Introducing 100 Days Project
MA Studio I: Visual Communication Fundamentals | Fall 2023
During our first semester of the CMU MA program, I took a course led by Brett Yasko and conducted 100 days project as part of the course.
What is the “100 Days Project”?
We were given an individual project that should be executed throughout the semester. The principle was simple:
You choose one “design operation” and continue doing it for 100 days.
What to consider for personal “design operation”
The topic of 100 days project could be anything. Some students were interested in taking photos of specific objects or situations. Others drew illustrations for 100 days. While all these topics seemed interesting, I wanted to consider what kind of takeaways I wanted from this project before deciding on my topic.
These were the criteria I considered before deciding on my design operation.
- Scalability: Is this topic scalable enough to be continued for 100 days but not run out of content?
- Feasibility: Can I finish it in time?
- Growth: Will this design operation help me develop design-related skills related to my interests?
- Humanity: I wanted this project to be related to human values, whether by helping me understand others better or designing for others, not just for myself.
How I ended up with the theme “100 posters for 100 problems.”
Among diverse options, I decided to design 100 posters for 100 problems. As a designer, I am interested in how design reframes real-life problems and creatively tackles them.
Then I came to ask myself:
‘Why not start by paying attention to the problems of people around me?’
After getting to know my classmates, I realized that all of them were having various issues, problems, or concerns in their lives. Some of them were very common among peers, while some were very unique. The more I got a chance to talk with my peers, the more I realized that we had similar problems in our lives. Also, those negative feelings related to our problems often sparked deeper conversations and helped us understand each other better.
Designing 100 real human-centered posters
Considering four criteria; Scalability, Feasibility, Growth, and Humanity, this design operation was the perfect opportunity to design for real-life problems and develop my graphic design skills. Also, this would be a great opportunity to get to know new friends I made in Pittsburgh better.
Also, from the beginning of the operation, I thought of the final image of this 100days project as a compilation video with Jay-Z’s 99 Problems as a soundtrack.
Interviews and collecting “Problems”
I first began by interviewing all the people I encountered in Pittsburgh. Most of them were classmates from the MA program, but there were some people outside school I randomly encountered in Pittsburgh.
After taking notes from each interview, I created an Excel spreadsheet to organize the list of problems. Sometimes, thinking about the person helped me come up with design ideas, so I kept the name of the person with the problems.
Design Process
In the beginning, I didn’t have any solid work process. However, as days passed, I realized that I needed a more structured design process to accelerate my work speed and effectiveness. So, by paying attention to my way of working, I could come up with 3 basic styles.
Case 1
- Sometimes, I got inspired by a vocabulary or expression.
For example, when I was interviewing one of my friends from India, she told me that she was missing a traditional food from her home country. This new word and object gave me the biggest inspiration. I looked up some images for the food and picked the color palette based on its colors. Because this special rice had such a unique geometrical shape, I could use it as a main figure on the poster.
Case 2
- Focus on exploring the grid and typography.
At the beginning of this project, I barely understood the grid. While I could notice fairly easily when something is off the grid, I never thought of the grid as a tool to enhance my creativity.
Halfway to the final date, I got some advice from my friend that I hadn’t been using the grid effectively. After receiving feedback, I implemented a grid as another design style I could focus on. I could explore working with different numbers of rows and columns, sizing of the letters, and blending italicized ones with sans-serifs .. all of them were fun and stimulated my creativity.
Case 3
- Focus on learning new tools or effects.
One of the main goals of this design operation was to become more familiar with working with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop since I was already familiar with using Figma as a UX designer.
In the first half of my operation, I worked with the Illustrator to explore various shapes and arrangements of letters. During the last half, I started using photographers a lot more adding effects I had never had a chance to use, and became more familiarized with diverse blur and tracing effects. Adding diverse effects and yet harmonizing them on one poster was also a creatively stimulating process.
After establishing my three ways of working, I could speed up my work process and get myself more comfortable with this ambitious yet fun task of creating 100 posters for 100 people I meet in Pittsburgh.
Feedback
Overall, I received positive feedback from the class. However, I wanted to hear some negative feedback, so I asked one of my friend, who has 4 more years of experience, and received some valuable feedback.
- use of grid and layouts more rigorously
while I was using grid, some of the images were off-grid unintentionally. These ‘no-reason’ offs made my design more amateur. After getting this feedback, I became more
- try use Photoshop.
After working on Illustrator for 2 months, I felt stuck and felt as if I was not moving forward. By getting this feedback, I could add more diversity into my operation and outcomes.
- learn from references.
This friend introduced me to new designers or references like Karel Martins and the International Poster Book. These designers opened up my horizons and made me understand how they approached graphics in original ways.
Final Outcomes
