Process This! St. Norbert College Intro Design Fall 2016
Nicolette Sylvain
This book is dedicated to my family and my roommates. They are always there to help support me and my love of art and graphic design.
About the Rising Designer In this book you will see the behind the scenes of the way I thought through each assignment, and executed on each of those projects. For me, I am called to creative work, it is someting I love to do and am good at. This calling has been realized by my love of arts, and crafts and always hoping for project assignments rather than writing or tests. Being able to create projects makes me feel proud, and gives me a sense of bliss. Seeing my idea come to life is such a fun and great feeling to experience as a creator. If I could be guaranteed financial support in designing anything I would love to create my own line of small canvas artwork specialized for house and dorm decoration. I love designing and creating abstract and unique paintings and images and hang them in my room.
D-School In this first asignment we did a quick crash course simulation of designing a product for a client. The goal was to interview our partner and create a product that helped aid them in getting and giving gifts to people.
My sketches of the ideas I thought of to make giving gifts an easier project to do. I took the more unsual and unrealistic route to give the gift giving a more magical fun experience.
Through the process and experience of interacting as well as interviewing my partner the final project was created. In fact, the product evolved through many questions asked by my partner. The process in this project went by really fast compared to the way that I usually work. This made it hard to be able to refine my work the way I normally like to before showing it to someone. If I could go back and add to my design I would add more materials and greater detail to the work so things would be easier to understand and see what the product can acutally do.
Dot-Line In this project the goal was to create abstract compositons using dots and lines to show a use of value, scale, line, and visual hierarchy to show the concept of Gestalt while executing good craftsmenship. The three words that I chose to reprent were terror, oppression, & energetic.
Creating this project was a challenge for me since it required a lot of precision and cutting straight lines, which I am not the best at. However, I just needed to take my time and not rush when cutting. If I was not happy with the cut I made, I just kept redoing it until I was happy with my result. The use of dots and lines to describe words did change the way I saw abstraction. Describing words without illustrating them was a challenge. It was hard since when I am at a lost for words I use images to get my point across, so not transferring that idea to this project was a challenge. This exercise is a great way to gain inspiration for me. The challenge was good for me. The change of pace from doing my own projects where there are no rules, to projects where there are very strict guidelines really helps me be more creative and helps keep me from getting bored.
Terror
Oppression
Energetic
Typography In this project the goal was to use the knowledge we had of typography and use it to create many different hand letterings of words that coincides with the use of form. Doing all of these hand-lettering taught me that the smallest details in my letters can cause the viewer to change how they view and perceive the message of a certain word.
One of the techniques that I used in this project was ink. I really enjoyed using ink and it was really fun to experiment with. However, I wish that I would have experimented with it more since there is so much that is possible with that medium. Ink is easier for mistakes to happen, however, with the photoshop would help fix the small imperfections that could happen when using ink.
Experimentations with photography
Final Result
Object Iterations In this project the goal was to chose an object or animal using experimentation with media in many different ways and creativiy, through a way that the image is still able to be recognized by viewers. For this project I chose to use the toucan as my animal. Through this project I learned that there is a lot of different views that I could use to portray a toucan. I was a little worried at first if having this particular project in black and white would effect the ability of someone to recognize the toucan image. However, the use of the large beak and markings made color not necessary.
Contour
Master Artists Banksy Inspiration With this project I was able to learn a lot about photoshop since I have never really used it before. The thing that I learned how to use was the layers. I found this a very helpful tool and before this project I was not very sure what it’s purpose was for. Photoshop was especially helpful for these Banksy artist spray painted images. It was much easier cleaning up the little spots of paint that appeared outside of the stencil. I was also able to increase the contrast and make the image really stand out.
Keith Haring Inspiration This was the most enjoyable style, using the inspiration from master artists to create my iterations. It was a lot of fun imitating these well known artists, even though it was a fun challenge to make sure you captured the essence the artists style with my toucan.
Collage It was fun finding images to make a toucan. However, it did take a lot of time and thought planning out each piece. It also took time to lay out the pieces and glue them together.
Type Collage The most challenging media for me was the type collage. I feel that finding good contrast in the different type was the hardest part, I felt that I was able to represent the toucan well, yet I would have wanted there to be a little more contrast in the piece.
Cartoon and Geometric For the geometric pieces it was a challenge hand drawing them, it required a different way of thinking and putting the image together without using curved lines.
The cartoon iteration was a fun extra piece I created since I love to make cartoon images and charaters. From this extra experimentation if I would have been working on this iteration for a year I probably would have wanted to create a toucan style dress and toucan paintings. I think using different media would be really neat to see it in 3-D.
Data Visualization The goal of this project was to show data using writing and text to talk about data, with using color and visual hierarchy to convey information to the viewer with this one illustrated piece. This project was a challenge for me all together. I had a hard time picking out and finding my data. Once I got the data that I wanted, figuring out how to display it was another challenge. I had several sketches and ideas that I wanted to use. However, once I tried using my idea of having the legos looking at the data like a movie screen, people had a hard time understanding what I was trying to show. This lead me to take the feedback that I recieved from critique and start my design all over. It was a daunting and stressful desicion but since I was not happy with my first result, I had to try it again. Once I finished the final version of this piece I was way more happy with how it looked and how it showed its data.
Movie Release Effects on Lego Revenue 18,731 (mDKK)
2011
Harry Potter Deathly Hallows part 2
23,095
25,294
2012
2013
(mDKK)
Avengers
(mDKK)
Iron Man
28,578 (mDKK)
2014
Lego Movie
35,780 (mDKK)
2015
Star Wars The Force Awakens
Movie Releases & Lego Revenue
18,731
23,095
25,294
28,578
35,780 (DKK)
(DKK)= Billions in Danish Krones
(DKK)
(DKK)
(DKK)
2011
Harry Potter Deathly Hallows Part 2
Key
(DKK)
1 (DKK)= 0.15 USD
2012 Avengers
2013 Iron Man
2014
Lego Movie
2015
Star Wars The Force Awakens
Data from annual report on Lego.com
The most important information that I conveyed in my project was the increases in Lego revenue each year, in relation to the movies that were released in the same year. To create visual hierarchy in this piece I used differenct colored lego bricks for each tier to show the increase in Lego revenue. Some of the skills I learned in this project was being able to rearrange the data I collected in order for the viewer to be able to undertand what I was showing. Another skill I learned was how to fill in color to the images that I drew by hand and scanned into the computer. I loved the ability to use color in this project. It was a good challege for me in order to arrgange the colors. Also picking out a good color scheme that fit the data that I was trying to represent.
Movie Releases & Lego Revenue
18,731
23,095
25,294
28,578
35,780 (DKK)
(DKK)
(DKK)= Billions in Danish Krones
(DKK)
(DKK)
(DKK)
2011
Harry Potter Deathly Hallows Part 2
Key
1 (DKK)= 0.15 USD
2012 Avengers
Data from annual report on Lego.com
2013 Iron Man
2014
Lego Movie
2015
Star Wars The Force Awakens