I am finding out that I love design week just like I loved photo week, not as much but it’s getting there!

The next design assignment I did was the Lyric Topography Assignment (**). The task was to take lyrics from a song and illustrate them using only topography. I love topography. I had no idea that this was considered “desgin”, now it makes sense! This is an example of topography:

I got this photo here. I had already seen this before this assignment came up, so I wanted to try to create something as cool as this! I played around in GIMP and Powerpoint for a while {seems like a reoccuring theme this week – and I’m not complaining!} and this is my finished product:

The lyrics are from Mumford and Sons – Hold On To What You Believe. This song is so powerful, I knew it would make a good typography. Granted, I’m not pro like the person who created the image that was my inspiration, but I think I did a pretty good job for a “new-bie”! Things that I had to consider were font size, placement of words, what {if any} images I would place around the words in GIMP. The important words are big and bold. Luckily, I had cute font from this website {I use cute fonts when I create a worksheet or activitiy for a practicum classroom :)}.

You always hear how two wrongs don’t make a right, but what about three? When approached with the opportunity to design a Venn Diagram involving pop culture I decided to do the pop culture I’m best at, Disney! I’ll pause for a second while you be surprised. You good? Okay. So I immediately had this idea to somehow make it so that way a villain would be associated with one of the good guys! This was so hard to do!

So the way that I started planning this was writing down different characters of interest (which I wrote on crayon in a napkin in IHOP). On the villains side I had characters like Ursula, Scar, the Shadow Man, Jafar, Evil Queen, Stepmother, and Malicifent. On the good guys side I had the fairy god mother, Timon and Pumba, Mushu, Mama Odie, Genie ans the 3 good fairies. I knew right away that this was going to be a challenge, but once I started I really wouldn’t stop. I haven’t dedicated too much blog posts to one of my favorite Disney movies, Mulan, so I decided to make Mushu be my character of interest. Brainstorming with my friends we start listing different things that happened to Mushu or qualities that he may have. One of the first things that we saw he had in common with two villains were that he changed his state of being. At the very beginning, Mushu is actually a metal statue where he then transforms to the dragon. Looking at our villains side, Ursula transforms from an octopus to a woman in order to throw off Prince Eric for falling for Ariel (nice try Ursula), and Jafar gets what is coming for him when he turns in a genie at the end of the movie and ultimately gets trapped (he also turns into a huge snake, but I hate those so it gets little recognition). So now that I had three of the four characters locked in, I had to start thinking about similarities and difference between them. Looking just at Mushu and Ursula I noticed that they both played a major role in the princess’s transformation throughout the movie. Mushu helped transform Mulan into acting more like a man (and even gave her a cover up name), and Ursula transformed Ariel from a mermaid to a human. So now I looked back at my list of villains and noticed that the Shadow Man is the one who transformed Prince Naveen into a frog, which was pretty major to the movie. Now I had all of my characters, so it was show time! All I had left to do was find a similarity between Jafar, Mushu, and the Shadow Man. Easy right? Nope. Any similarity that I could find seemed to include Ursula as well, which would make her belong to the middle category with Mushu. Until finally I found a trait that she did not have in common, she’s a girl! Yes that is right, Mushu, Jafar and the Shadow Man are all male figures, Ursula certainly is not. Therefore I had my last quality and was ready to design.
I made my design in Microsoft Word since I felt comfortable using those tools, I then print screened the end result and saved it to a jpeg file using GIMP. I based it off the example that was shown in the instructions because I really liked the way it looked. I played with the fonts a little bit to make certain things stand out more than others, but I was pleased with the end result.

Thanks for reading!

Princess Karissa

To really get you thinking visually, I chose to do the One Story/Four Icons assignment (**). It may sound easy at first, but picking four images to represent a story, without giving it away, is actually challenging! And I loved creating it! I chose this assignment because I enjoyed looking and guessing at the ones previously done by DSers, so I wanted to give it a shot. Can you take a guess at what it is??

No hints are going to be given. And I am not going to tell you if you are right or wrong until SUNDAY the 24th because I want as many people to guess! Also, if you read that someone already guessed what you were going to say…it’s ok! You can still comment with your guess — it’s not for a grade…or is it??

Photo Credits:

So this assignment was literally propaganda.  I had to redesign a WWII poster to propogate our class.  Now, everyone has seen the craze of Keep Calm and Chive On, Keep Calm and Shop On, Keep Calm and Drink Coffee, etc.  Now what most people don’t know is that that the original one was a set of three posters that the British had in store in case the Germans invaded.  The posters would be placed around the city to keep the peace.  The original one was Keep Calm and Carry On.  Here’s the original.

Now for mine, I adapted it for our ds106 class.

I loaded it into gimp, got rid of the crown and everything after the “and” in the picture using the color picker to pick out the gray background, and then the paintbrush to paint over all the white.  I ended up with only the Keep Calm part of the picture.  Then I stole the ds106 logo off the site and loaded it into the picture, enlarging it using the scaling tool.  After that, I added the “on” in the photo.  Eventually I decided on a book to replace the crown, and loaded up a clipart image of a book at the top, enlarging it enough to fit nicely in the picture.  That was it.

The next assignment I decided to do was One Story/Four Icons. This assignment was to “reduce a movie, story, or event into its basic elements, then take those visuals and reduce them further to simple icons, four of them.”

Another part of this assignment was to NOT share what movie you were doing!  So I’m obviously not going to share the process I went though to decide which movie I was going to do.  I will share the process I used in making this though.  In the description of this assignment they suggested going to the The Noun Project for the pictures for this project.  I went and looked around and was thrilled with the choices.  I choose the skull, flying saucer, sheriff hat, and pizza as my four icons. I imported these four icons into gimp and aligned them side by side.  I found this project really easy to do!

So can you guess which movie I did?

Nine stars down! Six stars to go!

Here is my second design assignment for the week! This one is a 3-star Minimalist TV/Movie Poster. All you need to do is pick a movie/TV show and then create a poster that “captures the essence of the story.”

For this assignment I choose the TV show “Chicago Fire” it’s one of my favorites currently and if you are not watching it now, I highly suggest you check it out! The show is basically about firefighters and EMTs lives in a Chicago Firehouse. There is drama, romance, and action- I feel it’s a show that can apply to many.

In trying to be minimalistic, I decided I’d go with an outline of the state of Illinois. The blue background represents a color in Chicago’s Flag. The little fire marks “Chicago” on the map and I just added the title.

I used GIMP, paint and Picmonkey for this project and it was very annoying and frustrating. I just couldn’t really get things how I wanted them, thought I’m pretty happy now. I choose this font in picmonkey because I thought it had a “fire-y/burnt” look to it.

What do you all think?

Star Points: 5/15

We are on to design week, this week. And I’m ready to show you my first assignment!

This is a required 2-star assignment called “One Story/4 icons.” Basically you need to get 4 icons that describe the movie/story/event you are trying to portray. Don’t tell people what it is, but rather have them guess!

I got all of my images from google image and created a collage using Picmonkey, which was SO much easier than using Gimp!

I ended up making two DIFFERENT Collages, so you have two chances to guess what I am trying to represent here. I feel like one is a bit easier than the other, but I’m excited to see what you all think about them!

Set 1:

Set 2:

Any guesses??

Star points: 2/15