10% of total

Class 5, Wednesday October 8th, 2008

• Understand the impact of resolution and bit-depth on image quality
• Familiarization of Photoshop, scanning procedures, image input, and digital cameras as tools for generating new bitmap images
• Gain application skills in layer ordering, image construction and making selections
• Practice concept development and implementation of surreal images

Your task is to choose a celebrity and create a visual caricature of them, focusing only on their face and shoulders. During your initial research, look for people who have distinctive features – anatomy, accessories, hair, clothing, facial expressions, etc. – that you can emphasize to help other people easily identify who your subject is.

To be successful with this project, you must choose actual 3D objects that are related to your celebrity's profession to either photograph and/or scan for use in building their portraits. When deciding on your objects, consider how they function as symbols or be suggestive representations of your celebrity's distinctive features.

Please note: no images can be taken from books, magazines or the internet — you must create your own images!

First of all sketch out your visual idea — this is a very important part of the design process, it helps you to explore different ideas and leads to a well thought through, justifiable* solution. This process fosters efficient design organization, and guides you in deciding which elements you need to search for and collect when you're ready to build your project.

Once your concept is developed and approved, photograph and/or scan your objects, adjust your images for color quality, make selections, edit out backgrounds, and then place each one of your objects onto their own layers in your Photoshop file, and then manipulate each layer until you have a satisfactory composition.

* You will be asked to justify your choices as a part of the critique process.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Jonathan Heartfield

Color

• Full color

Format

• 7 1/2" x 10": Fits evenly within a US letter size page
• Format orientation can be horizontal or vertical

Submission Requirements

1. One page, US letter size, color printout mounted on 11" x 14" black mat board, flapped with tracing paper.
2. Full size working reference sketch taped to back of mat board
3. ‘Unflattened’ RGB Photoshop file upload to Memory Stick

10% of total

Class 10, Monday, October 27th 2008

• Acquire an understanding and working knowledge of color theory
• Experiment with the dynamics of color combinations in design solutions
• Observe the use of color and its importance within cultures, fashion, perception, etc.

You have each been assigned a Pantone or PMS color, identified by its number. Your task is to assign a ‘conceptual’ name to your color and develop a ‘graphic’ supportive illustration that communicates your color's qualities, mood, personality and interactions with other colors and contexts.

Project requirements are:

1. Your color must be the dominant color in your illustration
2. The illustration must be accurately constructed with reference to the underlying, supplied Illustrator grid ( vertical format or horizontal format)
3. The illustration must be built from only overlaid, pure geometric shapes of circles, squares and triangles
4. The Pantone color number and your color's conceptual name must be incorporated into the illustration
5. You can't use any black in the illustration – it's about color dynamics!

For illustration reference and research, the following list is at least six ways in which a color can be described, manipulated, and implemented in art and design:

• Hue: The place of a color in the spectrum of light
• Saturation: The degree of chroma or purity of a color
• Brightness or Value: The degree of light present in a color
• Warmth/Coolness: The perceived temperature of a color
• Complimentary: Opposite color on the color wheel
• Analogous: Colors which are adjacent on the color wheel

15% of total

Class 14, Monday, November 10th,2008

• To explore the integration of vector and bitmap content
• To consider the aspects of type: legibility, expression, and communication of concept
• To capture and convey the meaning/translation of a piece of jargon

With the incorporation of many forms of "new technology" into our daily lives and work environments, whole new expressions and words have become or are in the process of becoming part of our everyday language. i.e. myspace, wiki, blog, ajax, ruby on rails, voip, etc.

Your task is to choose one of these new or emerging jargon words and communicate its meaning through the use of only typography and texture, without any reliance on distinct pictorial imagery. Your illustrative solution will be presented to class as a potential cover for a new technology magazine called "new architect." You will need to use the provided template with its masthead for your project.

