Classes for Final Semester
Course registration for the spring semester began today. I was a bit sad the past few days realizing that the classes I chose were to be the last of grad school. There are still many courses that I would like to take. But alas… In addition to my thesis project and thesis paper, I am [...]
Design Fundamentals Is Over
Once again Friday brings the end of a project-driven week, and a big sigh of relief. The difference between this Friday and the last five is that next week there is no new project to work on. The design fundamentals course is over. We’ve got two weeks off before fall classes start. I’ll be doing [...]
Where Is My Mind?
It’s 1:04 a.m. and I’m listening to KEXP’s streaming archive of John Richard’s morning show. Now playing: Where Is My Mind by the Pixies. I love it. Three Hundred and Six That’s how many photos I took for the photo project. At this point I can’t remember what the actual assignment is. There were two [...]
Photographing My Classmates’ Homes
I spent the last several hours traveling around Squirrel Hill and Shadyside invading my classmates’ homes to take photographs for our project this week, which is due Friday. I’m not exactly sure what I will do with these photos. One of my classmates gave me a great idea, but sadly after I had taken 130 [...]
Photographing Scars
I’m going to skip over what we did today in class, which was essentially reviewing the pairs of photos we took yesterday, and jump right into tonight’s assignment: On photographing a person; and, on being photographed. We had to write about the experience, so I’m going to include that in it’s entirety because it’s after [...]
Photography Week
It’s the final week of the design fundamentals summer course. In some ways it feels like we’ve been doing this course for ages. And then, as always, there’s that feeling that it went by too quickly. This week we’re studying photography with Charlee Brodsky. As stated in this week’s syllabus, “We will look at, discuss, [...]
Illustration Week Wrap-Up
Our five-day drawing bonanza ended with empathetic form. In our case, that meant drawing our own hand. As usual, Mark was there to help. And I needed it, as I have a hard time figuring out how to portray the dimensions of shapes such as the hand. This week was the most fun for me. [...]
Amorphic Space
Today we drew organic shapes, what Mark referred to as amorphic space. He asked us to start by drawing a sphere within a cube, which was kind of funny because he told some of us yesterday that it was an exercise he did with his undergrads for weeks that drove them crazy. Was he trying [...]
Rotational Space
As has been the case every week of the design fundamental course, each day we are forced to make leaps due to the time constraint. This has been working out so far, even though it always seems like a stretch when presented with the new task. Today we launched into drawing 3D objects. We first [...]
Fat Space
Today, we tackled fat space, or cubic space. And the first thing we learned, after being asked to draw a cube, was that 90 percent of the class and likely most of the populous has an unrealistic idea of what a cube looks like on paper. Simply put, what you would likely draw as a [...]
Drawing 101
I don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t recall ever being able to draw well. Last year I started reading Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I enjoyed the reading and psychology part, but I found the drawing part rather laborious and other things began sucking up my time until I stopped. One year later, I am learning to [...]
Information Design Week Wrap-Up
This week was not as intense as the past couple weeks, which was a nice change. Part of that had to do with us not starting to actually create our change of address forms until Thursday. Despite only having one day to turn it around, everyone turned in quality work. It was impressive to see [...]
Deceptively Weak Thumbnail Sketches
Today Bob critiqued our thumbnail sketches. Mine were pretty bad in retrospect. Bad in the sense that they didn’t look like much time or thought went into them, which is true for the time part. However, as it turns out, I followed my thumbnail sketch for my final production. Mine were full scale: 10.5 x [...]
Redesign USPS Change of Address Form
Yesterday my group and I wandered about CMU campus looking for people to fill out the US Postal Service’s mail forwarding change of address form so we could see what types of problems people have. The idea was to use the information we gathered to inform the redesign of the form that each of us [...]
Candle Holders
Candle Holders So here is a shot of the candle holders I made during week two of the design fundamentals course. I don’t have any tea lights at the moment, so I couldn’t light them up. Again, these are made out of paper and were required to fold flat so that they could fit in [...]
Information Design Week
This week we’re exploring information design with Bob Swinehart. Today we talked broadly about information design, and defined it as designing to help people understand information. And while that makes sense, it also has the feel of defining interaction design as “designing for interaction.” Though I do like the simplicity of both. Our project for [...]
Playing it Safe
While I was quite happy with my poster yesterday, today is just seemed okay. I had a suspicion that it was too safe. It worked well, but I felt like I didn’t really push myself. Type Poster Stacie essentially confirmed my suspicion when I asked her. She also commented that I seem fairly familiar with [...]
Type Poster Complete
It’s amazing how each week we go from nothing to a full-blown production. On Monday it seems implausible that we will actually accomplish the task given to us. This week I went from arranging magazine cutouts on an 8×11 piece of paper, to arranging an 11-page document on a 30×72 poster. Last week I could [...]
Struggling to be a Designer
I had a talk with Stacie today about how I believe my experience is keeping me from taking risks. I have realized over the past few weeks that even when I do take a chance, I often do not submit that for critique. And I find that troubling, since school is exactly the place to [...]
Grid Systems Project
Our project for the week is to use supplied text in the context of a large poster (30″x72″), a book, or a website. Because I have lots of web experience, I was not allowed to choose the website, so I chose the poster. The supplied text is about 10 pages, so putting all that content [...]
Communication Design Fundamentals
This week of my design fundamentals course at CMU Stacie Rohrbach is introducing us to communication design. Stacie gave us an overview of grids, fonts, and legibility versus readability. A point I found interesting was that for three of the four types of grids (manuscript, column, and modular), Stacie said you can set up the [...]
Paper Candle Holder Complete
A little past midnight Thursday I had a breakthrough with my paper candle holder design thanks to my resistance to using tabs and finding inspiration in an upright paper grocery bag in the corner of my kitchen. ?¢‚Ǩ?ìWait, that folds flat,?¢‚Ǩ¬ù I realized (a requirement). The final design was simple, but elegant, and could go [...]
What Can Paper Do for You?
Paper is pretty neat stuff, once you start to mess with it. And that’s exactly what I’m doing, and have done for a lot of today, mess about with paper. I’m looking to use some translucent paper that’s a bit like plastic for my candle holder, which has been slow in coming. But I keep [...]
Lesson About Cubes
Ever try to make a cube out of paper? It?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s hard. Add requirements like it must have three-inch sides, fit flat and disassembled in an enveloped, someone should be able to assemble it easily, and the cube should stay intact after assembly, and you?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re talking hours of frustration. That?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s what we did today. We made [...]