I have just finished editing a student interview with Marilese. This was about one of the most difficult projects I’ve worked on in my time at college. I spent a lot of time on the internet researching how to use adobe premiere before attempting to use it. The most difficult part of this project was matching the audio file up with the audio of the movie, and another difficult process was actually saving the file properly so that it would be shareable. Although it was a bit frustrating in the beginning, I can say I am pretty proud of what I learned from basically teaching myself adobe premiere with a bit of online help. Please enjoy the video!

Tetsuya Nomura is a well-known Japanese illustrator, designer, and art director in the gaming industry. He was born on October 8^th, 1970 in Kochi Prefecture, Japan. He has been drawing since the age of three and his parents noticed his talent in illustration even for his age. Nomura even made a Japanese game himself for him and his friends to play during school. Nomura recognized that when he realized how happy he made his friends along with the support from his father that he wanted to consider illustration as a career. When Nomura was in high school, his father bought him a computer and was enthusiastic about his interest in gaming and illustration. During this time, Nomura met an early Final Fantasy illustrator, Yoshitaka Amano. Amano was able to be a mentor for Nomura and supported him into taking the steps to become a video game artist.

As Nomura grew up, his interest in video games began to develop and his love for illustration was still prominent, with thanks to the support from his father. He started to get ideas during high school of becoming a mangaka, or Japanese manga artist. However, Nomura saw the possibility of becoming a manga artist very unlikely and hence studied advertisement at a vocational school instead. Around 1996, Nomura received a degree in advertising and started looking for advertising jobs in Japan.

This is where he ran into the company of Square Enix, or at the time was known as Square. Nomura began his part in the company as a debugger for their game Final Fantasy IV in 1991. His success with his involvement in the games allowed the company to promote him to graphic director for Final Fantasy VI especially after a few of the designers were impressed with his illustrations for the previous Final Fantasy games. In 2002 began the involvement as a director in one of Nomura’s most noteworthy games, Kingdom Hearts.

Tetsuya Nomura is now most known for his consistent work as an art director for the gaming company Square Enix. He is seen as one of the most remarkable game directors in Japan, with his net worth being 1.3 million dollars. Nomura’s latest projects are the Final Fantasy VII Remake and the latest downloadable content for Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts RE: Mind. Nomura has changed the lives of gamers all around the world and produced amazing storylines that was remarkable for games around its time.

This week, I went to the Museum of the City of New York. Firstly, I spent a lot of time around this neighborhood, so I was a bit baffled that I didn’t know of the museum’s location. I immediately noticed the intricacy of the architectural design of the building and the ivory color in contrast with the its background (being next to Central Park). This year, the museum’s concept was deeply focused on the appreciation of labor in New York City, the demographic of the city and the impact of New York City and indigenous people. A few things about the museum I appreciated was the unremarkable aesthetic of the museum, and how easy it was to maneuver from one exhibit to the next. Lastly, I feel like the placement in which this museum is located it significant as well. It is located in the middle of Spanish Harlem which I feel is important because of the amount of schools that are in that neighborhood. I feel like the easy access to this exam, especially for students is important because young students will be able to visit a museum that is close to or in their neighborhood and get to understand the history of the city they live in.

The first exhibit the me and the class began with was “Who We Are: Visualizing NYC by the Numbers”. This room was one of the most interesting rooms to me because it dove deeper into something I wondered  most about–the demographic of New York City. I stepped first to the main attraction of the room and noticed that on the table was an exhibit called “Dive Into the Numbers”. This exhibit included an interactive way to see all of New York City based on people by their race, and how many of which race lived in specific neighborhoods. The color scheme that was used in the second image work together well because they are all different tones of the same color of orange. I also noticed that only sans serif type font was used for the whole exhibition piece. This was interesting to me because this is something I have always wondered about. With the experience of living in two different boroughs, I am able to see that the demographic of New York is constantly changing. It was intriguing to me to see all of the data I’ve wondered about right in front of me.

Next, I moved down onto the second floor of the museum. I was impelled to go to a small part of the museum called “Urban Indian: Native New York Now”. This part of the museum conveyed the treatment and recognition of indigenous people in New York City. The picture that captured my interest the most was the commentary on the diorama of the colonization of native people during the Lenape-Dutch encounter in 1939. This diorama has been criticized many times because of its depiction of the situation between the native people and the colonists. Firstly, in the diorama, it looks as if the native people are willingly submitting to the colonists. Secondly, the appearance of the native people is also stereotypically introduced. Hence the many complaints and backlash the Museum of Natural History received from this, instead of rearranging the diorama they put text to clarify more clearly what the setting was supposed to have been in the scene. Although the Museum of Natural History received a lot of criticism from this diorama, from a designer’s point of view, the text was well placed in a way that it did not take away from the original diorama.

After seeing the rest of the exhibit, I decided to take a trip back up to the third floor of the museum. Here is where I discovered the “Pride” exhibition of the museum and for this exhibit there wasn’t a piece I liked in particular; it was more the setup of the room. The lights in the room were set with specific RGB colors to exhibit the colors of the pride flag. In the back of the room had colorful sticky notes for people to write about their lives as LGBTQA people. Those papers as well were set in the room to be arranged into colors of the rainbow, or the pride flag colors.

The Museum of the City of New York is a museum I would go to again, especially as a designer. As a designer, I was able to really appreciate the amount of thought that went into the color scheme of some of the exhibition rooms as well as the composition of rearranging text, like the walls in the third room in the Who We Are exhibition. I would love to visit this museum again and cannot wait for their next exhibition.

The History of Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts, also known as EA, is an entertainment software and video game development company. This company was founded by Trip Hawkins in 1982 and produced many noteworthy games such as The Sims, Need for Speed and Mass Effect.

The shape of the EA logo changed drastically throughout the years. Electronic Arts decided on Designer Barry Deutsch to make the first logo for the company. The logo inspired by EA Sports, another brand within the EA company. The first logo was composed of an overlapping square, circle and triangle meant to exhibit an abstract view of the companies’ name, Electronic Arts.                              

Electronics Arts latest Logo is their present design, created by the companies first designer, Barry Deutsch. The design consisted of a circle with the fill in black while the negative space in the logo has the lettering of “EA” inside of it. This is the logo that was made from 2006 to the present day. Another variation of this logo is for the circle to have no fill, a black outline instead with the letters “EA” in black.

In class, we watched Saul Bass’ title sequence for North by Northwest by Alfred Hitchcock. The first thing I noticed in the title sequence was about Saul Bass corresponded the text with the direction. For instance, Saul Bass Illustrated an arrow on the letter N and another arrow on the letter West in the text ‘northwest’. I also noticed that once the title was displayed, the green and black background changed to a grid like form. This grid allowed the text to look like it was apart of the city background, and some of the text moved around with the pedestrians walking in the city.