Casey's Extra Blog

For this project, I decided to make a kind of “get ready with me” video while talking about my blog topic, which is about my hair, the purpose and reason for this blog, and a backstory on how it started and how it came to be for my hair. My project relates to my topic because first of all, throughout the whole video, I talk about hair and my own hair and about my topic all while doing my own hair.

The inspirations for my designs and my layout was the basic “get ready with me” videos on YouTube. I usually don’t watch those videos, but I thought it would be a good idea and a more interesting video if I just did my hair all while talking about hair. So that’s that really influenced me to make a video like this. There was one YouTube video that I’ve seen way before this project where she talks about her big chop and that video is what really pushed me to cut my own hair. Her YouTube name is Chrissy Cousins and the title of her video is called “The Big Chop 2016: Starting My New Natural Hair Journey”. My design process was just to make sure that it looked and sounded interesting and to keep the viewers listening without them being bored, at least I tried to do that. So whether I added pictures, gifs, and music to the video helped a lot. This whole process took about two day and making the video took about one and a half day because I kept rethinking what I said and had different ideas of what I wanted to say instead of what I originally said.  What I used for my video is simply two things, my IPhone and Premiere from Adobe. First I made a raw video of me talking about my topic and how it all started. Then once I filmed myself, the total time that it came to was 3 minutes and 40 seconds. So since it had to be either 60, 90, 120, 150, or 180 seconds, I just cut out a few unnecessary parts that wasn’t needed. After that, it came to 2 minutes and 30 seconds or 150 seconds. So after I edited the video, I added background music so it wouldn’t sound dull and boring. What I used was an edited remix version a BTS song called Magic Shop. Then to show what my hair looked like before and the products that I mentioned in the video, I added photos. Also, I did add some extra things too juist to add more to it, like I added a Kim Taehyung gif when I mentioned BTS, and added some funny texts and some pic art to it. Shortly after, I decided to add a filter to it just to make it look more fascinating and look less dull and dark. Finally, I was satisfied with it and finish the video.

But at times, I would get really confused on where I could find certain tools and how to use them properly. I also wanted to use music that I wanted to use so I had problems with that too, but I ended up finding ways to resolve those issues by looking on YouTube tutorials on how to use them and what tools control what and I looked into using your own music of choice to add to the background.

So after some tips about my previous logo, I recreated my Extra Blog logo. The story behind this logo is that since the perception of type 4 hair is that it is too big and too much to handle, I created a women with a head full of hair, like an Afro, and made the title of it Extra. While adding some extra material like a shampoo bottle and another hair product. The first one that I made looked more like a phone wallpaper rather than a professional logo to me. So what I did was got rid of the extra space that was in the background because it was too much taking away from the woman and decided to make the background colour white just so it wouldn’t pop out too much. Then what I did was change the color of the woman because I realized that it’s not just dark skinned that can end up having Afros or thick type hair, but there can be more mixtures of people with Afro-texture hair.So I just left her skin type blank. After that, I made the whole logo a gold colour just so that it can look more elegant, attractive, and professional. Then to top it off, I just put the word Extra in the oval banner just to add some extra detail in the logo. But after reading the reviews of my previous draft, they mentioned that though they liked the idea of my blog and the logo I created, they talked about how I needed to get rid of the extra space, make it look more professional. So I just followed their advice and tips to enhance and improve my logo, and while doing that, it also figure out and learn more things that I can do and be more creative while using Illustrator. So this is the result of how my logo went from before this, and honestly, I’m proud of what I created with Illustrator and how it turned out.

My logo that I created was inspired by beautiful dark skin women with thick 4 type hair. Some of the women include Tracee Ellis Ross, Solange Knowels, Lupita Nyong’o, Viola Davis, Janelle Monae and Erykah Badu. Even though how big and thick their hair is, they’re not ashamed to wear it out and basically express themselves with their hair. Black women in Hollywood are embracing their natural textures more these days. People like them give other people that’s not into natural hair reconsider what you thought about hair transitions. I used websites like Bustle.com, Naturallycurly.com, Essence.com and Teen Vogue to see who these days are seen as “hair goals” or “natural hair inspirations”. How I created this on Illustrators is that I used basic shapes like circles and lines that would curve to create a banner in the middle of the photo. So then I put Extra in the middle as the title because of two meanings. The first meaning is that my blog name is Casey’s Extra Blog. The second reason is that with 4 type hair, there’s alot going on with it and some may say that it’s too much or it’s too extra, so I just put Extra in the middle just to embrace the critiques it gets. Then I just made her dark skin because most women that have 4 type hair and kind of dark roots in their family. Then for the background, I just made it a mint or turquoise type of green because that’s my favorite color. Overall, my designs meaning is that in the past, women were ashamed or were bashed for even attempting to wear their natural curls, coils, or even braids because they were seen as unattractive and “not cute” because perms, weaves and straight hair were the style that everybody loved and were admired by. But since time has passed, more and more women aren’t ashamed or afraid to wear their natural hair, and that goes for anybody with different race or shades that have any type of curls in their hair. They’re not being criticized for their hair and celebrities that I mentioned has a role in that step. There is still going to be those people that will still be ignorant talking down on people that rock their curls, but it won’t stop them from doing so.

