MCruz’s Profile

Student
Active 8 years, 11 months ago
MCruz
Display Name
MCruz
Major Program of Study
Communication Design
Bio

As a young lass, I loved to draw. I started off in my early years drawing my favorite Disney characters, and that eventually branched to where I drew anything that interested me. In the 5th grade, I took up ballet and tap classes, and my drawing was put on hold. I danced for the next eight years, growing a passion for this specific type of art. However, as an Adult, I realized that being a dancer was not an ideal occupation, and actually was an intensely strict, competitive field. So, I floated around Queens College for two years, majoring in Liberal Arts. I could not decide what I wanted to major in; what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, professionally. One day, out of the blue, I changed my major to computer science, but that was incredibly short lived. Not even a half semester later, I changed my major to graphic arts. Queens College’s graphic arts program was relatively new at the time, so there was one Photoshop class that filled up the first day of class registration. After two straight semesters of trying to get into that class, I was fed up. I decided to teach myself. At Barnes & Nobels, I picked up two DIY Photoshop books, headed home and worked at it for the next few months. I started off small, correcting skin in photos and such, and then eventually was able to add make-up, change hair/eye color etc. When I was 19, I took a break from school and I got my first job in my intended field. My brother opened up a gift basket business and picked me to do the photo enhancements for the website. A year later, I was hired to be a social media marketer for a karate school near where I lived in Queens, NY. I took care of the Facebook and Twitter accounts, and I also designed logos/t-shirts/awards etc. for the school. A few months later, I decided to go back to school and I transferred to New York City College of Technology. I am now two semesters away from my degree, and steadily building my portfolio for when I graduate.

My Courses

gra2330photo1_f13wed10

gra2330photo1_f13wed10

This course will explore the foundational concepts of light and exposure in photography. Students will develop visual literacy as well as framing and compositional skills. Students will become acquainted with a wide range of contemporary photographers and gain an understanding of how photographic style transforms subject matter into meaning. Using professional lighting equipment and cameras, the student will gain hands-on experience capturing digital images in the studio as well as on location. Students will also learn professional methods and software to manage, process and print digital images.

Graphic Communication Workshop, GRA 1111, 7313

Graphic Communication Workshop, GRA 1111, 7313

This course introduces students to core concepts in the graphic communication field including typography, color theory, design and production terminology, printing processes, file formats and substrates.

COMD2450 Web1, SP2015

COMD2450 Web1, SP2015

A required course for all Advertising Design and Graphic Arts students. Topics include creative user interface design and best workflow practice. Students will design a website using an XHTML template, and will develop design, typography and web programming skills. XHTML and CSS will be taught. Over the semester, you will: • Design and build an effective personal portfolio web site • Gain a solid foundation in current web markup languages (HTML & CSS) • Explore industry standards in layout design and functionality • Upload a fully operational site to a personal URL

ADV 2340 Digital Photography 2

ADV 2340 Digital Photography 2

In this intermediate class, students use photographic style and light to transform subject matter in order to communicate ideas and feelings.

GRA 2330 Digital Photography

GRA 2330 Digital Photography

This course will explore the foundational concepts of light and exposure in photography. Students will develop visual literacy as well as framing and compositional skills. Students will become acquainted with a wide range of contemporary photographers and gain an understanding of how photographic style transforms subject matter into meaning. Using professional lighting equipment and cameras, the student will gain hands-on experience capturing digital images in the studio as well as on location. Students will also learn professional methods and software to manage, process and print digital images.

My Projects

”For Adobe, the Future is in the Past”

”For Adobe, the Future is in the Past”

This article, by Nick Bilton, is about Adobes future plans of breaking away from the traditional mouse and keyboard techniques they have been using to operate their products since the creation of the company. He talks about the drafting table Adobe will be releasing, that lets you operate photoshop on a touch screen, and draw using your fingers. Bilton also mentions a few other things that Adobe plans to be releasing in the future, such as some apps available for use on smart phones and tablets. Perhaps their biggest upcoming product, is Photoshop Touch. “Photoshop Touch allows people to draw, paint and manipulate designs and images. The application goes beyond desktop software, too, by allowing people to share their work on Facebook and by taking advantage of a tablet’s camera to pull photos directly into the software.” He closes the article by saying that computers haven’t been forgotten, what with all the tablets and smart phones and such, and they will still be used for creativity, but now they will work alongside these other devices and creations, to offer an even bigger playing field.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs

