I created this in paint. I chose the categories funny, sports, and rich. For frich, I chose Kevin Hart because he is my favorite comedian, and he’s obviously rich. For forts, I chose Peyton Manning because he is one of my favorite football players, and I love his commercials, I think they’re hysterical. For Srich, I chose Tiger Woods because hes always talked about and he’s the most wealthy athlete in the world. For the blend of all of them, I chose Shaq, because he is a very famous athlete, hes clearly rich, and he is hilarious.
The next assignment that I decided to do for my Design Assignments was called “Name that Single“. In this assignment we were asked to create a design for a song…. not using any words, but simply using symbols for the song! The song that I chose to do was ….. Aqua’s song “Barbie Girl”. I decided to do this song because it recently played on my iTunes and has basically been stuck in my head ever since…. when I saw this assignment that was the first song that popped up into my head. I decided to google search the words .. “barbie” and “barbie word” and see the various things that came up. Although I did not create either of these pictures myself. I am giving credit to the people that did (signature9.com & formationtoolbox.blogspot.com). I then placed the photos into a word document and had an arrow pointing from the barbie to the barbie world… kind of singing the lyrics in my head as I did so. This assignment was pretty fun… I guess you don’t always have a mental picture when singing a song, but this caused me to think of one.
So I started this new band the other day called My Cat Jack. The debut album is coming out in a few weeks, it’s called He Like Bag. The band includes my friends Alex, Katelyn, and myself. My friend Alex has a cat named Jack, and he really really likes bags. This is my favorite picture of him because he got stuck in a sleeping bag bag and needed help getting out. I love using my favorite pictures and items on assignments for this class. Our music is a mix of rap and country, there has never been anything like us. Get ready for the new big thing everyone.
The assignment to create a warning sign was by far the easiest design assignment from this week, but I also learned a surprising amount getting it done.
Creating the sign was easy enough: I found a simple Hard Hat Area sign, drew over the original text with white and red, respectively, and then slapped some new words on there (and yes, that is Arial. It’s a warning sign, it needs to be readable, not pretty). A few adjustments with the scale tool and voila! One more assignment down.
Like I said though, I learned a lot here. Attempting to fit the word “Procrastinating” on the sign made me realize that not only does a warning sign have to be legible, that legibility depends on what words you’re using. Words that are too long won’t be read, especially on street signs when people are whizzing by in cars. There’s also the ever-important issues of color and placement; if you don’t use colors that stand out in contrast to each other and if your message is cluttered, it’ll also make it impossible to read. On a warning sign, that’s more than essential, it might actually be life-saving.
It made me realize just how much work goes into creating the little design elements we see around us every day and take for granted. Somebody (or a couple of somebodies, or a committee of somebodies) had to sit down and figure out what would be visually striking, clearly readable or understandable (in the case of signs that just use images), and could be easily replicated over and over again. Someone figured all of that out, spent hours or days or weeks designing it, and now it’s become part of our cultural landscape.
The next assignment that I decided to do was the MINIMALIST design (poster) or a tv show or movie. I thought this would be a cool assignment because it is generally open ended… it could be interpreted in many different ways and there are SO many tv shows and movies that could fit in. I decided to make with a desk in it….. The show that I wanted to represent was “The Office”. I love watching that show and I figured representing it minimally wouldn’t be very hard…. especially because of the name. I decided I would create a picture of a desk with some supplies on it in order to explain that it was an “office”…. I did this through the use of the Mac app, Paintbrush! I thought that having a desk, looking like an office was very minimal, but it was also very ironic. The office is a show that doesn’t really have a lot to do with the idea of an “office” so I thought that would add a bit of humor…. because that is the name of it, without being its exact topic. I think this captures the “essence” of the story because although it is just a desk with a few supplies, one may understand or quickly think of the show because of it’s name (especially because it seems to be a fairly popular show). It kind of resembles a game of pictionary…. I loved playing that!
As Design Week comes to a close I will have to say that this has been the most miserable week of my life. This brought up a lot of negativity from my Digital Approaches to Fine Arts class because of my constant use of Creative Suite 5 then, and even returning to work on CS6 and finding how much more amazing CS6 is from GIMP or Adobe PhotoShop Elements or Paint. Additionally, I can’t stand design work. I can tell you why something looks bad and point out the clutter and the elements that make up the poor design, but I have no idea how to make awesomeness from scratch.
Design Safari
Going on a Safari was weird. It made me step back and really think about the kinds of photos I was taking because I was looking for letters; I never photograph letters and words. Whenever I photograph letters or words it’s so that I can remember things easier when I’m going on travels around various parts of the city. I always thought about advertisements especially after learning about Matt Siber, so it was interesting to have to kind of replicate the things that he does, but I’m not going in digitally and editing things.
