So a brief explanation of what you're looking at up there... I chose the challenge from the Design Basic Index book on page 145. Basically using only repetitions of a simple image that can be rotated and resized, make three images for each of four categories. As you guys can perhaps tell, I ended up doing more than just that because I had so many good ideas when doing the sketchwork. So first of all to start, the simple design that I repeat is the one all the way in the upper left hand corner. Everything else on that page is built out of that one image. The other two up in that corner are other basic images that I thought it might be useful to keep on hand so I could quick copy them whenever I needed that particular design. The right one of the three in that corner I ended up not using, but it can also be grouped with the starburst type designs to its right. In the upper right corner are five velocity designs. You can probably tell that three of them are variations on the same idea but with pointing into, along, and out of the circle they form. In the lower right corner, the fern, flower, and bug are all part of my serenity designs. Honestly these ones are kind of my favorite, followed by the starbursts. Finally the three sets lined up on the left side are all strength based designs. I found that category to be the trickiest to conceptualize and wound up going with 'strength of unity' although the bottom left one makes me think of scales when put upsidedown so that could be an angle too.
The second challenge I chose was from the White Space book in Chapter 7's type related challenges. I chose #6, to make a restaurant menu. I wanted a nice, but not super fancy pizza place so I used Sans type font for the cover while using various Serifs for the inside spread. By bolding menu item names and using a smaller italics for the item description, I was able to emphasize grouping and make things visually distinct. I further grouped concepts by using some free dingbats I found online and you can actually see me putting those in with gimp in my screencast. For the background, I borrowed a few pointers from chapter 8 on color to go with a pizza-ish yellow. Since this seemed boring on it's own and I had a rather large space under the restaurant name even after the dingbat underscore, I thought about putting something to spice it up. White space isn't my enemy, so I didn't want to fill it so much as accentuate it, meaning I decided to go with an idea to sprinkle 'oregano' across the cover but I don't think it ended up working for me. The sprinkles weren't distinct enough and ended up just looking like a greasy blur. In retrospect I should have used the paint tool instead of the airbrush and chosen my particle shape a bit differently, but I'm not going back to fix it right now. Additionally by the advice of chapter 8, instead of just using green, I may want to also balance out with yellow's other complementary color orange. If I have reason to revisit this later this semester I might take the advantage to do something with that, but for now this is what I'm showing you guys.
Hi Chad,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your post and seeing what you were able to design for this week! While I didn't complete the same activities as you, I did do one of the activities that required using a vector based program. I was wondering - what was your experience like using Gimp? I know you mentioned in your post that it was "awkward to learn", but I am a bit curious to see if it was user friendly in any way. I personally used Inkscape to complete my assignment on textural composition and I spent hours just figuring out how to create the simplest of shapes.. Regardless, I think that the designs you created were pretty neat and I particularly like the design at the bottom of your menu. Thanks for sharing!
Elaina, Gimp was a bit tricky to pick up when I first learned it, but once you figure out how to make the basic shapes using rectangle select, paint fill, and rotating and resizing as necessary, you can do a lot with just that. The path tool which makes lines is incredibly versatile... once you learn how it works. But the rest of the tools are mostly intuitive aside from some random things that can catch you off guard. For instance when you type in a resized value, the image you are resizing does not actually resize unless you jiggle the up/down arrow keys. Very strange. Actually something that might be worthwhile is having a sort of group thing for everyone interested in learning how to do stuff with gimp. I wouldn't mind trying to figure out how to setup a livestream or something if there's enough interest.
DeleteHi Chad,
ReplyDeleteWhen viewing the google plus page the image that was displayed for this week’s post caught my attention so I HAD to take a look at what you did. I think all the designs in your first assignment look really good! It is amazing to me that just one design as simple as the one in the upper left hand corner can turn into something completely different when it is repeated numerous times. For me the same thing happened where I had too much fun completing this assignment this week. I got so into the zone when creating my different shapes and forms that I completely lost track of time and spent a lot longer than I anticipated creating the designs.
For my second assignment of the week I considered creating the restaurant menu but didn’t have any ideas really flowing from the start so I knew it probably wasn’t going to turn out that great. However, after looking at your menu I really wish I would have went through with the menu instead. I think how you implemented a lot of the different features we have read about in chapter 8 really made the menu genuinely appealing to look at, which is what you want the customers to say when looking at a menu. Overall, I really enjoyed reading your post for this week and am looking forward to this upcoming weeks!