Currently In Progress by Noah Fidlin
Personally, I believe that I need creative work in my life, whether it is illustrating in my free time or designing for a client in the future. For years, I have pursued drawing, music, photography, painting and filmmaking. I have been influenced by so many creative things that one day I would love to inspire someone else to make creative work as well. The following are reflections on various projects that I created for Intro to Design at Saint Norbert College. I decided to take this course because I want to be a graphic
designer and illustrator in the future, and I knew that this class would help me to create even stronger pieces of work.
As for the course itself, while I do think that certain projects could have been improved on, such as the dot-line project or certain aspects of my object iteration poster, I am pleased with how most of my work turned out for this class, especially my typography works and infographic poster. While they took more time to complete than I had expected, I feel that it really ended up paying off in the end.
An illustration of mine from 2015
work with a real person in real time. I was able to ask questions and get feedback on my work, making the product much more catered to his needs. It was helpful to show my unfinished work since I could then understand how to make it much more useful for him. The pace of the process was very hectic and stressful towards the end, though, because I did not have enough time to create my best work. If I could go back, I would have tried to have made the product much more presentable by using glue, evenly cut boxes and marker to display the work better. By not being able to use my computer, this project helped me to understand that technology can really make partially-finished work look much more presentable, especially when showing it to a client for the first time.
ruining the pieces, I knew that I had to ultimately go with my gut instinct to experiment right then.
When working on the D-School project, our goal was to create a product for our partner that would help to make gift giving easier for them after asking them a series of questions. Because I love finding new websites that are easy to use, unique and very time efficient, I decided to create a hypothetical website for my client out of paper that helped to make gift giving much more simple. By creating a profile for the receiver of the gift and answering yes or no questions based on the receiver’s preferences, the website would then offer a suggestion of what gift would be best for the client to purchase based on his preferred price range. For this project, it was very helpful to
For our dot-line projects, we were asked represent emotions through the theory of gestalt and using specific amounts of circles or lines within a square. To my understanding, gestalt is a philosophy that explains the processes that go into how we understand things visually. When it came to creating presentable work for this project, I really struggled with using the X-ACTO knife and scissors. A lot of the small flaws in the pieces added up, making it look very tacky, even after I tried to fix my mistakes with an eraser and the knife. It was also very challenging to know that my work was not perceived by others as I intended, representing other emotions that I did not intend. Even though I had created multiple rough sketches to plan out how my final product would turn out,
it was still very hard to predict how others were going to view my work. Overall, it was very hard to be excited about this project because of how extremely restrictive it was, how I was not very good with using the tools and and how my work did not resonate well with others. Though it was a challenging project, it helped me to understand how to think abstractly and to be very patient when creating my work, even if that means doing it all over again. In the future, I believe that the gestalt theory could be very helpful in the future when I create work in my free time or when I am creating designs for other classes.
For our hand-lettering assignment, we were asked to represent abstract words through typography. I was very excited to work this project since I enjoy illustrating and, though I have experimented with hand-lettering before, I never worked on it in an academic setting where I had to critique and revise my work. I didn’t understand until later in the project how much precision and revision was needed to create quality designs, but I was very pleased with how my final products turned out. Though I did not completely stick to any one of the original drafts that I had done for this project in my sketchbook, I felt that experimenting with the finished project in the moment ended up working out really well. Though I was worried about the possibilities of
Although it took a lot of time, I loved slowly measuring, tracing, drawing and inking out the letters piece by piece, paying extra attention while using the ruler to make sure my typography was visually balanced and legible. I felt like the pieces, in the end, spoke for themselves because of how much character they had, emphasizing the design but complementing the words. I would love to keep working with hand-lettering in the future by practicing with it outside of class.
When we were assigned the object iteration project, we were required to select an animal and represent it through various artistic styles. I wanted to pick an animal which was easy to represent, easy to identify and loved by most people. In the end, I chose to represent koalas, one of my favorite animals. For my iterations, I represented the koala through a photo collage, a word collage, a line drawing and a geometric illustration. For the two iterations of my choosing, I decided to pick Russian Constructivism and a Saul Bass-like illustration. I enjoy both of these styles, but I wanted to see how translatable they were to this project, especially because of how iconic they are in popular culture. Out of all of the iterations, I felt that my Russian Constructivist koala turned out the best while my line drawing was my least favorite piece. For the former iteration, I decided to use a lot of contrast and dynamic shading for the illustration, giving the koala a bold and heroic look. Although I had a previous version of the Russian Constructivist koala that I thought was okay, the final version looked much more engaging, especially with how close the koala is in the picture. As for the line drawing, though, it was hard for me because of how i
As for the last assignment (not including this poster), we were asked to represent data of our choosing through graphics. While I was originally going to represent data that was very serious or very personal to me, in the end I chose to represent statistics about Christopher Nolan’s movies. Because he is my favorite director and his work is very popular, I thought that it would be very engaging both for my and the rest of the class. The most important information that I conveyed in the poster was how Christopher Nolan, his wife Emma Thomas and his brother Jonathan Nolan all assisted in these films, if at all, seeing if there was a correlation between their contributions and the success of these films on Rotten Tomatoes and in the box office. Particularly for this project, I was very grateful for the feedback that I received. While there were certain things that made sense to me and that I thought looked good, having other opinions and suggestions on my infographic helped me to go back and fix things that really needed corrections. Some of these things included
ntimidating it was. I was not familiar with the style and was not pleased with how unrecognizable my first rough drafts were. I had to keep making more iterations and, in the end, pick the one which looked most like a koala. In the end, I learned with this project that objects need to have all of their key features present in designs of them, otherwise they are not recognizable to the viewer. For example, in all of my final iterations, I had to be sure to emphasize the nose and the ears of the koala, otherwise I knew that it would be confusing for my audience. I also learned that some things are best to do by hand instead of Photoshop. My Russian Constructivist koala relied both on Photoshop and on my hand illustrations, but the majority of it was completed by hand. This actually made the process go much faster when I uploaded it into the computer and ran it through certain filters. I think that if I were to continue this work, I would find it interesting to represent koalas by using both watercolor paints and pencil in a single piece, having a much more organic look than some of my other iterations.
changing the contrast of the pop art portrait I made of Christopher Nolan, removing the second set of icons I had for Nolan’s films and spacing out my text a bit more. One of the skills that I learned from this project that will help me in my future work as a designer was learning how crops and bleeds work. I had heard these terms used before we started this project, but actually working with these tools helped me to have a greater understanding and appreciation for them. I also learned from the challenge of using color in a design as well, since this was our first project where we were able to use color in our work. Though I enjoy bright color palettes, I needed to learn to restrict my color choices particularly in this design in order to represent the seriousness of Nolan’s films.
To conclude, I believe that taking this class and producing creative projects in an educational context was very helpful in order for me to learn more about the design process. As I said before, I would love to work primarily as an illustrator and designer in the future if it works out financially. While some skeptics of design might think that it’s ridiculous of me to spend my time learning about typefaces and color palettes or creating detailed drawings, making creative work for this class really helped me to learn that what I am doing in my free time will help me in the future as a designer.
An illustration of mine from 2015