Steven Paul Jobs was an American inventor and entrepreneur, and was also the chairman and co-founder of Apple Inc. Apple, a major American electronics company, is best known for their extensive line of Mac computers and hand-held devices named with the signature lower-case “i,” such as the iPad, iPhone and iPod. Apple also has it’s own recognizable operating system for their computer line (OS X) as well as a complete line of software applications. Most of this was possible because of Steve Jobs, who single-handedly help change the future of electronics. Jobs was born on February 24th, 1955 to a Syrian father and a Swiss mother who almost immediately gave him up for adoption due to the fact that he was born out of wed-lock. Jobs was adopted by an Armenian-American couple who raised him into adolescence. At a young age, Steve’s adoptive father, Paul, taught him how to take apart and put together small electronics and his adoptive mother, Clara, taught him to read before he started school. In school, although a prankster, Steve was exceptionally bright and even skipped a grade. After high school, Jobs attended Reed College in Oregon, but did not stay longer than a semester because his parents could not afford to pay his tuition. Eventually, Jobs began working for Atari, one of the first video gaming corporations, where he created hardware for video games. Steve Jobs paired up with a high school friend, Steve Wozniak, and formed their own business in 1976, which they named “Apple Computer Company.” They invented their first computer and paired up with an Intel employee. A few years later, Jobs resigned from Apple due to a conflict within the company. He then joined a company called NeXTStep, a hardware company that produced computers but ultimately turned out to be unsuccessful. From there, Steve purchased a graphic film company, which would later be named Pixar. Eventually Jobs returned to Apple where the successful business began expand, creating the apple store and iTunes. Jobs stayed with Apple until 2011 when he resigned from the company, but stayed on as chairman. Jobs also had a biological sister who he eventually met in 1985. In the biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson mentions how close jobs and his sister, Mona Simpson, became. They both also tried to locate their father and Mona was successful, but Jobs became uninterested in meeting him, through some of the things he learned about his father. Mona, an accomplished writer, actually married a writer for the show “The Simpsons,’ which is more-or-less the way the show got its name. The two remained in contact for the duration of Jobs’s life. So what exactly made Steve Jobs so important? He is important to me personally because I happen to work for an independent Apple repair store called Dr. Brendan Mac Repair, next to TekServe in Chelsea, NY. In a more broad sense, he was the co-founder of Apple, which he built from the ground up and today is the worlds second largest technology company. The evolution of the Macintosh line of computers is astounding to see, along with the various electronic hand-held devices that have completely revolutionized the social media/cyberspace world. Perhaps the biggest, next to the Mac computer line, is the iPhone, one of the first smartphones that doubles as an iPod, along with the iPad, a multi-purpose hand held device with Wi-Fi. Just before his death, jobs stated his future dream of designing an Apple car called the iCar, which I imagine would have been well equipped with it’s own interface, the famous Siri, and lots of glass. It is widely known that Jobs rejected a lot of product proposals, and that he believed that the design of an object should go hand in hand with its performance. Take the iPhone for example. It is a small and sleek device available in white or black and is made with glass which is considered classier and more delicate than plastic. It isn’t the most durable electronic, but it definitely speaks money and sophistication when compared to the leading competitors. Jobs also frequently references in his book a calligraphy class that he took in college as being one of the factors that prepped him for success. Jobs also revolutionized the music industry by developing portable devices with access to world-wide music, (purchasable through the iTunes store), for a generation that thrives off of music. Prior to the release of the iPad, it was thought it would not be a trendy product, but wound up kicking off the tablet craze, which thankfully brought life to reading books in a dying age. Steve Jobs died on October 5th, 2011 from a tumor of the pancreas, and even though he never finished college, he was worth about $2 billion. Although many people helped create and expand Apple Inc. jobs is the most widely known for his accomplishments. Today, Apple is known for being a well-made user-friendly product, which I would more or less have to disagree with, being that I fix these products nearly every day of my life. In a city like New York, it is easy to see the popularity of this product by simply people-watching on the subway or some other public place. People everywhere are playing games on their iPhones, watching movies on their Mac laptops and listening to music on their iPod. The first Apple computer was bought for $600 and the company today is worth $400 billion. Resources: -http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/A-Tribute-to-a-Great-Artist–Steve-Jobs.html -http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-said-he-wanted-apple-to-eventually-make-a-car-2013-2 -http://www.crunchbase.com/person/steve-jobs -http://adage.com/article/agency-news/book-jobs-a-student-advertising/230612/ utm_source=daily_email&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=adage -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#iPhone -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs -Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson. Published by Simon & Schuster, Print, 2011. -http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/A-Tribute-to-a-Great-Artist–Steve-Jobs.html

