Macarons Packaging!

One of my guilty pleasures are the french macarons, that's why I decided to create the packaging for them. 

I love that the macarons packaging are always full of colors and delicate designs. I also like that they are lots of styles and shapes to create the boxes in which they come. 

Examples of macarons packaging: 


Laduree: 

This brand of Macarons is the most famous all over the world. I love the design of their packaging because they are very classic and sometimes vintage, highlihting in this way the Macarons history.  They always keep their designs simple and clean. 

Pierre Hermé: 

In this case, I love the illustrations, I think that they are very french and make me think of Paris. I also like a lot the shape used for the box in the first example. The designs in Pierre Hermé always show very literal the relation with the product. This packages are more modern than the ones that you can find in Lauduree. 

Macaron Café:

In this brand we can find designs very similar to the Laduree, but we can also find boxes as packaging with just a little detail but no design, which is very common.  They have also very modern packaging with contemporary illustrations. 

In general, we can see that almost all brands try to keep their designs very clean, soft and simple.

Upper East Side logo design

THE UPPER EAST SIDE

For the logo project we chose as inspiration The Upper East Side. We chose it because everybody in the class was going to Brooklyn and we wanted to do something different. The Upper East Side is an iconic neighborhood in Manhattan, known by elegance, wealth and social standing.

So, yesterday, we went to the Upper East Side looking for something specific to focus in for our logo design. We finally decided to focus on doors; we realized that every door of every building in the neighborhood was gorgeous and its something that characterizes the place.

Here are some pictures of the field trip:

 So we startet doing sketches based on this doors, I tried to paint some in my sketchbook (I don't know how to paint at all, so it makes me feel bad showing that here):

I gave the idea of using the "Park Avenue" for our logo, I thought about it because we walked all the time in that avenue.

Today, we started working on illustrator in our logo, we spent the whole day on it. Firts we took Anna's logo, my work was to see different color variations. We finally closed red:

After the critique we realized that the little details on the right where not seen and people didn't understand what they where from a long distance, they also didn't like the R... So we started working again, we all did new logos and made some variations (this was mine) : 

But we all decided that we like the most Asstas design, the we all work together on it to fix the las details and this is the result:

At the end, we made the list of things that we have left to do : 

We are really happy with the result of our logo and excited for seeing it printed next week on the bag! 

Book cover for The Library Of Babel

In the story made by Jorge Luis Borges he makes the readers think of a library as the universe in which books are the people. With my cover, I wanted to create that sensation, so made this symmetrical immage based on a picture that I took to the entrance of a library in Lyon, France.

I took just a part of the book entrance and add it some effects with photoshop and illustrator to give it a texture and to make it look like a painting.
Then, i created the symmetrical form that you can see in the cover.

To arrive to this point I made a lot of different covers with color variations and layouts variations, but this one was the most successful and the one that I liked the most.

Book cover that I love

This is a book from Taschen, I actually have it in my home because I've always been a pop art lover. 

I like a lot the book cover because it is very simple and it has a piece that represents very well this art movement from the XX century.  The font is very simple because there is already too much information on the image used for it, so that is what makes it look good. 

I am a social communicator, and this type of art takes images from the popular culture from the mass media  (like advertisings) and give them a new meaning, using the "kitsch" aspect of some cultural element.  So in this type of art I find two things that I love the most: mass media communications and art. All in one single piece. 

The Pop Art is the result of a life style, is a manifestation of culture, of the use of technologies, democracy, fashion , in some way it shows the life style that most of us have nowadays; because it always represent the habits, ideas and appearances of the contemporary world. And this book cover looks a lot like it. 

The Library of Babel - Jorge Luis Borges

The Library of Babel is trying to explain the existence of the universe using the metaphor of a library. Both, the universe and the libraries are infinite and interminable.

The books are really important is this short story. Books are chaotic, and the live of someone who works with books tour around explaining the reason of the existence of those books.

So for me, while reading the story I had the idea of people as books in a huge universe as the library.  It also made me think about the Christian myth that can be found in the Old Testament.

I really like how Borges creates the image of a labyrinth from the chaotic vision of universe, because it makes me think about what has an end or what is infinitely.

In conclusion, the story creates a doubt to the readers and makes us think if we really now what the finite is or is its just some kind of sensation created by our minds. 

Book project.

“The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.” 

My accordion book is base in the Kundera’s novel called The Unbearable lightness of being. The author tries to show the idea of dualism, the idea of two realities, two natures, which are the body and the mind. The novel is a love story full of the common and real problems that people face in real life.

I love that this novel is not only for the heart of the people who read it but also to his head and mind.

The novel is an anecdote and reflection about philosophical problems that we have to face in our daily life, helping us to look and understand them from many different points of view.

The novel is extremely complete because it talks about history, politics, philosophy, and psychology about the common issues we face in the world.

Starting from here, I took two subjects whom I think are important for almost everybody: What is love? What is truth?  

But getting to that point was not easy at all. At the beginning of the Project, I just had a bunch of quotes that I like from the book, but I didn’t have any idea of how to organize them. So I decided to just keep going, I started to select pictures for each quote and to fix them in Photoshop. Then I figured out that i could divide my book in two sections: truth and love. From that moment on everything just flow and I got Kind of obsessed working on the book.

So my book is an accordion that can be read in 2 different ways. When you finish one part is the start for the other. I think, that is a very nice way of putting things together, because although they are different concepts I relate them a lot, for me love is truth.

In each side, there are 5 pictures with a quote each one.

On the side of Love, the quotes are the followings:

In the sunset of dissolution everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia: for this quote I used a picture that I took of a sunset in Lyon, France. I think that a lot of times people feel nostalgic by love, so I used this to set a kind of mood or atmosphere to the book.

A single metaphor can give birth to love: this means for me that love is everywhere.  

Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost: I used a picture of a couple in central park holding hands, which creates a very good metaphor for the longing part of the quote.

We all need someone to look at us: the picture was taken in Lyon, France as well. In it is a mother taking a picture of her son. I really love this picture because i think it talks by itself and makes me feel happy and in love with life.

Happiness is the longing for repetition: the picture is a Little girl trying to touch a bird. I took it in Paris, I used it for the quote because in the moment that i took the photo the little girl was very happy and enjoying the fact that all this birds where around her because she was giving them food. And I think that you can tell that by yourself, her face is just pure happiness and softness.

And on the side of Truth the quotes are:

Living in truth means breaking barriers between the public and the private: for this, I used a funny picture that I took in Paris, you can see a man in the subway just wearing his underwear. I used it because I think that normally people walk around just using underwear when they are in private. So for me this is an excellent visual aid for the quote.

The only truly questions are the ones that even a child can formulate: the picture is a Little girl in Paris reading a book. When I saw her that day I felt very impressed because nowadays is not common to see children reading, they are usually playing with some electronic device. When you read, your mind wakes up and starts thinking and asking questions, that’s why I used this picture for the quote.

Keeping a public mind means living in lies: I used a picture that I took in Bryant Park at the summer film festival, the place was really crowded that day, so is the perfect scene for this fragment.

On the surface an intelligible lie, underneath an untelligible truth: The photo of the masks was taken in Prague. Masks are used for covering the face to conceal one's identity; it’s a lie hiding the truth.

Finally, I want to say that I really loved and enjoy doing this book. It was hard and heavy but it feels very good when you finally see your work done! I’m glad I chose this path and how I created a piece based on my favorite book in the whole world. 

Some of my final pieces

After lot of editing I finally have some things done. I really like them and feel happy about what I have learned and what I've been doing this summer!