TODAY

1) Icebreaker

2) The Syllabus-questions?

3) Oh, C.R.A.P.

4) Design Task Zero: You’re in the Movies now

5) Homework

Icebreaker

For today I want you to tell us all your name and your favorite visual artist.

Mine changes daily, it seems, but for today I’m going back to my childhood hero, Todd McFarlane

The syllabus

For today, you should have read over the syllabus and major assignments. At this point, do you have any questions or concerns? Ask away! Don’t be shy!

AND NOW SOME C.R.A.P.

As funny as it is…… making CRAP jokes, it really is a foundational premise of design, and it’s deeply important (and thanks to our sense of humor usually quite memorable). The letters, of course, stand for:

ContrastRepetitionAlignmentProximity

You read about itSo I’m going to give these to you in my words, along with a few quick examples, so you can get a good sense of how it works.

Contrast

Basically stated, contrast means that things that are similar look similar but things that are different look clearly different. This keeps your reader from becoming confused and creating relationships that aren’t present.

It comes, of course, from literal contrast, the light-to-dark or black-to-white of an image. In design it often ends up being about color values.

This image is a great

example, and it is also a

hyperlink to a great blog entry on

contrast, if you want to learn

more.

RepetitionMaybe the easiest of these four concepts to define, repetition is, just as you’d guess, repeating something– a color, a logo, a typeface, a type style.

It unifies and organizes.

Alignment

Alignment is about positioning on a page. Nothing should be put on haphazardly. There should be a reason and a measurement that guides where things are placed in relation to each other.

The image to the right links to a post that has some cool

reflection on alignment. And there’s all kinds of alignment going on with the new Windows 8 start page.

ProximityProximity is very similar in theory to alignment, but it’s more about grouping and use of white space.

Basically: similar things are grouped together, different things require space.

Activity

You should, I hope, have been thinking about starting the In-Design tutorial. I want to stress that in this course we won’t be spending the time to go over all of the In-Design basics, but I will be taking you through some of the set-up as part of in-class activities, and I will be glad to offer an outside of class session if people want to come in for some intensive just-tech training time.

But make sure you are working on those tutorials. They matter. Based on exit comments and evals, not doing those tutorials was the big difference between success and failure for the last classes.

But today…

I want us to use our new-found knowledge of C.R.A.P.– which you will read a bit more of– to do a little really basic Photoshop work. What I need you to do is gather the following, quickly– let’s take no more than 4 minutes to do this.

1. A photo of yourself 2. A movie poster you like

The task

Is to put yourself into the movie poster. I will walk you through one way to do it, on the overhead, but if you’re an advanced Photoshop user, you will realize there are more elegant alternative ways to do this. When you finish, post whatever you managed to put together to your Tumblr. That will require you saving as a png or jpg. I can show you how to do that if you’re not familiar.

Homework

For Monday:

Read for class: Wysocki “The Multiple Media of Texts” and “With Eyes That Think and Compose and Think,” as well as Barthes “Rhetoric of the Image,” Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction,” (all on Niihka) and Kress “Reading Images”

Don’t forget your Tumblr post and design activity (both due Monday night)!

Design Task One

Your first design task is to create a remixed movie poster. This means, basically, take one movie poster and elements from another (or from some other place) to turn it into something different that makes some sort of new visual argument.

I have posted this prompt and some examples to the course website.

And…

Work on the

In-Design tutorial!