The CreaTe Postcard

For Graphic Design our final assignment was to design a postcard to promote the Creative Technology curriculum. Last Friday everybody got the chance to show their design. The ones that stood out most to me were the postcard from Roman, who came up with an idea that very much resembles the design language used by the University of Twente, the postcard from Nick Byerly, who created a postcard showing that pen + mouse = pen tablet, and the postcard from Isa, who realised a postcard is not just a 2D object to look at but can also be used as an instruction to build something else.

This is what I created:

Front	Back

The idea was to show that our study is heavily based on cooperation with each other, so in the picture you see different people collaboratively working on drawing a human hand, using a brush as well as using code. To add another element of technology I included a robot hand (thanks for the tip Isa!) that is put together by two people. I tried to give the viewer the feeling that the back of the card really belongs to the front of the card and is not some random addition, so I used the same background for it. To make the text more legible I used a gradient from black to transparent on the left side and a gradient from white to transparent on the right side.

Concepts for the CreaTe postcard

On Tuesday we had to show our first proposal for the postcard we have to design to promote Creative Technology. Since this was our first assignment for Graphic Design in which we had to create something from scratch, it was a quite a daunting task. As a result, a lot of people were insecure about presenting their work or didn't want to present anything at all.

Nevertheless, there were some truly great concepts with much potential. I was most impressed by the designs of Inez, who had made a flower out of words (related to Creative Technology), Sharah, who had created a collage of products and items related to Creative Technology and Thomas, who made a collage of technical products with the word "Create" as a white shadow on top of it (see the fifth/sixth lesson header).

A smart way of presenting your concepts was provided by Tom, who only presented sketches and not fully fleshed-out designs. When you present your ideas in this way, you focus the viewers attention on the thought behind the picture, and not on the realisation of it.

Unfortunately, I hadn't presented anything as I was not quite sure what to draw, and I thought that my sketches were not in a presentable state. As I mentioned before though, I was not the only one who was insecure about my proposal, so at the end of the lesson some people had to come to the teacher to at least show their drafts because they hadn't present anything. Chris assured us that when you have to present a piece of work you have created from the ground up it will never be easy, but of course the only way to overcome this fear is to just do it. I hope to get more productive next week for the final presentation of our postcard.

Billboards

Yesterday, we had our fourth lesson of Graphic Design. The assignment for this time was to pick two photographs, and two infinite verbs, and put them in a 2x2 grid, like so:

Photo 1 / Verb 1	Photo 2 / Verb 1
Photo 1 / Verb 2	Photo 2 / Verb 2

It turns out that it is very difficult to find a verb that fits both images, and isn't just an obvious description of what happens in the picture, but enhances, changes or narrows down the meaning of the picture. When you have finally found the right verb, the hard work is not over though: you still have to pick the right design for the verb and the right place. When you don't pick the right place for the verb, it will interfere with the message of the image, or the verb won't be noticed at all. When "designing" the verb, you will have to take the following things into account: legibility (colour and brightness of the verb in relation to the background), typeface (must enhance the meaning of the verb) and size (the verb must be seen, but not cover up too much of the image). In the end you must also think about an interesting contrast between the first row (different pictures, same verb) and the second row in terms of meaning.

Designing in this way actually is somewhat similar to designing a billboard: you want to give a photo a new meaning by using one word (or at least the minimum amount of words), and the text has to be easy to spot, but not deduct from the meaning of the photo. You also don't want to confuse your audience, but instead the meaning of your visual language should be immediately clear, and it should tell the same story to everyone, instead of having a different message to every viewer.

The assignment for the next two weeks is rather exciting: we have to design a postcard that promotes the Creative Technology programme. The advice of our teacher was to sketch, sketch, sketch, cry, doubt and sketch again. Next week we have to present our first proposal. I'm looking forward to what everybody comes up with!

Enjoy your panic

The assignment for today's lesson of Graphic Design was pretty difficult: we had to choose a picture that we had affinity with. This picture had to be put in a 3x3 grid, constantly altering its meaning, like so:

Enhance the message of the photo	Change the message of the photo	Diminish the message of the photo
By adding an element	By adding an element	By adding an element
By taking out an element	By taking out an element	By taking out an element
By exchanging an element	By exchanging an element	By exchanging an element

We learned that it is very difficult to pick a photograph that is right for this assignment. Some photos are fine the way they are, and do not easily benefit from adding, taking out or exchanging elements, since it doesn't help to enhance their meaning. With these kind of photos, it is difficult to find the right element to add or take out. When adding or exchanging an element, you also have to be very careful not to alter the meaning of the photo when you only want to enhance it. For example, there was a photo of a woman leaning against a wall, apparently waiting for something or watching something. The person who showed this picture decided to add a bus stop sign above the woman to enhance the message. What he actually had done was deciding for us what the picture should mean. In the original, the viewer would wander what the woman is doing: is she waiting for some friend of her? Is she watching a fight? Is she looking at her children walking away? All those scenarios would have been possible with the original picture, but not in the "enhanced" version.

Another lesson we have learned is that it is very difficult to diminish or erase the message from a photo, because every visual object has at least some meaning. For example, when you have a picture portraying a man standing in front of a building, and you take out the man, the picture is still about the building, thus having a meaning.