Daily Create One
October 2, 20120 | tdc268
Imagine your own personal font (typeface) and draw the letters in your name.
I thought that this assignment was so much fun. I used to sit in my high school classes and doodle out some new fonts, always dreaming to someday sell them. I lost sight of that and stopped my font-doodles and am sticking more to doodles that are more in the manner of The Gube, so this assignment was a nice way to get back in touch with my teenage self.
Daily Create Two
October 4, 2012 | tdc270
From memory, draw the floor plan of the house you grew up in.
This assignment made me homesick. This house was being built during the first year of my life and I have lived there ever since. The floor plan also reminded me of how every year in elementary school I would run upstairs when I got home and try to bribe my dad to draw the floor plan of the house for me for the fire safety packet I brought home. He would draw it on a separate paper for me to use as a guide and I would grab the fattest crayon I could and scribble down our floor plan and then our escape route in red.
Daily Create Three
October 5, 2012 | tdc271
Show us a classic title from your bookshelf and tell us why you treasure it.
So this is the video I shot kind of late. Whoops. I woke up in a panic at five this morning, read the daily create prompt on my phone, snapped a picture, uploaded, and heaved back to sleep. Halfway through my day I was going through the daily creates and realized I had to do a video instead. Whoops.
Daily Create Four
October 6, 2012 | tdc272
Add crazy sound effecs to your favorite song! e.g. as if performed by visitors from outer space.
I started off with Deep Enough to Dream by Chris Rice and then added farm sounds. I used cows by reinsamba, horse snorts by ERH, and a montage of geese and friends by sinatra314. I layered sounds, changed the pitches on some and had a lot of differentiation in volume.
1 STAR
I just had to do this one, I couldn’t sneak away from it. I created this tapestry with a tapestry builder and had so much fun. I think at one point I tried to tell a story with all the options available, but it was far too crowded. Maybe if I made a real tapestry I would have put everyone on there at least four times!
2 STAR (times three equals 6)
I started off with my melting family and that was a neat experience because I was back in CS6. It wasn’t the easiest subjects to work with and it definitely could have been better, but it still ended up how I wanted it to. I then moved on to my lackadaisical typographic depiction. I liked this one a lot more and because I was using CS6 again the layers were easier to manipulate and alter. The finished product was a lot cleaner than some of the other ones I created. Of my two star assignments I liked my minimalized philosophy the best. I created this one on paint and used Impact as my font. It’s a great font.
3 STAR (times two equals 6)
I started with creating a four icon story. This was probably my favorite one that I had done up to this point. I drew with my mouse (not my favorite, but it is effective) in black and then filled all my excess negative space with black. I was also really excited about this because I had just watched it for the first time a weekend ago as part of my movie education.
My other assignment was creating my own album covers. This was also something that reminded me of high school when I signed up for a class in my freshman year of high school that was desktop publishing. We had outdated computers with limited technology but were still designing covers for our “Greatest Hits” album. All my classmates went crazy with color and I stayed simple. Now, using GIMP I went crazy with color and creating silly little titles.
4 STAR
I am pleased with this assignment. I created my own Top Gun card using GIMP and images from the internet.
End total of stars is 17. I think the coolest part of all of this is that I actually attempted a design challenge from every star level. Another thing that I took into consideration when choosing the assignments to do, with the exception of the four icon and philosophy, that I tried to do things with a handful of completions. The lesser the besser (German for better). A lot of the assignments corresponded to the things that I had recently seen and have been learning about. Design week was a pain but still a lot of fun. And because I said I would wrap it up with a bow:
Each student must write a blog post outlining his/her planned contributions to the radio show. In addition, each student must design a poster as an advertisement for their group’s show.
I honestly have no idea what I’m going to do. I haven’t been effectively communicating with my group so there’s a lot I’m unhappy about. My fault. My contribution has been assigned to me as talking about road blocks and the security system. I am neither from Virginia nor a frequent visitor to the City so this is going to be the biggest challenge. I’m not interested in doing an interview or creating a verbal story, so I’m going to create an audio depicting this with a few introductory words. I’m going to take more of RadioLab’s approach to the way that they incorporate sounds (layering, a lot of sound effects).
Here is my initial poster for the radioshow:
I got my images here and here and used GIMP to create my product.
(This poster will probably be changing a lot more the more I create sounds for my segment. I want more layers, I think.)
I had fun with my Design Safari this week. Once I had a little bit of understanding and a grasp on some of the elements of design, I was able to notice them in things surrounding me. I even had trouble pinning down what category I wanted to put some of the posters and advertisements in because they all had several elements in them.
