I am currently doing an online graphic design course and hope that the skills I learn will be beneficial for my new business. I have created a few mailers for marketing purposes on Photoshop and am interested to see how these compare with mailers that I will be creating after the course. The course runs for 10 weeks and teaches you to use Adobe Illustrator. Here are two flyers I made using Photoshop:

The yellow colour is really awful... so these definitely need to be worked on! In the course we have been introduced to some contemporary designers who are currently leaders in their field.

One of the fmous Graphic Designer we learnt about is Marian Bantjes who makes very beautiful, sensual, detailed work. You can watched her TED talk below which is very inspirational.

[embed]http://www.ted.com/talks/marian_bantjes_intricate_beauty_by_design?language=en#t-25427[/embed]

"Sorrow" by Marian Bantjes was made from real flowers that were donated by a local flower shop for an installation at the Chicago Design Museum. She named the artwork Sorrow because the fresh flowers wilted and dried up over time while they were on display.  (see http://bantjes.com/work/sorrow/)

I really like the way she used real leaves and flowers as materials to design with. So for my first assignment I also used this technique. The brief was to write your name using different tools in Adobe Illustrator and also make use of a raster image. The aim was for you to experiment and learn how how to the program. I took photos of leaves from my garden and incorporated them into the design. This is what my assignment looked like:

Once I am finished with the course I hope to see a big improvement in the kind of marketing material I will be producing for Sprout Landscapes.