Week 03 - 2D

Class Format

After a review of last week the class consisted of a group exercise and a practical. A fair amount of group discussion occurred while evaluating the results of the group exercise.

 

Group Exercise

Creative Thinking - Combine Ideas

1. Choose at random two words from the lists below.
2. 
When you've selected two words, think about the words. Get clear in your mind what each represents.

3. In a Word doc., do a rough mind map of each word and figure out what each means and represents to you.
4. Combine ideas. Think about how the one thing relates or could relate to the other.
5. 
Each person creates TWO 2D Design OPTIONS based on the chosen word combo.

Our groups 2 words are 'Cherry' and 'Skull'. Associated words with 'Cherry' : Red, Ripe, Sweet, Succulent. Associated words with 'Skull' : Death, White, Decay,

These drawings were completed in class with illustrator. The first one is obvious - I have shaped and coloured a pair of skulls like cherries. With the second drawing I took the idea of decay and applied it to the cherry. The purpose of this exercise was to recognise the value of random input in the creative process. It also demonstrated a system by which this input could be evaluated and collated via the collaborative process.

 

Practical

Draft a range of 3 excellent design concepts for your exhibition portfolio. Use any tools you wish. Put the results and a paragraph of description in your blog. Invent 2 different options for each of the 3 designs. Describe how each of these options differ in OR any 3 criteria of your own choosing – list these criteria clearly.

• Shape
  - Square, round or other. Top navigation, Side navigation of floating.
• Media
  - CSS, Spry media or Flash.
• Style
  - Minimal, Dynamically Interactive.

I chose to look at the design options for my online portfolio. Beginning with a sketch my initial design concepts were concerned with the layout for the navigation menu. These were Top, Side and Floating (an icon follows the mouse pointer revealing the menu when clicked). Shape parameters varied where the overall layout could be described as square, rounded or irregular. Media varied where the code could be executed in Spry, Flash or regular HTML and CSS. Style varied where the content could present itself as minimal or interactive. This exercise demonstrated a process by which individual design concepts could expanded upon through a criteria based interrogation.

 

Research

Video

After completing the creative thinking exercise we all had a look at each others results. Some interest was generated in the class in regard to how I had completed the drawings above in Illustrator in the allotted time. This youtube video gives away the secret to the seemingly magical trickery. My tips for using youtube tutorials include; be specific - tailor your searches to a specific task or program, follow - when you find a specific publisher that appeals to you subscribe to their feed & keep them - download videos you find useful keep them as a reference. There are add-ons for the various browsers which offer the the ability to download videos from youtube, although I have had mixed success with these. I prefer to open the activity window in Safari (common/option/A), locate the largest file (usually the file before the one ending with 'crossdomain.xml'), press option and double click. The video is put in your designated downloads file as 'videoplayback', rename it something appropriate and add the extension '.flv'. The video will now play in VLC or is ready for conversion to your preferred format.

Images

The 'Rational Alphabet' by Gustaf Lord came to me via an RSS feed from Design Taxi. A simple, clever and completely unusable font. From his website, 'By combining every two letters into one the number of letters used in total will drop by half. This will decrease paper usage, ink and toner as well. 
The only downside of using this font is that some unreadability will occur...'. At first I liked Gustaf's website, the index page is clean, well laid out and has a muted palette. Then I had a look around and two things really bugged me; the placement of large text saying, 'Oh, dear Lord!' at the bottom of every other page and his usage lurid pastels in the background of those pages. In his defence the colour choices are not completely incongruous as the tones may be found in the projects they are behind. Below is a swatch of the offending pastels, the first one being from the index page.

 

Reflection

I took from this weeks lesson an appreciation of the ideals of expansion and retraction in relation to idea generation (not bad, I got 4 '...tion' words into that sentence!). The process of ideation followed an expansion route through random input, elaboration and collective discussion with the first exercise. Then a broadly formed idea was concentrated through the application of defining parameters in the practical. When forming ideas the human brain is a remarkable apparatus as both of these approaches and more occur simultaneously and with little or no interruption to conscious thought. This occurs in the part of the mind I think of as preconscious, in line with Freudian psychoanalysis. These ideas then pop into the conscious mind through what many consider to be miraculous inspiration (reference to 'The Ancient Model of Inspiration' here). At this juncture I briefly considered a lengthy diatribe on the ridiculous nature of this notion, but reconsidered in light of the requirements of this body of text (...I will have my rant one day though, oh yes I will). Todays exercise and practical was about using conscious interpretations of preconscious processes to move ideation forward. Developing these techniques is important for any creative who has faced any kind of 'block' and especially so for the designer who usually faces more restrictive timeline requirements as our work is inherently collaborative.