By Alex Odgers.
TABLE OF CONTENTS D* School Crash Course..................................................................................2 Dot / Line project .............................................................................................3 Expressive Text..................................................................................................................4 Object Iteration.................................................................................................................5 Designer Presentation....................................................................................................6 Children’s Book.................................................................................................................7
D* School Crash Course: The design school crash coarse was a quick interactive project, an experiment almost. We had to follow the instructions step by step in order to redesign the gift-giving experience for our partner. We starting by interviewing each other asking questions about gift giving and in the end we had to try to solve their “gift giving problem� by creating the solution out of the materials that we had access to in the room. This project was a lot of fun and it really made me think during the last step when I discovered I had to create the solution to my partners problem. Not having a lot of time to complete my creation was a bit of a bummer because I knew I could do better, but everyone faced the same time limit so it didn’t really bother me that I had to present less than perfect work.
In the end I realized that my partner was great at giving the right gift, however she needed to get better at deciding what gift she wanted. From what I learned during the interview I decided to re-create what seemed to be her all time favorite give, going to the concert of her favorite singer. To do this I did my best to mold the country star out of wire.
In return my partner decided that I need to be a better gift giver so she created a gift idea booklet for me to take notes in whenever a good gift idea would pop into my head.
Dot/Line: The dot/line project required us to express the meaning of a word using only dot and line shapes. My four words were stability, freedom, rejection, and Scarcity. At first I found the dot/line project to be challenging and to be honest, a bit dumb. Being abstract and creative has never been my strong point, I am more of a black and white kind of guy. Once I began working on the project I began to enjoy it and realized that it wasn’t dumb at all. This was the first time in a long time that I actually had to start thinking abstractly and open my mind to expression that wasn’t straight forward with its meaning. Doing a project with such tight parameters like this one had wasn’t an issue for me at all, I was lost enough with the project at first that the freedom to use things like multiple mediums, for example, would have just complicated the project for me even more.
I started by using my sketchbook which allowed me to easily visualize what my ideas and decide weather or not they were good ones. I found it difficult to represent the meaning of my words abstractly. It seemed much more natural to try to illustrate their meaning like a game of charades. Consequently I had to make a lot of rough draft sketches tweaking each one a little bit to arrive at a few that i thought pulled it off.
Stability
Freedom Trying to make my final pieces as perfect as possible proved to be harder than I expected. Between cutting the dot and line shapes, gluing the shapes onto the white card stock, and then gluing the card stock onto black foam-board I always managed to smudge some or have a less than perfectly cut shape. I do appreciate a bit of perfection so I didn’t mind being a little tedious, even though I don’t think I got any of them quite perfect.
Rejection
Scarcity
Expressive Text: The expressive text project, possibly my favorite assignment of the semester, required us to practice the art of hand lettering and ultimately create four version of a hand lettered word that, while also spelling the word, simultaneously expressed its meaning as well. The flow and fee form of hand lettering allows it to be 100 times more versatile and expressive than digital fonts. The Art of Hand lettering such as calligraphy is tedious and can be very slow going in order to get it right, but it is also rewarding when you finally finish and you can enjoy the beauty of your work. If I were to ever attempt more typography I would most likely continue the idea of trying to use the letters of a word to express the meaning of the word itself. It is a much more rewarding and exciting idea to me than making fancy letters using calligraphy.
First we experimented with general hand lettering techniques
Then we brainstormed ideas about individual words, making charts, in order to help choose a word and acquire ideas on how to express their meaning.
Once I chose a word I went to work creating rough draft sketches in my sketchbook and pondering the best way to express the text. My chosen word was DRIFT.
My final Expressive text iterations.
Top: “snow drift”
Bottom: “drifting away”
Top: “adrift in the wind”
Bottom: “into the distance”
Object Iterations: The object iteration project required us to create the likeness of an object through 5 different mediums. Collage, geometric shapes, text collage, continuous line drawings, and by coping the style of two different master artists. My master artists were Olly Moss and Wayne White. In the end we had to hand in a spread of our works in black and white.
We started the project doing continuous line drawings while only focusing on a picture of our object, not what we were drawing. They turned out as expected, Terrible. It was a lot of fun, it made simple drawings into a complex feat were I had to focus on my hand movements without seeing it.
While doing this project I realized that a corkscrew is not very interesting or photogenic. Doing the geometric portion of the project proved to be most challenging for me. I felt I could was not able to represent a corkscrew very abstractly. Most of my attempts and even my finals are relatively straightforward, and not very imaginative. I chose to do my geometric iteration on Photoshop, I though that perfect circles might help.
I am most proud of my iteration using print collage. I can’t exactly say why, it just caught my eye from the moment I finished it and it’s my favorite iteration.
It wasn’t my first attempt either. I started with a real concrete iteration, I wasn’t very abstract and it was boring.
My two master artists were Olly Moss and Wayne White. Olly Moss is famous for using the negative space in a picture and Wayne White is popular for his paintings which are within someones else’s painting. I ended up tweaking my Olly Moss rendition a few times before I was satisfied. My first draft was rather dull so i kept trying to make it more interesting and appealing.
1st
2nd
3rd
If there was a next time or a change to redo this assignment with different ways of representing my object I would likely try to use a different medium than Photoshop or collage, perhaps many wine bottle set up to resemble a corkscrew. At the end of the project this was the final Spreadsheet of iterations that I handed in.
Designer Presentation: Herb Lubalin. To be honest the initial reason that caused me to pick my designer was his name, Herb Lubalin. I found it interesting and very fun to say, it kind of rolls of your tongue. I found out that he lived from 1918-1981 and he was a well known graphic designer and remembered for his work in typography.
He worked on several different magazines including Eros, Fact, and Avant Garde.
In fact the logo for the “Avant Garde� magazine that he worked on became such a hit that he made an entire typeset of the font. This font is one of his works that he is most remembered for, along with his own magazine call U&lc, which stood for upper and lower case magazine, that he started in his later years.
Children’s book: The children’s book project required us to work with a student from a different class, they were the authors. The authors were in charge of writing the book and we had to illustrate the pictures for the book. Working with my authors was great. They were very easygoing, open to most of my ideas and always had positive feedback for me. The most challenging part of this project was getting started. At first it felt kind of overwhelming trying to decide how to go about it like what medium to use and how you were going to express the text in your illustration. I decided to begin by sketching each page by hand, This allowed me to visualize my ideas and see what a good next step would be.
Once I had a few sketches done i decided that I wanted to use Photoshop to color in my pictures in such a way that it would look somewhat like a cartoon. Doing this turned out to be far more tedious and time consuming that I expected, but it did turn out nicely.
Another advantage of using Photoshop was that I was easily able to make some changes to my design without having to go back to the sketchbook. As you can see the first page is identical to my sketch however, in my second page I resized the butterflies and added another milkweed plant.
The last thing I designed was my front and back covers. Their creation marked the completion of the children’s book illustrations.
The Monarch Migration Written by: Holley Haver and Haley Joosten Illustrated by: Alexander Odgers
If given another chance to complete this project I would like to attempt to illustrate the book by painting, or using oil pastels or colored pencils instead of primarily using Photoshop to color in my drawings. I am very familiar with Photoshop and don’t credit myself as being a great painter but I think it would give the book more character and originality if I would have done it more by hand.
This book was written by Alexander Odgers Illustrations by Alexander Odgers This book was created in collaboration with the ART 130, Introduction to Design, course at St.Norberts collage. Printed by the SNC print center in the year of 2015 This book primarily using the font of “minion pro�.