Ricks Italian Cafe

 The original menu is cheaply laminated and very hard to look at. The front of the menu is just a dirty ugly blank page and the font is ugly and small. So I decided to use their menu to revamp. The owner of the restaurant is my neighbor and when I told him I was going to work on his menu for a class, he got very excited and let me mess around in the kitchen and bar to take pictures and stuff. When I showed him this mock-up (which is actually only the beginning) he decided to pay me for it!!! 

So here is the front cover of the menu with his hand drawn logo and wines from his bar along with the inside of his fire-oven.  

 This is the first page of the menu. I had wanted to frame everything so it looked more separated but the owner said he thought it looked busy that way so I kept it as it. I changed the menu around with his approval. Before, the menu just listed tons and tons of pasta options and it was a very long, messy list that was repetitive. So I turned it into a step by step process, which I thought would be more interactive for guests and less messy.

 For this part, I also turned the pizza into a step by step process that is easily editable because they wanted to add more steps. I learned about lining a text box with squiggles and I think it is fun but still keeps with the integrity of the menu. The brick is actually the front of someones apartment complex, I thought it looked "old-timey" and then I Photoshop in the grapes from his bar. That. took. so. long. Going in there detail by detail was brutal but I think I did a good job considering. I warped and free transformed the leaves and vines so it looks like they match up and are attached to the grapes and each other.

 I know it was not necessary to do the wine menu, but I thought I would go the extra mile and do it anyway. I got this great picture of a trellis that was in the restaurant and used it as the background, but I also changed the hue and saturation to make it look a little more purple. It ended up being a happy accident and I really like the way it turned out. I made the grape and vine divider in Illustrator.

All in all I think I did a very good job. Especially considering my computer broke and I had to start from scratch on someone elses computer. I think I made the menu very professional and very much in line with the Italian way. 

Great pics I got!

So The owner of Ricks Cafe gave me a tour and showed me parts of the kitchen and bar and I got to take a lot of great high quality pictures and mess around with placement and stuff. They even cut out a cheese block in the shape of "UT" for me! I am going to incorporate these pics into the menu:

Progress?

So this is what I have done so far. It is a trifold menu and the middle panel would be the front. I have just built up the furnace but have yet to make it blend in with the rest of the brick. I am working with the owner of the actual restaurant owner (he is my neighbor) for pictures of the kitchen, restaurant, and the brick oven. I have not started on the actual menu yet because the design and layout has taken me so long! But I think once I am done making this part look perfect, then the rest will be pretty fast. I have actually used more tools in making this menu than I have on any other project. I have taught myself a lot and I am excited to see the outcome.  

Finally Done!

Last night I finished everything. Although mine may not look as good as other peoples that I have seen, I am still pretty proud of mine. Given that I am not an art major or minor I think I used my limited knowledge in what looks good and what doesn't, pretty well. I started off wanting to do the diving with sharks for the Aquarium because I wanted to use the pictures that I took when I went diving. But as I started designing my template, I used less pictures and more details. I think I could vamp it up a little bit and add a little more to it if I got the chance, but I am still pretty proud of it!

I used Illustrator to create all of the vector shapes and the gradients and then transferred it over to Photoshop where I added masks to the pictures so I could erase them to match the shapes. I did this pixel by pixel and it took a painstakingly long time but the outcome is pretty high quality I think. After that, I moved the whole thing over to InDesign where I messed around with the texts. I liked being able to control how bold or Italicized everything was. Another helpful tool was the All Caps button or the No Caps button. It made it quick and simple to see what words I wanted in all caps and what looked like too much without having to retype everything. Also, I liked the tracker tool. It helped me see what kind of changes I was making once I got to a certain point. That way if I didn't like what I was doing, I could just decline the changes and I did not have to worry about it. It saved a lot of time and accidents.  

The Aquarium

I have chosen to do the Florida Aquarium newsletter. I want to highlight either their Scientific Dive Program since it has been in the news lately for discovering things about Florida's history that we did not know, or their Shark Dive Experience. I have been diving regularly for many years, and although I have not dove with this particular aquarium, I have done shark dives before so I think that it would be a very interesting topic to possibly create a newsletter for. I have created a template for the newsletter but it is a little messy so I have uploaded a picture of what I first planned out with pen and paper. It is really just the basics but it is starting to look a little more impressive now that I am putting color into it.

Final Work

Here are a few of my final Sound as Image pictures. I actually am very proud of mine. I chose a couple things in each picture and got extremely detailed with it. (I did not do it on purpose but I realize now that is what I did).

The most complicated thing I did in this set of images was make the phones and the turning pages in the book. I drew all of these out before I started on them, but a lot changed as I was going.