The Project
This was completed for an introductory graphic design course at San José State University. The goal of the assignment was to create a fully vector-based sticker design using Adobe Illustrator. It needed to include vector-based images, as well as some sort of text to tie the design together.
The Process
For this project, I used Adobe Illustrator to create the final design.
First off, I began by sketching my initial idea and importing that sketch into Illustrator to serve as a template for me to edit on.
Next, I went through multiple iterations of tweaking the design to refine different elements. Some of these elements were the colors, the texture on both the cactus and the sand, the typeface, the stroke weight and style, as well as the transparency used on the shadows.
After going through these different iterations, I was able to land on my final design that incorporated what I believed to be the best of each of my individual versions.
The Purpose
One of the things that inspired this idea was the fact that some of my most common sketches include cacti with shocked facial expressions. The next part of this was the fact that cacti appear to have their hands raised, which gave me my tag line that I would use for this project.
After coming up with this initial idea, I began to think about how I wanted the composition to be set up. One of my other inspirations were old western wanted posters. So, I tried to mimic a font that would be used on these wanted posters, and the background color was inspired by the color of these worn posters.
Then, I was able to find a desert picture that I could use to create a sand texture that I was looking for. I also used a leaf image to come up with the texture used on the cactus. Both of which were used to add more dimension to the image and make the design appear less flat.
Finally, to add to the realistic composition I was trying to create, I experimented with opacity effects to create shadows, and overlay these textures over the colors I chose for the behind elements.
Through the combination of all of these components, I was able to come up with this final design which I felt reflected my initial vision well.
