Back to the Basics
Week one was all about the basics: history of visual communications, design principles, color theory, etc. AKA — the foundation for makin’ the magic happen.
Our first project, Designing For a Theme, spans across 4 weeks and focuses on crafting cohesive visual styles, with a final deliverable of 7 style frames.
Knowing that work and class would be taking up the majority of my time, I want to use these projects as a time to be raw. However funky or silly that comes to life — taking the opportunity to process different life events, express what’s true, and make sense of the world.
Week 1 Assignment: Pre-Production Presentation
- Chosen Theme
- Word List
- Mood Boards
- Reference Images
After bantering about the bellyaches in the dating arena with my friend Adé, there was a window to kill two birds with one stone.
The thought was around that ‘New Age luh’ — the flawed communication in texting, jumping to conclusions, emojis, and exclamation marks to compensate for the lack of tonality and body language. We had very different interpretations behind the common texting tropes and wanted to create a back and forth visual series — to extend the conversation. ‘Mixed Messages’ was adopted as my project theme and I dove into the first week’s assignment. Stoked to blow out style frames for the series!
For some incomprehensible reason, procrastination hit hard AF on this assignment. I worked up until seconds before, uploading the doc as I was simultaneously logging into our class, and still left it pretty WIP. I got my toes wet in the whole ‘balancing school and work’ escapade and I now have a better idea of the hours I need to make available for classwork and areas of my routine I need to adjust.
Live Sessions
We had 4 live sessions this week — theme brainstorm, our mentor class, a student spotlight, and Career Lab.
The mentor class was a 2 hour or so skype-like session with my smaller class group (5 other classmates and our designated mentor). We each presented our pre-production assignments and gave/received critique for the first part of class. Last part of class was a lecture/discussion on design process and our mentor had given us a full walkthrough on his specific approach — extremely valuable!
Current attitude: Craving surf-style tacos. Indecisive. Craving Thai. Trying to channel the same ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’ attitude I had in college, but without the freshmen 15.
