Making a splash

I finished up my typography final just a few minutes ago. I'm really pleased with the way it turned out, it's much, much, MUCH better than what I was originally going to do for my final design solution... and I'm very glad that I put in the effort to really push this assignment. (Now I just hope that my instructor feels the same way)

Here's a little bit of process documentation, for anyone who might be interested.
*process notes below - skip to the bottom to see the final outcome if design talk bores you*

The whole piece took only about 10 hours to design, probably a little more, but the process was a long and tedious one. Each of the three (well, four, but I only used the big one once) "water" masks had to be individually designed, since InDesign doesn't scale content when you scale the frame (that I could figure out). In addition, the stroke weight didn't scale the way I'd have liked it to when I did size up the content, so in addition to re-weighting them, I'd often have to alter the scale of a ring or two and play with the positioning in order to make sure the rings cut through significant parts of the letterform, otherwise they'd be entirely unreadable.

The worst part was when I first laid out the composition: I had just finished stacking hundreds and hundreds of the typographic masks, took a step back, and realized that I should flip the composition... only I couldn't just flip it, since that would reverse all the letters. An hour or two I had shifted the rough composition over, but it would be several more hours of tweaks before I could drop in the lotus or the text.

So, without further rambling - the final design.
Only thing left now is to figure out what sort of stock to print it out on.

Special thanks on this one to Hannah Blumenreich, Anna Bongiovanni, Josh Engen, Sean Hartman, Jan Jancourt, and Ruthie Sauvageau for their help and insights.