Kayla Mitchell - Final Process Book

LATE NIGHTS

IN THE BUSH ART CENTER a process book by Kayla Mitchell

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About Me My name is Kayla Mitchell, and I am a freshman at St. Norbert College. I am majoring in Graphic Design, and minoring in Communications. This book is a collection of all of the work I’ve done throughout the semester in my Introduction to Design class.

I do feel as though I am called to creative work, because it is something I have been interested in since I was a little kid, it is something I have a natural talent for, and it is something I really enjoy doing. I have an internship at which I do a lot of Photoshop/InDesign work, and I’ve realized that when I’m doing that, it doesn’t feel like work to me.

My senior year of high school, I took a Digital Photography class, in which we did a project where we had to create 3 ads for a company of our choice in Photoshop using pictures that we had taken. The company I chose was GoPro, and I used photos that I had taken using my own GoPro camera. When we did in-class critique, neither my classmates nor my teacher had anything negative to say. It was this project that made me realize I wanted to pursue a career in design, and showing these ads during an interview actually helped me get an internship in the marketing/communications field doing design work. Not only am I proud of the project, I enjoyed doing it, and it turned about to be a stepping stone toward my future career.

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Table of Contents D-School Crash Course 4 Dot-Line 6 Text & Typography 8 Object Iteration 10 Data Visualization 12 Designer Presentations 14

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D-School Crash Course OBJECTIVE: to work with a partner to discover a problem, develop multiple solutions to that problem, and then execute the best solution given limited time and supplies.

I liked working with a partner and digging deeper into something so simple to find a problem to solve.

However, I sort of disliked how fast paced this was because it was difficult for me to think and perform under pressure. What surprised me was how easily I was able to come

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up with a creative solution to a problem that I really had to dig deep to even discover, and how much fun I had with the whole process.

Showing unfinished work to a classmate was kind of scary and embarrassing because I felt as though it wasn’t

my best work, and I know I could have done better given more time and supplies. Working this fastpaced made me feel a little anxious and really rushed, and it was sometimes hard for me to think clearly since we were under so much pressure to finish on time.

Final Iterations

The above piece shows a solution I came up with to solve my partner’s problem of being unable to successfully wrap gifts.

The piece shows my partner watching instructional videos on YouTube, while simultaneously following along and practicing wrapping various gift-shaped items.

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Dot-Line OBJECTIVE: to build strong abstract compositions representing various iterations of a word with minimal elements (dots/lines).

It was a little difficult for me to make a wellcrafted object simply because I’m such a perfectionist, and I will obsess over tiny details until I get them just right.

It is hard to work this way under a time limit, so at times I just have to accept the fact that my work will

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have some imperfections.

It was sometimes difficult to represent certain ideas without illustrating them literally. For example, words such as stability, chaotic, and abundance I feel were harder create representations that weren’t so blatantly obvious that those were the words

they were supposed to represent. I think this was because words like these are so familiar to us, which makes them so easy to represent that it’s sometimes hard to shy away from that literal illustration and come up with an abstract representation.

Final Iterations

Abundance

Oppression

Scarcity 7

Text & Typography OBJECTIVE: to experiment with a variety of hand lettering while utilizing the form of letters (typography) to demonstrate the meaning of a specific word through text/type.

This project actually taught me a lot about letter forms and how many different styles of letters there are (serif, sans serif, etc.) It taught me how to pay attention to even the tiniest of details to make sure that all of my letter forms were consistent with each other.

When I think about my finished pieces, I think

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my strength is content, because although the letter forms sometimes contribute to the meaning of my word, I think the content or the technique I used contributes more to getting the meaning across than the letter forms themselves.

In this case, I think my executions were stronger, because my ideas were all pretty similar

to one another, and they didn’t really branch out until I started experimenting with different techniques and ways of actually making the words.

Final Iterations

This rendition of the word ‘space’ was created using letters cut out of paper as a stencil to create negative space while I splattered ink on top of them.

This rendition of the word ‘space’ was created using a stencil to draw the letters, and then going in with an Exacto knife to cut them out, creating negative space.

This rendition of the word ‘space’ was drawn with a Sharpie marker, and features a variety of spacing between letters, representing the meaning of the word.

