This is the last installment of my blogs featuring work from my Graphic Design classes this last semester. This project, was the largest, most expensive, and most time consuming of all my projects, but I am also extremely happy with it!

I was not allowed to do something video game related again, as all my previous projects involved the gaming culture or industry, so I fudged the lines a little and did a project on my other big passion, comics!

The project was to create an identity for a clothing line, and then package and display a full outfit from that line. I had recently finished my Wonder Woman costume and figured that would be a fun outfit to package. I started with the name for my fake clothing line, “Hero Gear” which I thought worked well even though it has been used a million times before in different contexts.

I wanted my design style to be something between Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol’s style of pop art. I started by arranging a shoot of myself in my Wonder Woman costume, to use in the design. That was a ton of fun on its own, and I owe Mason of Mason’s models big time for letting me shoot with him on such short notice.

Then I did a massive amount of work in Photoshop. While I know my way around Photoshop very well, I am an Illustrator girl at heart, and it was quite a long, but beneficial learning experience. With tons of filters, transferring the images between files, and then hand coloring in each photo (halfway through I realize I had colored WW braclets gold in all the panels and had to redo them ALL), I ended up with a pretty fun look.

That was the easy part. At that part in my graphic design career, I had really only worked on a 2-D surface, or much smaller scale projects than this. This project needed to have a 4-foot imprint, and made me think on a completely different level. I knew I wanted to have a mannequin body to show off the outfit, a plexiglass background to showcase my artwork, and some sort of platform to rest the boots and other objects on.

I found a mannequin body on craigslist, drove an hour to get it, and found out the wood base was broken when I got it home. At that point, I was not completely sure what to do, so I put it aside thinking Gorilla Glue would work if absolutely necessary.

After that, my dad and I went to the store and got some 2x6 boards and plywood to create a base. I was very particular about doing the work myself, so my dad showed me how to use all the tools and I made the base, and spray painted it black the next day.

I attached two metal wall-mounting brackets to anchor dual pieces of plexiglass to the back of the base. The pieces of plexiglass were going to be used to sandwich my designs in later. To make sure the Plexiglass was nice and tight, I put some plastic tubing behind them.

At that point, I was putting the mannequin torso directly on the stand that I made, and was not a huge fan of how it looked. After a trip back to home depot, we came back with a plumbing flange and a threaded gas pipe, drilled a large hole, screwed in the plumbing flange to the base, and screwed the gas pipe from that directly in the bottom of the mannequin. After a little fine-tuning, it was done!

Now that the identity and the display was done, the last part of my project was to package the individual items. I wanted to stick with the fun and industrial look to contrast the art style, so I used metal rings attached to plastic sleeves that featured each individual part of the costume, including a close-up, pricing, and even a barcode!

Besides all this, I also had to design and print a 24 x 26 inch poster, and with the price of the large format printing, along with the price of materials (WTF?!?!? Plexiglass costs $45 a sheet???) my costs went well up over $300, but I am extremely happy with the results! I got an A on the project, and it looks awesome in my office, which is comic book themed. I now have a very personalized and unique Wonder Woman tribute in my own home!

Now on to the good stuff:

Ideas I came up with for the Hero Gear logo:








The Final Logo I chose:


Some pictures from the Wonder Woman shoot I did:














The artwork panels I put together from the above photos:













The final panel arangement:


The hang tags I designed:


And the final project! (pictures taken in my office)













Let me know what you think, and as always, comments and critiques are welcome!

Thanks again to Ryan of Gifted Models for the awesome pictures!

So, I had a pretty good semester, I redesigned the 1988 mario boardgame, made a tribute to the History of Nintendo , created a Video Game Triva board game , created a identity package around a cosplay company, made an interactive Wonder Woman clock, and a funny flash Mario movie (can anyone host them for me so I can post them?). All in all, I am pretty happy with the semester!

As for this summer, I am going to be keeping myself busy designing other random stuff, right now I am working on some desktop backgrounds for dtoid, which is turning out fun, and hopefully you will see them soon!

That’s all! Thanks for reading!