Process Book

Becoming a Designer The journey of turning a passion into a career Introduction to Design- Fall 2015

Table Of Contents Dot/Line Expressive Text Object Iterations Children’s Book Designer Presentation

Dot/Line The Task In my first project, the task I was given was to work with abstraction. This abstraction consisted of dots and lines that I had to put together in a manner that could descibe a particular word. Another goal was to work fast and come up with many quick, different ideas and combinations of dot and lines; abundancy of work was key in creating and coming up with many pieces. With many ideas of work already made, I was then able to come up with four final solutions to be presented.

What I did Out of the list of words we were allowed to use for our dot/line compositions, I first experimented with fear, attraction, chaos, and joy. I did not want to be cliche (ex. placing a ton of dots and lines all over the place to describe chaos). I wanted to strive away from cliche, yet still compose the dots and lines in a manner that could still acccurately represent the word. For my final work I chose one main composition for each word, figuring out which ones were my strongest. This, however, took more experimenting and revising from my original ideas for the words. Class feedback allowed me to adjust and strengthen my compositions accordingly.

Struggles and Challenges My first struggle was realizing how hard it is to successfully put combinations of dots/lines together to accurately express words to an audience. A frustration I encountered was thinking that a certain combination described a word, and when presenting it to the class, others thought differently about it.

It did not matter if I thought it was depicting a word right; I needed others to relate and agree with it too. What I thought communicated attraction, for example, did not seem like attraction in other people’s opinions and perceptions.

Another struggle was creativeness and abundant work. Abundant work means experimenting with many different ideas. I would propose four to five compositions for a particular word, and when asked to revise/come up with even more for that word, I would find myself stuck to come up with even more combinations that could also work for the word. When I would see someone elses idea for a composition with my same word, I would think to myself, “Why didn’t I think of that?!”.

The Learning Process Overall, the dot/line project was a challenging but fun project for me. I have not worked with abstraction that much before so it was a good introduction. The project also encouraged me to use creative thinking processes in order to create an abundance of work and come up with the compositions I had for words, and finally, my four compositions for attraction.

A large part of this project introduced me to Gesh-stalt, meaning that a whole is other than the sum of its parts. The five main elements I learned about were figure and ground, similarity and anomaly, continuation, closure, and proximity.

Through learning these theories, it helped me develop my compositions in a way that reflected the elements of gesh-stalt, furthering my success in creating my compositions.

Expressive Text The Task As my next project approached, I was eager to find out that it involved letterforms. Unlike the dot/line project, where I was trying to give the idea of certain words through abstraction, I was now challenged to create letterforms of a word that would communicate the meaning of the word. Choosing from a list of words provided in class, I had to create letterforms for these words, working in abundance. Finally, I had to choose the word I was going to use to do my final work, and I chose the word force and created four different examples of text for the word.

What I Did In the beginning of this project, I chose three different words from a list to experiment with: step, beam, and force. I came up with all sorts of examples for each word, and tried to think of as many as I could. I used specific techniques and letterforms for each word so that it looked and gave an accurate feel for the definition of the word (ex. making the letters in the word step have small arrows on the end to indicate a sense of movement). After coming up with a variety of work in my sketchbook mainly using pen, I analyzed my work and tried to decided with word had the strongest and most effective use of the letterforms to describe it. I concluded that the word force was my strongest work, so I continued to work even more on coming up with more words for it. This enabled me to move past working with pens and to start painting with ink to create letterforms. Since ink can be used to form both dramatic dark values and softer grey values, it helped me create a variety of different ideas. Even though I moved to ink, I still experimented with pen in different ways and even combined the two in some ideas. Once I completed many ideas, I chose the four strongest examples of my word and put each of them onto a seperate piece of paper for the final format.

Struggles and Challenges A challenge for me with expressive text is that I always came up with five to six good ideas for each word, but after that, my brainstorming went dull. I then had to put more work into thinking of ideas that would describe my words. That is the challenge of working abundantly; sometimes you run out of ideas and new, even better ones, are waiting to be discovered.

Sometimes it takes a bit more thinking, and so I put more time into coming up with possible ideas for letterforms. At the same time, if I got stuck in my thinking, I would just sit down and start drawing random things and see if I could unexpectedly come up with a new great idea.

It was also difficult to work with the ink and choose which final four letterforms were the strongest to present. Painting with ink, sometimes i would not feel as careful when trying to paint the letterforms, as opposed to having a firm grip on a pen when drawing out the letters. As with choosing my final four, I found that I liked a lot of my ideas and choosing which ones were strongest was a challenge since some came in a close tie. This required me to reach out to a few people and ask their general opinion on my ideas, including my class during our in-process critiques.

The Learning Process Overall, this project was fun and definitely engaging. I enjoyed coming up with different ideas to portray the words. My creative ability was strengthened and provided me with helpful feedback on my work. I pushed myself to work as much as I could; the more ideas I had, the more possibilites there were for me to choose from and edit. Giving me experience in working with letterforms and how they communicate to other people was an excellent pathway to further my understanding in graphic design.