Daily Creates
I really enjoyed completing my Daily Creates this week. They were interesting and thought-provoking ideas that were fun to talk about and explain in my blog posts. They also just made me really happy in general because whenever I think of my old house, I think of my childhood, and it makes me smile.
Roadtrip Radio
Here is more of my description of what exactly we did this week in terms of collaborating on the radio show, the midterm project. It was fun to think of things once my ideas started flowing and everyone started to contribute and think of cool things!
Design Assignments
These were interesting to do this week!
My best friend is really pretty…. I showed her this picture and she was really creeped out by it. Not a surprising reaction, obviously, because she looks like death and a zombie combined.. Awful! 1/15
Dr. Seuss was difficult to manage this week. Not him actually, duhhh, but a cover of one of his famous children’s books. Green Eggs and Ham. One of my favorites as a kid. I couldn’t get the hang of image editing… maybe in the next few weeks I will get better. 4/15
My group’s radio project is called “Roadtrip Radio” and this week I designed a t-shirt to advertise for it. It was a really fun and creative process. 6/15
After being frustrated earlier in the week, I finally was able to complete this assignment. I used a different picture and different image editing program to complete this album cover. 9/15
I completed this assignment just because it was fun and simple! Four squares, four pictures, one image. 10/15
I used something by Jack Johnson earlier today to add text to my own custom t-shirt and I’m using another song by him in this assignment to create a typography poster. Banana Pancakes <3 12/15
This one was pretty easy and interesting to do. I love creating stuff with music, it’s always my favorite thing to do With this assignment, we had to create a design that would reveal the title of a song and people have to name that single! So fun! 14/15
So this assignment was really cool! We had to create a minimalist poster for a tv show/movie. So I did one for How I Met Your Mother! One of my favorite tv shows 17/15
The answer is 6. Here is the summary for design week!
Daily Creates
Egg Rolls
Personal Typeface
The void
Imagining of my house
Here was my post summarizing all of the daily creates that I have also posted above in slideshow form. This post will be heavy on slideshows, just so ya know.
Design Blitz
Unity
Form/Function/Message
Metaphors/Symbols
Typography
Minimalism
Here is the post in which I described the process of design blitzing. Design blitzing was my least favorite item this week, but I still enjoyed it substantially more than I liked the visual assignments. It was fun to dissect everything in the environment looking for design strategies.
Week 6 Design Assignments
DS106Poster
updated pill
Updated Curve poster
Cookie monster!
Nate’s Card
Tragic Tale of Mr. Wine
I’m going to post the link to each of the assignments and describe what the purpose of each of them were here:
2 Stars: The Tragic Tale of Mr. Wine. In which I create an autobiographical cover. Since it was the first assignment of the week, it was one of the weakest efforts on my part (although there’s another one that will take the cake later).
3 Stars: I choose you!. Favorite. Faaaaavorite. FAAAAAAVOOOOOORRRRRITE. I liked this one a lot. The goal of the assignment was to create a Pokemon card that was based on yourself. Check for yourself how I did. I’m going to see if anyone else did this assignment after I’m done writing this because I’d like to see some other examples.
3 Stars: Coming Soon. I also really liked this one. We were supposed to create a movie poster that was “truthful.” Nothing is more truthful than the fact that Clint Eastwood has been typecast as a grumpy old man.
2 Stars: MacGuffin-ing it up: I really “MacGuffined” this one up. The point was to change a line of dialog in a movie/show/scene to change the outcome of the movie. I made Neo choose the red pill instead of the blue pill, thus negating the whole movie. This was my weakest effort and I’m kind of disappointed in it.
3 Stars: Well those look delightf… WAIT A MINUTE: I also really enjoyed this one. Here, you were supposed to put someone or something in a situation in which they did not belong. I love cookie monster as you can tell from my avatar.
2 Stars: Here Comes the Radio Show: This served as a joint post, but my final 2 star assignment of creating a poster for the upcoming radio show group project was in here.
Radio Project Summary
Here Comes the Radio Show was also my post in which I summarized my coming contributions to the radio show project.
The [design] assignment, Warning, by Tom “Lots of things today have warning labels. Create warning labels for things that exist only in movies or your imagination.” Allowed for me to be able to focus on what keeps me awake sometimes.. now this is embarrassing but I have nightmares of trolls on tall bridges.. don’t ask me to explain because I wouldn’t know where to begin.. I made the photo a tad ironic considering I wanted to make it more fun than scary (: I just combined two pictures on Paint and here is the end product:
With this assignment, we had to create a design that would reveal the title of a song and people have to 
