This used to be known as “Design School in a Day” but it’s now a little longer than a day.
The Design School Assignment (described here) is due on Sunday, October 8th. You turn it in on Canvas.
The design school is in multiple parts:
- Reading/Discussion 5 – has the reading part of it. It requires some discussion
- Seek and Find 5 – has you look for a well designed object and see how the principles apply
- Seek and Find 6 – has you do a basic art school assignment (which will also help you think about abstraction)
- The assignment on this page – asks you to do some graphic design practice!
Overview:
I really wanted to teach you all about graphic design, but I am absolutely a non-expert. Providing artistic training is outside of my range (actually, I could really use it myself). But, I want you to get a dose of it. So, I figured I’d see what happens if I let you try it on your own.
Now, I don’t really believe that doing a little reading and some design exercises will instantly turn you into graphic designers. However, I do believe that this can get you to think about graphic design elements enough that we can be conversant about the issues for class.
The ideas for this assignment come from my friend Steve Franconeri at Northwestern (group website) who teaches a “visual communication” class in the psychology department. Parts 3 and 4 below (Re-Design and Explore Contrast) are an assignment in his (undergrad) class – which is in the psych department.
Here are the parts:
- Read: (the reading is part of Reading/Discussion 5) Chapters 2-6 of The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams. This is a great book since it distills out some basic principles for those of us who aren’t designers. This is clearly not all there is, but it’s a good start. These chapters are short, and get the points across quickly. She distills things down to four principles: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity. CARP, since she has enough design sense not to pick the other acronym. You can of course read more.
- Critique: Find something that is designed well in the graphic design sense (a “print” object, like a web page, or flyer, or page from a magazine or … – you can even do this with a visualization, not something textual). Critique it from the perspective of how the CARP principles lead to the success of the design. Note: not all good designs follow the principles, but many do. And for now, we’re looking to learn the rules before we get license to break them for good reason. So, try to find something that succeeds by demonstrating the rules. (this is Seek and Find 5)
- Re-Design: Now, find something that is poorly designed in the graphic design sense (there are tons of terrible things on the web). Do a re-design by adding the CARP principles. (do this as a mockup – use powerpoint or word or something – or sketch it and scan it). Showing the two side-by-side should make it clear what you did, but you should describe how the “bad” thing was bad because of not obeying the CARP principles, and/or how you added CARP principles.
This is due Sunday, October 8th – turn it in as part of a Canvas discussion.
Part of this assignment is that you should comment on other people’s redesigns. - Explore Contrast: This isn’t connected to the graphic design stuff above, but it’s a standard “art school” exercise that will really help you lean to look at things with an eye towards capturing the essence of visual things visually – a great skill for doing visualization. You’ll pick four things (real objects), and then make a sketch of each that contrasts the differences between them. You should turn in a a lineup of the 4 real things (pictures) and your sketch as a similar lineup. This will be much clearer when I show you some examples in class (I can’t post them, since they come from students). (This is Seek and Find 6)
Some notes on the Redesign Assignment
(since everything else is a normal assignment)
You need to turn in 2 pictures (a before and an after). And a description of how the “bad” thing was bad because of not obeying the CARP principles, and/or how you added CARP principles. In the past, we had people turn in PDFs (since we did peer review in class), but this year, we’ll try the peer part online – so try to get your design and redesign into a picture on Canvas.
You will turn this in by posting to a discussion on canvas. (here)
You are expected to comment on other submissions.
This is all Steve told his students:
Assignment (Re-design): Do a CARP redesign of a PowerPoint slide, flyer, poster, webpage, business card, graph, etc – your choice. Include a ‘before’ and ‘after’ shot on a single page PDF. Creativity counts, and don’t repeat examples from class. Tip: Pick your ‘before’ design before watching the CARP video, and think about the changes you’ll make while you watch the video. You don’t have to turn in 1 PDF per part – you can turn in 2 pictures per part. And you can do a business card, or book cover (although, you’ll learn something more by picking something more challenging).
Assignment (Explore Contrast): Pick four things that are similar in some ways, but contrast in ONE way that you’d like to highlight. Different types of leaves that you found outside, characters in a book, icons on your phone, ideas about political structures, anything! Visually depict the contrast among them, while eliminating all other sources of contrast. The chosen contrast should be extremely clear to the viewer – you shouldn’t need to provide any text that explains it. We’ll talk more about this assignment in class.
Note that for part 1, we’re doing it online, and for part 2, we’re doing it as a Seek and Find.
If you want another two examples for the Contrast assignment…
