this project was the long-dreaded and little understood moment that still had me slightly fearful of this quarter at scad. fortunately, that dread and fear is now mollified. the project qualifications and parameters are as follows:

1. bring whatever art stuff (or craft stuff) you happen to have, including your normal art box of paint, pencils, pens, and some other more juvenile stuff like crayons, glue stick, etc.
2. bring paper, magazines, newspapers, type specimen books, you get the drift…
3. create a project with no parameters regarding medium, format, dimensionality, or specific style in a 1 1/2 hour time period, using no technological influences outside of a copy machine and/or polaroid camera

so, on to the actual experience. I went out to michael’s to buy some paint, since I assumed my gouache had dried up by now (it hadn’t). So, I bought several colors of sort of cheap acrylic paint, rubber cement, and other weird stuff like crayons and glue stick. I showed up at 9:00 this morning with a full art box, portfolio case, and other misc supplies. others arrived complete with a portfolio case and roller luggage full of stuff. the project topic was announced–create a visual narrative describing your personal design process, using whatever traditional methods/media/style at your disposal. also, use of type as communicative via language was not allowed, type was only allowable as texture or design element. we had written a paper describing our design process for last class, so this project was visually expanding on the paper we had written. i’ll attach the process paper and some other stuff to this post.

The project really went pretty well. I’ve not really planned, designed, and executed a project in a classroom setting like this, especially in such a restrictive time limit. It turned out to be a lot of fun, and really reinforced sticking to our own design process to solve a design/creative problem. Following the design/execution session, we did a class critique of all of the projects. She apparently liked mine, but didn’t really seem to dislike anything anyone else did either. She did remark that my project communicated in a clear and linear fashion my design process (which I thought was the goal). On the other hand, most of the other projects required a large amount of explanation, dealing with visual language, symbolism, and flow to even approach the project–to me, this seems a weakness, since the projects failed to communicate on a primal or experiential level. On the other hand, I think that is something that will be addressed in the redesign over the weekend.

So, what did I learn about design through this exercise? I think I was much more conscious of my design process as I worked through my solution. I can’t remember a project in recent months or years with a more tightly controlled process of brainstorming, thumbnails, roughs, and final mechanicals. Whether that will turn out to be a creative limitation or enhancement remains to be seen. Over the weekend, our task is to turn this project around in digital form, analyzing our process up to this point, summarize its strengths and weaknesses, and then redesign the project as necessary for class on tuesday. This process of creation/analysis/redesign/presentation will repeat every week for the next 6 weeks. Oh well, there goes my weekends.

design process paper

I will often speak of what good scad graphic design students refer to as “the process” or “my process”. the design process is at the heart of the grad graphic design program. Although you are encouraged to do thumbs, roughs, and type studies at BJU, they are not formalized stages or grading stages for a project. At scad, each project is to be accompanied by a process folder. This folder is a guide to the project at hand, including research printouts, sketches, thumbnails, roughs, type studies, color studies, initial mechanicals, and the final project. Throughout each project, the professor will look through this process folder to see what work you have done for the project. This also means that you cannot skate through some of the stages of the design process, because someone will be evaluating your process as well as your final project. As an organizational freak, I like the whole folder system, but it seems that it may be too formalized to deal with creative beginnings to a project. Also, I like to use my hardbound sketchbook rather than loose-leaf paper to do my initial sketches and thumbnails. I guess it will have to grow on me. So there you have it–the “process”.