nschae20's blog

I am very proud of how my final map design came out for this class. I did a lot to distort the overally quality of the map and it gave me some great ideas on how to make an effecive composition. This final idea stemmed from a shape I saw in the burnt, crispy edges of one of the map pieces; it started to look like the New York City Skyline. I decided to run with this idea and to further improve on it by taking that piece and overlapping others, and then slathered them with india ink to make a night sky. I then took the rest of my map pieces and meticulously cut out tiny buildings to recreate what I had seen in the burnt piece. I went for a small scale design, which I think really helped the overall composition of the image, and had a great use of economy in  it.

During Critique it seemed like the class liked my design. The postcard look and the story behind the design and my process were the main highlights of what they liked.

The sound Map assignment tasked us with sitting in one place for an hour and just absorbing the world around us. We were supposed to document al that we heard in the world around us. I seemed to hear a lot of sounds I normally take for granted while sitting outside, like the wind gusts I heard while listening. This was a very interesting assignment and i enjoyed doing it a lot. 

Map Project Part one was quite an odd assignment. I went in not knowing what to expect, the blog post described something very odd with the unrestricted creative ability given to me. First thing I did was change the map by destroying part of it with the weather. This was liberating, being able to destroy to create something new. So I started off by standing in the rain for a few minutes outside of Anderson. 

I then decided that my project was wet so I obviously had to dry it off , what better way than to crumple the map into a giant ball?

I unwrapped the beautiful looking project that I had created and gazed upon it’s amazing textured surface.

I then decided that this map looked like it wanted to party as it grew into it’s own design. So I cut out the “very” in ” Discovery map”, thus making it a Disco Map.

The map was getting a little to cool for itself… so I decided to burn it a little bit….. but ended up burning it a lot. opps

I think it’s ready for Part two!

The ABC project tasked me with finding all the letters of the alphabet and numbers 0-9 in the environment around us. I thought this project would be really hard, but in the end it actually was quite enjoyable. After walking around Forsyth Park and Broughton street for a few hours, I had found all of the letters of the alphabet and numbers 0-9.

In Design class our latest project challenged us to create the story of jack and jill with india ink. We were given a variety of different shapes to create the design and to put a twist on the classic story. This was a group project so there was a lot of collaboration to come up with the final product. Overall I think we did a pretty good job and told the story in a cool way by making it Adam and Eve instead of Jack and Jill.

Our final Design

The two boards I created

I think our group dynamic for this project was pretty good. We all got our work done on time and helped each other to formulate the final layout. I felt a little bad that I could not contribute more early on in the brainstorming stage because I was in the hospital the day the project was assigned. Our creative process was based off of what we thought would make the design pop of the page and at the same time tell the story effectively, and I think we succeeded.

I really enjoyed the fact that this was a group project. It helped us come up with some great ideas that otherwise probably would not have been realized on our own.

During the critique it seemed like the class enjoyed our twist with jack and jill being adam and eve. The only problems people had was that the bottom, middle layout was to bold and became a focal point, the occasional missing outline on jack, and they wished the diagonal of the hill was kept throughout the design.

The first blog I researched was Shepard Fairey’s. I learned of Shepard’s Obey campaign when I was in fifth or sixth Grade, way before he became popular. I always thought the way he ran a Guerilla campaign to get his designs around the nation was amazing. Shepard’s blog is quite interesting because he is a very active artist, and a highly successful one at that. He took a guerrilla campaign and made it into a highly profitable clothing and poster line.

Here’s a link to his blog   http://www.obeygiant.com/

Another Blog I decided to visit was my brother’s. My Brother is a graduate of SCAD and he is a part of the reason I choose to go here as well. He is now a copywriter at Translation Advertising, which handles clients such as McDonald’s, Coca Cola, and Budweiser. He worked at Jay Walter Thompson for a year and a half before switching to Translation. He loves working in the Ad world and he loved going to Scad. You can see the passion he puts into his campaigns and in the magic tricks he posts on his site and on Youtube. I have always looked up to my brother and get a lot of inspiration from his work.

http://www.alexschaeffer.com/

The third blog I looked at was not a blog about one artist in particular but rather many artist’s ideas and designs featured daily. My friend recommended this site to me and I think it’s a really cool idea because it puts the artists into the limelight for a little while and opens up more outlets for their work to be seen. I think this format can give you a lot more inspiration than one artists blog because multiple people’s feelings and ideas are being featured for you to observe.

http://design-milk.com/

I found a lot more Advertising blogs than any other type of blog during my research, this makes sense since most people don’t stay at a firm for too long and do a lot of moving around. Some blogs stood out more based on their layouts, professionalism, and their personal feel.

The Black Square project tasked us with using terms from design but describing them with the normal definitions. These terms were: Bold, tension, Increase, Playful, order, and Congested. I did some planning for each term and these are the thumbnails I produced.

Not that good looking, huh?

Here are my final designs

Playful:

Tension:

Order:

Bold:

Increase:

Congested:

These were my final designs of the Black Square Project. Hope you all enjoy.

The Grid project was a very interesting project for me. I made some interesting motif layouts but the one that did the most for me was an oval with another oval. This produced a Motif that resembled a Leopard like print which I though was quite interesting. I decided to put this Motif in the bottom right corner of each Grid, looking back on this choice it may not have been the best design choice since it hindered my overall design. I made five different design options and there were only one or two that I really thought would look good. 

Out of all of these designs I think the first, and the third design show the most potential. In the end I decided to go with the First design. Below is the design glued to the tracing paper.

I then had to make three different inking plans for my final design, I had the option of using steadtler pens or India Ink. I decided to use pen for these layouts since I would be using the India Ink on my final design.

In the end I ended up going with the third Layout of motifs because It looked like a really cool pattern in my mind, and I thought it would work well.

It would seem that other people did not like my design choice as much as I did based on my critique notes. Some of the problems people saw were: Poor Craftsmanship, Lack of creativity, people thought there was no need for the white border I included, and they wished that my focal point had a little more contrast.

This being said I think I could have choose a different motif or at least motif placement to make a more powerful design. I liked this project more than the previous project because it felt more creatively charged.

This assignment in my Design Class was an exercise in exploring how to use isolation and concentration techniques correctly in designs.

This First Design showcases the technique of concentration to draw the viewers eye to a focal point and absorb them into the design. Out of all of my Designs this one felt the most organic and most powerful showcase of the concept of Concentration.

The second design showcases the technique of Isolation to draw the viewers eye the a focal point and make them stay and eyeball the design for a longer amount of time. Out of all of my Isolation designs, I think this one was the most original and at the the same time simple, in a way that works effectively to what I was trying to express.

In my Redesign I tried to expand on the original layout. In some areas I scaled down and in other areas I spread out to make the design more organic and balanced. I think this design is better laid out than my first attempt at the design.