 4: Adobe Photoshop Editorial Illustration
What the heck are we doin'?
The focus of this project was to use Adobe Photoshop to create a nifty editorial illustration out of spliced imagery that could appear in a prospective issue of the Atlantic, along with a coinciding article headline design. I found this article by Shirin Gaffery from Vox Media on the topic of facial recognition in policing, and was very inspired to dive in with it as my concept. Let's freakin' do it! 🤧
After reading Shirin's article, I was feeling a bit inspired by the sort of artistic response that came from the community following World War I—Dadaism, collage and the like. Since this article was tapping into ideas surrounding the fear of new technology, I thought that this could be such an interesting parallel to explore in my design— brought to the contemporary with some exciting color and texture and all that.
I did some doodling in Procreate for my iPad Pro to start, to try to figure out where the heck I could go with this project. My moodboard is chock full of really neat colors, textures, shapes, and layouts, and I really wanted to explore those. Granted these sketches don't seem like particularly much— but the ideas I pulled from this quick little spread really helped me channel the sort of grief that we as people feel in these sort of circumstances, the age of technology we live in. You know what I mean.
Some process work! The final piece contains 21 different images that were masked and all that in Photoshop. For each image, I started in Photoshop and did all of my editing, and embedded them in a new Photoshop file for the final image. From there, those files were placed into InDesign for the final magazine layout!
The 3 step process to my humanoids: clip out the shape I want, overlay with a deteriorated mask of the inverted image, and introduce a bold gradient to the inverted mask. Midcentury photography serves to parallel (and highlight the similarities of) the very human reactions to modern advancements of those times— urbanization, communication systems, etc.— and the fear that came with them, to present-day tech advancements like facial recognition.
The final layout for the story! I would definitely take a minute to give this work a read— Shirin Gaffery wrote on the topic of facial recognition technology in an incredibly insightful and hopeful manner. Although new technological advances can seem terrifying because of their implication on democracy and our own freedoms, Gaffery makes a great point to iterate that it isn't all just doom and gloom. With action and understanding, new tech can become more of a tool for advancing society rather than a weapon to trap it.
Aaaaaand the presentation board! Although this project completely eradicated any sort of discomfort I may have in working in Adobe Photoshop, I still hate that damn program with my whole heart. So finicky and inconsistent. But! You can make some dang wonderful stuff with it if you can deal with it's stubborn temperament. Please do not comment about "operator error" or whatever because that CLEARLY is not the case. Maybe.
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Until next time! ✨
PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS: Guido Jansen, Le Tan, Maiqui Cordeiro, Mikita Karasiou, Oscar Helgstrand, Patrick Tomasso, Revolt, The New York Public Library, Xavi Cabrera (Courtesy of Unsplash).