Our teacher was glad that we had had difficulties with the assignment, and told us to "enjoy our panic", because it shows that graphical editing is not an easy task.To illustrate this, he ended the lesson with a lecture on the book he had created for Industrial Design. Some seemingly simple pages would take him three days or more to get exactly right. He had completed the whole book in 2 years time. This lesson really made me appreciate the layout of books and other forms of visual communication more, and it helped to open my eye to the small details that are present everywhere in graphical work just to make the visual presentation feel right.

Next week we have to combine our second assignment (which was to fix a letter in a typeface) with the current assignment. We have to choose two photos and two verbs and put them in a grid of 2x2. The result is two different photos with the same text on the first row, and those same photos with a different text on the second row.

The quick brown fox...

Today started with a discussion about the "We Create Identity" project. We eventually came up with the idea that you would meet a park manager in the interactive video, who asks you to decide how the problems with the park should be solved. The consequences of this choice will then be shown in a video. We also wanted to incorporate the concept "Enjoying Nature" and "The Power of Nature", for example by having a picnic in the park and by water surfing. Since we didn't quite know how to link those ideas, we decided that it would be best if everyone works out one (or more) of those ideas and then link all the best options in the end to create one coherent story. You can see the discussion about this project on our Google Doc.

In the afternoon we had a Graphic Design class, where everyone had to pick a font, look for a letter in this font that somehow doesn't feel right, and then correct that letter. This resulted in the observation that all typefaces follow a certain set of rules, and this exercise makes us look for the letters that don't follow the rules. In practice, however, we found that sometimes it is necessary to break the rules in order to make the typeface better: sometimes breaking the rules creates a certain identity for a typeface, at other times the typeface might become more legible by doing so, and in some cases it improves the balance between black and white in a printed text.

After most people had presented their work it was time for a lecture on visual language. We looked at several visual messages, identifying their meaning, judging how clear this came trough, trying to work out how you "read" an image and offering suggestions on how to improve those images. This lecture made it very clear that you have to take utmost care when creating a visual instruction. Viewers must be able to see what it means in a couple of seconds, there can be no ambiguity, viewing the image must give the viewer a feeling of comfort, and the image must respect the viewers knowledge and level of development by not having too much explanation of the message of the image. When you consider all those requirements, it becomes apparent that creating a proper visual message is not as simple as it might seem at first.

Following the lecture, there were a few more presentations of typefaces. At the end of the lesson we received the assignment for next week: we must pick a photograph, put it in a grid of 3x3, and add, remove or exchange elements from those 9 pictures. I will explain the assignment in more detail next week after the Graphic Design course. I will also update this post with my own fixed typeface at the end of the week, after I have used all the knowledge I have obtained today to improve my version of the typeface.

Tuesday

A post about a tuesday posted on a wednesday? Yes I should have posted this yesterday but I hadn't really decided what I would post on this blog: only things regarding the course "We Create Identity" or all Creative Technology related matter. I have now decided to do the latter, and because of that I still have to write a post about yesterday.

Tuesday started with the course "We Create Identity" but the teacher wasn't present. He kind of told us so on monday but it wasn't exactly clear whether we had to be at the university or not so I decided to go anyway. About half of the group was in the classroom, waiting to see if someone would show up to give us an assignment. When it turned out that this was not the case, most of us left to do something else. Others decided to play videogames or watch movies together. I decided that I wanted to use the time to prepare our course of the afternoon, Graphic Design. There was a PDF file on the Blackboard page of the Graphic Design course about, amongst other things, the development of our alphabet. I found this to be very interesting, also because I already knew some of it from the Greek and Latin courses in secondary school.

In the afternoon we had the Graphic Design course itself. It started with an introduction to the course as well as to the Creative Technology programme in general by the teacher. After that we had to look at photographs from each other. The person presenting the photograph would not tell anything about it. Instead, everyone in the audience was encouraged to say what association he or she had with the photograph. This resulted in the following observation: some photographs have a very clear focus. They tell the story of only one object. With these kinds of photographs, most people will agree on what it is about. Other photographs lack this clear focus, and as a result, everybody has a different association with this picture, because there is a lot of visual data available in the picture. Lastly, photographs can also be associated with something that is not actually visible on the photograph itself. For example, somebody showed a picture of her sister and herself sitting in the desert, wearing a sweater. For some people this picture represented loneliness, because no sign of human life can be seen anywhere around the two people on the photograph. For others this picture represented a contradiction: wearing clothing suited for a cold environment (a sweater) in a very warm environment (the desert). But to the girl who presented the photograph it brought back the memories of a happy holiday with her sister.






















This was the photograph I had intended to present to the class, but unfortunately there was not enough time to show all photographs. It is a photograph of my parental house in Driebergen, near Utrecht. In retrospect I think this photograph isn't very well suited for the exercise, because there are not a lot of different associations people can have with it. When you have a photograph that everyone has another way of looking at, you can discuss why each person has this association, and that is where things get interesting. Another flaw with the photograph is that I have associations with it that no-one else can have, because the memories I associate the picture with are not represented in the picture itself. If I had to choose a photograph for the assignment now, I would choose a photo that I like because of the atmosphere it has, a photo I like because of its aesthetics, rather than a photograph of an object I have fond memories of, because somebody who doesn't know what that object means to you will never have these memories attached to the photograph.

The next part of the lesson consisted of a presentation about various typefaces, and how they came into existence. It helped us to be aware of the aesthetic side of letters instead of just looking at their meaning. It was really refreshing to look at letters in a completely different way. I also liked the fact that the teacher himself was very enthusiastic about the subject.

Our assignment for the next time is to pick a font which you like. You have to find a problem with this font and present the fixed version to the class.