Education, Graphic Design

Exercise 02.04: Symbolic Gesture

Jason W. Howell
January 1, 2019

Goal

The goal of this exer­cise is to develop an aware­ness of the level of sim­plic­ity needed to com­mu­ni­cate iden­ti­fy­ing information.

Objective

The objec­tive of this exer­cise is to dis­cover the min­i­mum iden­ti­fi­ca­tion needed for tran­si­tion­ing from actual image to rep­re­sen­ta­tive shape and finally geo­met­ric form that explores the extreme bound­aries of pre­sen­ta­tion and mean­ing of liv­ing creatires.

Background Reading

Exercise

Choose a crea­ture from the fol­low­ing list: bear, boy, cat, chicken, cow, dog, eagle, ele­phant, fish, girl, man, mon­key, pig, snake, snail, woman

Part One

Find sev­eral images of the cho­sen crea­ture. Look for var­i­ous posi­tions, per­spec­tives, con­trast lev­els and light sources. Open the images in Adobe Pho­to­shop and adjust the image until you are happy with a sil­hou­ette. Use mul­ti­ple images and make any adjust­ments to cre­ate a com­pos­ite form with depth and vol­ume implies by ges­ture, over­lap or shadow. Ulti­mately, your image should con­sist of black and white only, no grays. Trace the image(s) in Adobe Illus­tra­tor and clean up as nec­es­sary. Keep it fairly quick and simple.

Part Two

Reduce any por­tions of the image to min­i­mize com­plex­ity of detail and “styl­ize” the figure.

Part Three

Finally, reduce this image to a series of geo­met­ric shapes and using a Carte­sian grid (30°, 45°, 60°, 90°) to keep shapes consistent.

Cre­ate a PDF from the files and deliver it to the appro­pri­ate D2L Dropbox.

Alternative Solution Using Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The abil­ity to adapt any and all avail­able tools to solv­ing design prob­lems is a key skill for design­ers work­ing into the future. This par­tic­u­lar course require­ment can be done using AI appli­ca­tions, but with the fol­low­ing restrictions:

  • Any pro­gram must be used for devel­op­ment pur­poses, and not intended to pass off as orig­i­nal stu­dent work.
  • The role of the AI tool must be clear, the ratio­nal for its use noted and prop­erly cited per pro­fes­sional guidelines
  • The same steps, parts and inten­tion­al­ity of the require­ments should be fol­lowed, includ­ing “sketch­ing” or process development.
  • Doc­u­men­ta­tion of appro­pri­ate prompts and in-process solu­tions (ie rough drafts) is required as part of the sketch­ing, ideation and brain­storm­ing assessment.

Assessment

  • The fol­low­ing rubric posted on D2L will deter­mine exer­cise score: Exer­cise Grading

Materials

com­puter, soft­ware of choice, web browser

Deadlines

As defined by cor­re­spond­ing cal­en­dar item, drop­box, dis­cus­sion or con­tent topic description.