Brochure Sketches

Above are the sketches for my company brochure. The first one is the front, back and inside flap, and the second picture is what would be on the inside of the brochure once it is unfolded. I wanted to incorporate a lot of pictures of my baked goods on the brochure to provide lots of visuals as well as include the different flavors of cakes and cupcakes they can order and the pricing information. The pictures below are some of the photos that I want to choose from of things that I make for my company. I will choose the ones that will fit the best on the brochure and ones that will make it look good when added all together with the text.

Business Card and Letterhead Sketches

Above are the sketches of different business card and letterhead ideas for my "What's Baking?" business. I like the 1st and 4th sketch of the business card the best for the front and back, and for the letterhead, I like the 3rd and the 5th sketch the best. I will use these as a guide when I create the actual projects through inDesign.

Corporate Identity Questionaire

1. What is your business?

What's Baking? is a my baking business. I make custom cakes and cupcakes for all occasions. I have many different flavors of cake and use home-made fondant for 3D cakes.

2. Describe your business in one sentence.

What's Baking? makes customized cakes and cupcakes for all special occasions!

3. Who is your target audience?

My target audience is geared towards anyone who would want to buy a cake or customized cupcakes for an event or even just for a friends. I do cakes for kids' birthday parties, weddings, bridal showers, baby showers, holiday parties, corporate parties,  bachelorette parties, bar mitzvahs, etc. So anyone who is willing to buy a special treat for a special someone or a special event would be my "target" audience.

4. Who are your competitors?

My competitors would be any other bakery out there that makes birthday cakes. Publix, Walmart, and a lot of grocery stores make really good cakes and cupcakes. But what my business offers is customized treats. Desserts with fancy designs with the use of fondant, different flavors of cake that can't be found at a generic grocery store and creative artwork with icing that correlates with any theme of a party or event.

5. What makes them better/worse than your product/service?

A place like Publix is very established and they can make cakes very easily with the amount of utilities and room they have to store many cakes. My business however offers unique flavors rather than just plain vanilla and chocolate cake. All the cupcakes that I do consist of plain flavors to very interesting flavors such as brownies batter  cupcakes, chocolate chip cookie dough cupcakes, fluffinutter cupcakes, carrot cake, red velvet, almond cake, smores cupcakes, key lime pie cupcakes, etc.

6. Do you currently have an identity?

I am just starting to establish my business. I started making cakes for friends and family, and am extending slowly out to different people through word of mouth and some business cards I had made for me. I have done cakes and cupcakes for weddings, birthdays, bridal showers, baby showers, grooms cakes, etc.

7. What do you like about it? What don't you like about it?

I like that the cakes I make end up looking like sort of an artwork, rather than just food. For example, I have done a purse cake, a hamburger cake, and other challenging things. The cupcakes I make are unique and very yummy and a great option for birthdays and events. What I don't like is that I need a bigger fridge to store more of my baked goods when I have more than one orders, if I got busy.

1. How do you want your image to be seen in two years?

I want people to know What's Baking? as a business that I started up from my love of baking and I want my clients to know that they can get something beyond a plain vanilla layer cake with buttercream icing. I want them to know that I will try and make their special cake as customized as possible, whether it be the look of it or the flavor.

2. If your company was an animal, what animal would it be and why?

If my company was an animal, it would be an English bulldog. A big cute and cuddly one because whenever anyone sees a fat bulldog they usually go up to it and think it's cute, and I want my cupcakes and cakes to be as appealing to customers and want them to come to my shop.

3. If your company/brand was a person, who would it be and why?

If my company was a person, it would be me. I have always been so crazy about baking things for people and making people happy. I also am such a kid at heart, so I love to celebrate all different holidays to the extreme, and creating desserts for holidays was always a big thing for me. I want everyone to be happy with a cupcake or cake.

4. If your company/brand was an object, what would it be?

My company would be a cupcake. Because What's Baking is essentially a cupcake business, I think a cupcake explains what kind of bakery it is and it would be really cute!

5. If your customer was a cartoon character, who would it be?

If my customer was a cartoon character, it would be Cookie Monster. Although he is obsessed with cookies, my different flavor cupcakes like "chocolate chip cookie cupcake" or a cake designed that looks like a cookie would draw him in to my business because they look so yummy!

Lyrical Collage

This is my finished product of the lyrical collage with photoshop. I chose the song "I always feel like somebody's watching me" and found the butterfly picture really interesting. I wanted to have different eyes take the shape of the wings. So I used the magic selection tool and layer masking tool to create the exact shape in the backdrop of the butterfly. I really found this tool interesting. Then I found a perfect background to go along with the theme. I am very happy with how it turned out! I posted the pictures below of the ones that I used to create the entire collage.

In Class Assignment

This is the graphic I put together for Jay Adams. I had trouble with the "breakthrough medicine" logo, but its getting easier for me to transfer different photos onto an original graphic. I also got to practice getting rid of wrinkles with the spot healer, which I have never used before so that was fun!

Brush Graphic

For this project, we had to create a graphic with different kinds of brush strokes. I'm not very artistic when it comes to painting, so I had a hard time creating a very realistic looking painting but I did use a bunch of different brush styles to give the picture the different effects. I used the image above to replicate my graphic after. I got the colors of the ocean and the tree from the eye dropper tool from the original image. I liked using this because I could get the exact colors in the ocean and they blended well together. For the water, I used a "water" effect brush tool and for the sand I chose to use more of a grainy brush. I used two different brush strokes with different colors to give the tree trunk a more 3D effect. And for the palm tree branches, I used a brush that looked like grass and used all different color greens that blended nicely together. I used the eclipse tool for the sun and gave it a bright yellow color and added a radial blur to it because it went well with the rest of the photo. This isn't my best work, but I think that I got a lot of practice using the different brushes and did pretty well for creating a graphic from scratch.

Photoshop Assignment

For this project we had to take an original photo of ourselves and put it in a photo of a place where we have never been. I decided to take a picture of my boyfriend Shaheen and I that was taken outside and put us in front of the "Love" statue in Pennsylvania.

First, I used the Magnetic Lasso tool to select the part of the first image as best as possible. After selecting it, I cut my boyfriend and I out of the photo above and put it on top of the background layer below.

The color contrast looked very weird at first, so I had to play around with the brightness and color of the original photo to match the background as best as possible. Then I took the eraser tool and slowly went around the picture of us to eliminate this "white glow" around us and create some holes in between my hair to make the original background of the first photo completely go away. After perfecting that, I had to resize us down a lot. It was hard to see how big we should be because I wanted us to look proportionate to the picture. I don't know how big the love sign is in person, but I based it off of how large the pillars on the side of it were and sized us close to that.

I then still wasn't satisfied with the color, so I tweaked it a little more until I came up with the photo above. This is my first time working with photoshop so I was just getting used to the tools in the program. I thought it turned out pretty realistic, but I'm my own worst critic so I think I still need some more practice.