This rendition of the word ‘space’ was created using a stencil I made by cutting out letters from a piece of paper. I photographed it in a way that showcased the amount of space behind the object.

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Object Iteration OBJECTIVE: to experiment with a variety of media and tools to create six unexpected yet recognizable iterations of an object or animal.

Through the process of this project, I learned a lot about the texture of a sea turtle’s body and the detail in the pattern of their shell. I also learned a lot about their environment and how they interact with their surroundings.

I realized how difficult it was to fully capture that detail abstractly, especially through collage.

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The media that was most challenging for me were the two artist iterations. It was a little hard to adapt my animal to fit the style of certain artists, especially Kara Walker, since all of her paintings had this common theme of slavery and I had to think a little abstractly to relate that back to a sea turtle.

I’ve used Photoshop a lot in the past and I use it a lot at my job so a lot of this was review for me.

However, throughout the process of this project, I did learn a lot of really useful shortcuts that I didn’t know before, as well as that there are multiple different ways to accomplish the same affect.

Final Iterations

For the final product, I created a document with my six iterations of the Loggerhead Sea Turtle, which include a continuous line drawing iteration, two collage iterations, a geometric iteration, an iteration done in the style of Kara Walker, and an iteration done in the style of flash tattoo art.

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Data Visualization OBJECTIVE: to work with credible data from appropriate sources while using principles of design to accurately represent this data to produce an infographic.

During this project, I learned how to use different tools and features in InDesign that I had never used before. For example, I learned how to draw different shapes and how to round the corners, and this came in useful when drawing the image of the iPhone from scratch (that way I didn’t have to use someone else’s

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images and cite a bunch of sources).

Using color helped organize my data in a way that was both visually appealing and easy to understand. Since the background drawing of the iPhone was sort of bland and boring, it was fun to add a lot of color within the screen where the actual data was presented.

I created visual hierarchy by presenting the data from top to bottom.

For example, my data was a list of the top 10 most popular social networks based on monthly visitors, so I put the social network with the highest amount of monthly visitors at the top of the poster and worked my way down.

Final Iterations 10:25 pm

Top 10 Most Popular Social Networks of 2016 1. Facebook

2. YouTube

3. Instagram

1,000,000,000 monthly visitors

600,000,000 monthly visitors

4. Twitter

5. Reddit

313,000,000 monthly visitors

234,000,000 monthly visitors

6. Vine

200,000,000 monthly visitors

7. Ask.fm

8. Pinterest

160,000,000 monthly visitors

150,000,000 monthly visitors

9. Tumblr

10. Flickr

115,000,000 monthly visitors

112,000,000 monthly visitors

Data Source: https://www.dreamgrow.com/top-15-most-popular-social-networking-sites/

1,860,000,000 monthly visitors

This is the final infographic, which displays the top 10 most popular social networks of 2016 using color and visual hierarchy to display the data in a way that is both accurate and interesting.

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Designer Presentations OBJECTIVE: to research a contemporary designer and share the findings with the class while practicing persuasive public speaking.

The reason I chose Shepard Fairey was because we talked about him a lot in my History of Modern Design class, and I have always found him to be really interesting. I was already familiar with some of his work (like the Obey movement) and since I find it to be really interesting and appealing, I wanted to dig deeper and learn more about his other work.

I was nervous to present to the class because I’m not a huge fan of public speaking, but I realized that I usually hype

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myself up and get super nervous beforehand, but once I actually got up there and started presenting I felt totally fine. I think the fact that we have such a small class and we are all pretty comfortable with each other made it a lot easier as well.

I might research Saul Bass a little bit further, because he is another designer we talked about in our History of Modern Design class, and I didn’t realize just how many logos of familiar companies that he designed. I was aware of the fact that he did a

lot of movie posters, but I wasn’t aware that he also did opening/closing credits for movies, which I found very interesting, so I think it might be interesting to explore those a bit more.

Shepard Fairey

Above are a few examples of posters done by Shepard Fairey. Many of his posters focus on social and political issues, as shown. His style tends to consist of a lot of red, cream, blue, and black colors, as well as stencil-style lettering, and the Obey star logo.

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Introduction to Design St. Norbert College Spring 2017 Professor Ries

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