Object Iterations The Task In this project, we were presented with an assignment that was different than the last two because it focused on images. Working abundantly, we had to pick an object (preferably an animal) in which we would recreate using regular and type collage, contour line drawings, and geometric shapes. We also had to choose two master artists in which we iterated our object into a style like that artist. After creating them, we scanned our iterations on a computer and edited them using photoshop. After creating many, we had to have a final format of at least 6 of our iterations edited, two of them including our master artist renderings.

What I Did At first, I was deciding what object I would want to pick to iterate. I decided on a moose because they are one of my favorite animals. I printed ten examples of mooses off the internet to have a guide on how to start making my iterations. I started with contour line drawings, trying not to look at my piece of paper as I did the drawings of moose with a sharpie pen. Next, I took random pieces of paper from magazines and old scraps and cut them into shapes that formed the body of a moose and its antlers. I also cut out typography from random magazines/old books and used those to form mooses. To make moose out of geometric shapes, I drew either squares or triangles and assorted them into moose bodies. For my master artist renderings, I chose Albrecht Durer and Eric Carle. I really liked Albrecht Durer’s work because his drawings had so much attention to detail and contrasting values.

Eric Carle’s illustrations were a favorite of mine since I was a little kid, and his unique collages were mainly done to make animals, which I thought would suit my choice of a moose.

After I was done doing my iterations by hand, I picked the ones I liked best and scanned them on the computer. I put them into photoshop and made minor edits to them. After editing them, i placed them into an InDesign document and placed them in squares, organized on the page in a grid style.

Struggles and Challenges Challenges arose with this project since we had to work abundantly and with many different styles. I have not done collage that much, so it was sometimes difficult for me to collage things into a shape that accurately represented a moose so that people could still tell what is was even in abstraction. My master artist iterations were fun to do but also hard since my drawn moose required a lot of detail and my collaged moose had to represent Eric Carle’s style, which was collage pieces that had unique textures.

Jumping into photoshop was another challenge for me. I had a semester of photoshop in high school but it was a long time ago, so I forgot a lot about how to use it. Even though our editing was minor, it took me awhile to become familiar with it again. Working digitally, however, was something new and gave us more options than just working with pen and paper.

The Learning Process This project taught me how to change an object in my own way and come up with many creations based on different techniques. It also taught me how to render something abstractly so that others can tell what it still is, but in a different kind of depiction. I learned how to edit them on photoshop and arrange and print them in a manner that was appealing and presentable. I would love to work with iterating objects again, and found this project a stepping stone to create even better examples in the future.

Children’s Book The Task The children’s book project was a step up from everything I had already done; now that we had experience in design from a smaller area of work, I was required to dive into illustrating an entire book on my own.

For this project, we collaborated with a student from a different class who had written a children story; they were the authors, and we were responsible for illustrating the book and bringing it to life. The project teaches real life experience on working with a client, while also showing how to illustrate and put together a children’s book.

What I Did When I started the children’s book, I needed to write down a layout in my sketchbook so I could know which lines of words to put on each page and how many illustrations I would be drawing. After I did that, I started drawing my illustrations. I tried to think of my strength in art, and I especially love to draw. I decided to do pen drawings since I enjoyed it and thought it was one of my better mediums. I decided I could color the drawings in later on photoshop. I did all of the illustrations in my sketchbook and proceeded to scan them on photoshop, where I colored them all in using only seven colors. I then put all of the illustrations into an InDesign document, organizing them and arranging them into the right order. I typed all of the words of the story into the document last, and then it was ready to print.

Stuggles and Challenges This project was a huge challenge for me because I had never created a children’s book or had been on computer programs like InDesign. Drawing the pictures was familiar to me, but coloring them on photoshop could be time consuming and difficult, as well as making sure they were placed in the Indesign document well.

It was also difficult to only stick to seven colors in the whole book since I had different things within my book that I did not want to make the same color.

The Learning Process I learned so much about photoshop and Indesign through this project. I learned especially how to do a color overlay so I could still color my drawings and not cover up any of my pen work. I figured out how to put everything into an indesign document so that it would be organized and printed the way a book should be. By collaborating with another student, it taught me how to work with another person in accomplishing a task. My book turned out better than I thought it would.

Designer Presentation The Task For my designer presentation, I had to pick a famous graphic designer to learn and tell the class about. I chose AM Cassandre because I had learned about his work in an earlier class and admired his style. I needed many examples of his work, including other relevant information on the designer. I then presented it to the class in a Pecha-Kucha style presentation.

AM Cassandre

Examples of AM Cassandre’s work:

Struggles and Challenges I think the hardest part of doing this assignment is that I absolutely hate standing and talking in front of people, so I tried my best to rehearse it and present it well. I also struggled with the Pecha-Kucha style because a twenty second limit on a slide is a short time to talk about each one, especially in front of many people.

The Learning Process Overall, this presentation took me out of my comfort zone so that I could try my best to speak in front of others. I hope this experience can give me more confidence and comfortability in the future when talking in front of clients or other people about my work. I also gained knowledge about one of my favorite designers and was given the opportunity to tell others about his work and hopefully inspire them too.