Political Poster: Guantanamo Bay

Political Poster: Guantanamo Bay

Aamer Madhani, USA TODAY, May 1st 2013: WASHINGTON—President Obama said Tuesday that his administration would re-engage Congress on closing the U.S. military-run detention center at Guantanamo Bay, calling the facility a “recruitment tool for extremists” and suggesting it is undermining U.S. security. “It needs to be closed,” Obama said at a White House news conference marking the first 100 days of his second term. “I’m going to go back at this.” Obama’s comments come as military officials say that as many as 100 prisoners at Guantanamo are engaged in a hunger strike. _______________________________________________ My political poster shows Guantanamo Bay essentially being put on the back burner by being put into America’s closet, along with a bright orange jumpsuit – the prisoner uniforms used in the facility. The poster also shows the word: “Iraq W” in much smaller letters and appearing behind Guantanamo. This was done to signify how one of the first things Obama pledged to do was get us out of Iraq during his presidency, which he more or less did, but then sent more troops to Afghanistan, which was not the original plan. The idea was to completely be done with the middle east and instead, moved troops from one foreign country to the next.

Field Trip to UFT

Field Trip to UFT

UFT On May 7th, our class had a field trip to the united Federation of Teachers on Broadway in Manhattan, New York. The purpose of this trip was to get a close-up look into the world of a print shop, and to learn about the different kinds of machines, paper, ink, etc, that are used there. The reason this part of advertising/graphic design is useful to know about, is because it can greatly assist in cost and time reduction of printing, and will also keep you ahead of the game if you are previously informed to the kinds of printing available to you. The first machine we were showed was a poster-sized one, that can only print documents with minimum measurements of 11” by 17” in color or black and white. The next was a machine used to print newspaper-type articles with the option of front and back. This machine used oil-based ink and produces a medium-quality picture. The third printing machine we saw was an extremely large one of the ryobi series, used to print large quantities of large-sized documents. This machine used a soy-based ink because of the type of paper that it print on. If you used regular ink, it would not imbed into the paper, almost in an oil-water type of situation. Our tour guide then showed us how you can turn a document into a negative using certain metal plates and a high-powered light. From there, we were shown a very large machine that prints off of a gigantic paper roll, instead of by individual sheets. This paper would need to be cut after printing, and there is a cutting machine right next to the paper roll machine. This cutting machine can be adjusted so you can cut at any size. Our guide showed us how to minimize the time it takes to cut by always cutting from the back. We were brought to a different room that had several machines used for different things. One was an organizer that would arrange your documents in order. Next we were shown how we can use self-mailing on a paper you want to mail. What this means is, you can mail a piece of paper without using an envelope. You fold the paper and use a sticker to keep it sealed, and then right on the outside of it as if it were an envelope. There was also an envelope maker which seemed quite complex. The tour guide showed us a special machine used for printing high-quality posters and such. The machine was given to the shop for free so that it can be tested, and the results sent back to Japan where it was made. Overall this experience was helpful, yet just a glimpse into the depths of printing. Not only did we learn about a few different kinds of printing machines, but we also learned about the kinds of jobs the shop gets. Jobs such as making bookmarks or protest poster, envelopes, newspapers, large posters, books, etc. Anything requiring something that needs to be printed in bulk is done at shops like these. Our guide was managing the shop for 37 years and has done countless printing jobs. He stressed that sometimes you run into complications, but the bottom line is to get the job out on time.

The High Cost of Free

The High Cost of Free

This article is about the relationship between free products and customer service experience. It mentions free customer service help via phone and such not living up to the expectations of consumers. Harris Interactive conducted a stud that said that, “60% of consumers said that speaking with a live customer service agent via the telephone is the number one way in which they want to interact with a company, and only 25% said they prefer email.” Even companies such as Google that offers a great free product, their customer service, however, is another story altogether. The point the article makes is that if you’re offering a free service/product, your customer service should be up to par as well. I always love a good free product and I completely disagree with this article. Sure, it would be nice if the customer service of a good product matched the quality of this product, that would be great, but they’re usually not, and THAT is the true cost of free. But, this cost I am very willing to pay. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, so it is perfectly understandable for these well-known complimentary products to come with a price tag. As long as that price tag isn’t physically taking money from my pocket, I am all for it.

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