Remember that the success of your project will depend on the thoroughness of your research to acquire a sense of familiarity and ‘inside’ knowledge of your topic. Along with much experimentation during your preliminary design decision process, test how much information you need to include or exclude to successfully communicate the essence of your word and its associated concept.

Acquire all imagery you don't create yourself from one of these sources:

• freefoto.com
• bigfoto.com
• copyrightfreephotos.com
• dotgovwatch.com
• sxc.hu
• wikipedia public domain images
• Or other copyright free sources you can find. Try a Google search on "copyright free images "

15% of total

Class 18, Monday, November 24th, 2008

• To convey mood, context, time and location through the combination of type, color, layout, graphic elements, illustration, photographic references and textures
• To experiment and demonstrate comprehension and confidence in using software applications and design skills acquired to date

Your task is to illustrate and convey a subtle aspect of San Francisco. To successfully do this, your challenge is to find/construct a situation/activity, with location, time, day of the week, elements, scale of view, etc. which communicates an exclusive sense of experience of an aspect of San Francisco at a particular time of day or night. The illustration should not be a generic solution for some other location, but should be specific to the time and location you are portraying.

Once you've decided on the combination of elements for your illustration and developed your concept, you must include a line of type within your composition, that states the time of night, day of the week, and location/activity you're portraying.

An important element of this design challenge is to avoid clichèd and stereotypical ‘tourist’ images. The creation of unexpected and new ways of illustrating situations can have a far greater impact than those clichèd images already well known by many viewers. For example, don't use the Golden Gate Bridge, the Transamerica Pyramid, or Fisherman's Wharf.

Your design/illustration solution does not need to be highly realistic – i.e. correct perspectives, relationships between elements, etc. – and you may find that an abstract approach is a more effective solution when trying to communicate subjective content.

Finally in this project, try and incorporate and experiment with all the processes and design considerations that you have learned to date for color, typography, form, imagery and layout. Within your design format, experiment with the placement of your elements and their relationship to each other using techniques of scale, dynamics and contrast.

SPECIAL NOTE: Only gather research in the field in what you feel are safe situations. Do not go to the City by yourself, take friends and stick together

20% of total

Finals Week: Wednesday December 10th, 2008

• To use Photoshop as a design tool for conceptualizing web pages
• To gain skills in the use of Photoshop & Illustrator for creating and optimizing images and artwork for the web
• To understand color models, image resolution, file formats and compression options for the prep of web artwork

All our projects to date have looked at acquiring skills and an understanding of image preparation with either Photoshop or Illustrator tools for print artwork output. Today, designers also need to know the requirements of preparing images for web or screen presence. Photoshop & Illustrator play important roles in all these areas, especially in the preparation of pre-production ‘comped’ concepts for client approval.

Again we need to look at:

• Image resolution
• Color models
• File size optimization
• Font issues
• File formats

But now we also have to look at these in relation to screen output, web access times and the medium's design characteristics.

Your task is to design a web page sequence (minimum three pages) based on a vegetable or fruit of your choice. You are required to create all the imagery, text and design an interface grid with navigation icons.

Webpage Components

• Subject masthead
• Homepage layout
• Navigation icons (36 x 36 pixels): History, Growing, Cooking, Variety, and Stories (create these as vector artwork in Illustrator). At least two additional pages must be fully layed out.
• Fruit or Vegetable images – photographic (use of stock photos is OK) or illustrative
• Body text (set in Photoshop – choose fonts whose design are best suited for web display)

Start off your design thinking and problem solving by first drawing up a hierarchical flow chart to help you define the ‘user interface’ for the home page and subsequent pages/content depth within the site. Next draw up a grid that will help you maintain a visual consistency and structure between each page. For this medium in particular, think about the design mantra ‘Less is More’ – that white space is a very effective design tool – and filling a page with excessive text, images and clutter can easily dilute the site's message and confuses the visitor in their attempts to navigate the space.

Remember the value of testing your site and getting feedback from someone else before your project deadline, along with checking for correct spelling and grammar.