Frame 1 - Explore The Future
Frame 2 - Astronaut Shrink
Frame 3 - Some Good Sh*t
Frame 4 - Spacing Out
Frame 5 - Powerful
Frame 6 - Made with Photoshop
During a style frame workshop I was taking under Justin Harder of Claus Studios, we were tasked with creating style frames for a product ad. The product that I went with is Photoshop, given it's ubiquity in design spaces.
Some of my favorite memories with Photoshop include introducing it to my sister-in-law, who is in high school. While I was really excited to show off the design capabilities of the program, she was much more interested in figuring out how to make lasers shoot out of people's eyes and put faces onto random vegetables. Truly important skills.
Anyway, those moments really stuck with me, and I think there's a large demographic of young creatives who don't really care for the perfectly delicate subject selection tools, or content-aware fills. They just really want to make some cool stuff. And that was the driving force behind my designs here.
It was imperative to make designs that are fun, silly, and appealing. To many in the audience I was aiming to target, the world of Photoshop is entirely new. As such, I wanted to emphasize how "futuristic" and "advanced" Photoshop can be. Hence the opening quote: Explore the Future.
Inspiration:
Here's a quick look at a section of my Pinterest for this project. I know that the 80's outrun style is visually very striking with the audience, and I think that could be a great bridge for the futurism I'm hoping to sell through the style frames.
Designing:
I initially wanted to go even further back in time, and use product ads and pop art from the 50's. Ultimately it didn't feel appropriate for showing Photoshop as "the future". Nonetheless, here is the style frame quilt from that early iteration.
The styles from this era of the project didn't feel cohesive, neither did the graphics. I'm glad I scrapped it in hindsight, though I do want to explore that style more.
Iterating:
After continuing to explore the 80's futurism look, I landed here:
This was the final series that I presented to the class, and everyone seemed to be really impressed with the growth from the 50's style to this one. I definitely agree that this version seems to have a lot more motivation associated with the reference material, so I think the designs are more strongly aligned there as well.
I received a few critiques, and applied them for this final version that I'm proud to showcase once again:
Lessons Learned:
I think going forward it will be important for me to more closely nail down my references and inspiration before getting into the design. Having studied my Pinterest board over and over, I was much quicker in making design decisions that were informed by the references I was hoping to emulate. Beyond that, there is definitely something to be said about making sure there is cohesion behind the marketing messages and the style. Referring to futurism while emulating a 1950's art style created a strong dissonance that made the initial style frames a good bit weaker.
Beyond that, I'm extremely proud of the final result and the steps that I took to get here.
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