So my inspiration behind this photo is that since my blog is based on hair types, preferably type 4 hair, I made a woman with a kinky, tight-curled Afro and put extra in text in the middle just to add a part of my blog name onto it.

The inspiration behind my collage is to show everybody what my hair looks like and my current progress toward my hair growth journey. I added come changes to my collage to add more excitement and creative, so I added art, text and effects to it. The picture on the left is what it looks like when I have no product in it and not tied up in a puff. This is my favorite hairstyle because it shows how much volume my hair has and it leaves a good impression on people. The picture on the right is what happens when I do my twist out. What I do to achieve this is after my hair is washed and clean, I would add any type of styling creme that is Shea butter based, then after I would add any kind of hair oil that I have available at the moment. After, I would just twist my hair and leave it like that until it’s dry. I would do this style if I have extra time, which is not that often. Lastly, the picture in the middle is a hairstyle called a braid out. Again, I make sure that my hair is nice and clean before I apply any kind of styling product. While wet, I would apply a hydrating curling cream. Then after, I would add a curling quenching foaming mousse to help dry faster, shine, moisture and hold. Then lastly, I would do three-strand braids and let it sit in my hair until it’s dry.  The reason why I wanted to create this sort of collage is because I wanted to show 3 different types of styles that I would often do to my hair, some that I love and some that I’m sometimes lazy to do but really enjoy the result.

The inspiration behind my collage is to show everybody what my hair looks like and my current progress toward my hair growth journey. The picture on the left is what it looks like when I have no product in it and not tied up in a puff. This is my favorite hairstyle because it shows how much volume my hair has and it leaves a good impression on people. The picture on the right is what happens when I do my twist out. What I do to achieve this is after my hair is washed and clean, I would add any type of styling creme that is Shea Butter based, then after I would add any kind of hair oil that I have available at the moment. After, I would just twist my hair and leave it like that until it’s dry. I would do this style if I have extra time, which is not that often. Lastly, the picture in the middle is a hairstyle called a braid out. Again, I make sure that my hair is nice and clean before I apply any kind of styling product. While wet, I would apply a hydrating curling cream. Then after, I would add a curling quenching foaming mousse to help dry faster, shine, moisture and hold. Then lastly, I would do three-strand braids and let it sit in my hair until it’s dry.  The reason why I wanted to create this sort of collage is because I wanted to show 3 different types of styles that I would often do to my hair, some that I love and some that I’m sometimes lazy to do but really enjoy the result.

So, this is going to be an incredible journey for myself and you guys observing my growth of my type 4b hair. But to start things off, I’ll introduce myself. My name is Casey, I am a student attending college and my dream is to be a Sports Journalist. But even though I have a large interest in sports and journalism, I love to learn about hair and different hair types. During my childhood, I had thick and curly hair that looked  big and voluminous, people wished they had hair like mine. But while growing up, what I noticed was that “straight hair” was the most popular trend, just like UGGs, Juicy Couture Tracksuits and Cropped Cardigans. So just to make sure I was in style, I would ask my mom to put perms in the hair to make it easy to straighten and relaxed. All I wanted to do was to fit in, but it really just damaged to beautiful curl pattern and I was no longer able to wear my hair curly. It really disappointed me to the point where I gave up on turning my hair back to normal. But during my senior year of high school, I wanted to curls back and would do anything to get them to what they were before. So I did the big chop and cut off all my hair. I did healthier wash day routines and safe hairstyles to help with my process, which brings me to now. The reason why I created this blog is to bring you along on this journey of my hair growing process and also for me to look back on what I started with and the progress I will make in the future. For the majority of my posts, I will include pictures and videos of my hair and things that will apply to the topics that will be discussed. Some of the topics that I will be discussing includes high vs low porosity hair, differences between 4a, 4b and 4c hair, and the type of products that can help your hair. But even though this is my blog, I will have some inspiration from other bloggers as well, including Natural Hair Mag naturalhairmag.com , NaturallyCurly naturallycurly.com/curlreading , and Afrobella afrobella.com . So thank you for choosing to read and join this blog and I hope you enjoy it.