For this project, I animated a very basic happy birthday letter including a spinning gold ball and sparkle gifs. I chose to keep the graphics minimal.
When I previewed my animation, I noticed a lag in the interactions I setup (in the video I recorded, it takes a second for the happy birthday pop up message I designed to appear).
Overall, I saw a lot of potential with the software; it reminded me of a Rube Goldberg machine in that it was designed around ripple effects.
Today I attended a meta event for a virtual tour of Hegra, the ancient city in Saudi Arabia. Before entering the event, I customized my avatar, which started to connect this to video game experiences for me. Overall, I thought the experience was successful but similar to an educational video game, especially because I was the only person in the Meta space at the time.
My biggest critique of the experience was that features such as chatting were limited to paying customers, and I feel that the technology should be free at the moment to attract more users.
I think that the technology works as an entertainment tool / similar to a video game but has the added benefit of being web browser based. The idea of buying gaming consoles has always driven me away from computer games.
I don’t see this technology working as an advertising tool unless Meta spaces become more universal. New technologies like this can feel gimmicky to users including myself, so I don’t see why ads on the Meta space would be a successful alternative to ads on more mainstream platforms.
harrison cole
Inspired by the snow in Seattle on Wednesday, I chose to make my ar/vr animation approach the topic from a playful and less serious perspective. When the viewer uses the eyejack creator app to look at my photograph of snow, the words “Snow Day 2023” appear then are wiped away by snow-like imagery to reveal a smiley face.
Because I have previous experience creating gifs in Photoshop, I didn’t have any trouble with the project beyond 30 minutes of troubleshooting printer errors in the printlab. I enjoyed the project and thought it was a good opportunity to combine high tech with less serious, more playful visuals.
During the two years after I finished my undergrad degree as a fine art student, I set out to continue my practice as a visual artist and largely failed to meet my own creative expectations for myself. My goal was to produce a series of paintings/drawings, and over the course of the two years between undergrad and school at Seattle Central I only finished three paintings. Looking back on those two years, I have come up with three things that I could have done differently to push creative projects from the idea stage to execution stage. I learned to create a structured, written prompt explaining what my project is about and what I want to accomplish, growing connections with peers, and thinking critically about how to put the project out into the world.
Working from a self-created prompt
After working from assignments and rigid project proposals during much of my undergraduate career, I decided to spend much of my time improvising on the canvas instead of coming in with preconceived ideas about subject matter for my work. Although painting is a medium which benefits from happy accidents, I wish I had spent more time earlier giving myself direction in order to use the limited free time I had more effectively.
Growing connections with peers
I also wish I had reached out to peers more to critique my work and push me in new directions. I’ve heard advice in this program that networking and reaching out to peers or other people in the industry should be just as much of a priority as the coursework itself. In the future, I want to be mindful of the social nature of art and design work and work on being a good peer and supporter of others, because doing so helps me stay invested and curious.
Putting Projects Out into the World
When I was working on visual art after graduation, I didn’t have a plan for how the art would exist in the world. I feel that if I applied to more residencies and exhibition opportunities I would have gained more momentum with my project. As a graphic design student, I will be thinking about how to put work on the internet and use the work to apply to professional opportunities.
Top 3 hard skills:
-File management/organization
-Corporate writing: email, content writing, copywriting
-Creating Flexible systems
Top 3 soft skills:
-project/time management
-collaboration/adaptability
-decisiveness
Skill Summary:
I feel that the hard skills I mentioned, such as file management, corporate writing, and creating flexible systems, show that I am easy to work with as a designer. Short tasks such as naming files and layers efficiently, commenting out sections of code, and creating general systems at the beginning of projects allow others to work from my designs. Because these things are easy to forget in a fast-paced environment, my attention to these skills will make me a more efficient and helpful team member.
The soft skills I mentioned include time management, collaboration/adaptability, and decisiveness. Although one might conventionally think of adaptability and decisiveness as contrasting skills, I think they go together. I am good at being decisive and communicative about design decisions in order to work towards deadlines and plan projects efficiently, but I am also great at adapting when things don’t go according to plan.
Hard Skills I Hope to Develop at SCCA:
-Project Management Software
-Product Design Research
Soft Skills
-Public speaking
-Constructive critique
Developing Skills Summary:
During my time as SCCA, I hope to get better at using project management software and to learn more about product design/ux research. Because I often plan projects in a physical notebook, some of my planning can’t be shared with others immediately. I also feel that stronger research skills will allow me to grow more if I decide to pursue product design as a career.
I also want to get better at soft skills such as public speaking with confidence and providing and receiving constructive critique. I feel that being able to give constructive critique and talk effectively in front of an audience will allow me to gain a better understanding of whether my designs are effective and how I could grow my skills in the future.
While I am a trained and working visual artist in the media of painting, collage, and drawing, I have spent considerably less time on those interests while I’ve been a student at Seattle Central. Without creating any limitations for myself, I hope to set aside 30 minutes everyday to create a collage/painting. While I hope to include gestalt principles and things I have learned about custom lettering, I want to be completely experimental and open about what I end up producing.
For reference, I will include some artists and artworks that I’m currently looking at
jack whitten
Martin Wong
Jacqueline Humphries
Project Description:
For 60 days, I will set aside 30 minutes to create a collage using art paper, acrylic paint and drawing tools, handmade stencils, painting mediums and varnishes to create sheen and texture.
The goal will be to explore wildly and not feel a need to focus on output, defining subject matter, or even a specific scale for the works. Because I’m mostly going from sketch to computer as a designer, this will give me an opportunity to get back into working with materials to create imagery.
Timeline:
Jan 27–March 27, 2023. 30 minutes daily collage and painting.
Resources:
I would need to purchase more mixed-media paper, a set of acrylic paints, and continuously look for scraps of paper or other materials to work with.
Cost:
The project would cost approximately $100 for the visual art supplies.
I chose to create an image of cascatelli pasta, a pasta noodle with a beautiful curved spiral. Because the pasta has such an interesting texture, I wanted to use my interest in typography to create the letterforms out of cascatelli noodles. To create this image, I used Photoshop to edit out the background of a cascatelli noodle, created a brush in Illustrator using the image, and aligned the brush to the type and ornament. My solution uses vibrant color to highlight the texture of the pasta and give off a luminous feel.
During Abdul Kassamali’s talk about his experiences producing films, he brought up the need to pivot and change direction when real-life challenges presented themselves. As a student in the SCCA graphic design program, I’ve thought a lot about how to both set high expectations for myself and let go of perfectionism, which has prevented me from taking risks in the past. During fall quarter, my approach to many of the projects was to try out as many directions as possible, then commit to an idea and work intensely before the deadline. Even though I feel like this approach has allowed me to explore more and test out lots of ideas, I recently encountered issues which made me rethink my approach to managing deadlines for projects.
For Jason’s Indesign class, I found myself tasked with creating an illustration of a word made entirely out of letters from that word (I decided to make a hermit crab out of hermit crab words. I spent the whole weekend before the Wednesday due date exploring different options, but caught a fever on Monday that left me exhausted and concerned about the project, as I had tons of work to juggle and also needed to rest to feel better. On Tuesday afternoon, I took an hour-long nap then spent tons of time on two different reference images: one image of a shell which I had tried to render in a photorealist fashion and another on the hermit crab itself, which I had pulled from an Illustration. Because I had another assignment also due the next day, I gave myself a 9pm deadline to complete everything. I decided that the style I had used for the hermit crab could be used for the shell and take less time, then I created the shell and decided to simplify the crab’s body. While I wish I had planned for personal circumstances such as getting sick, I feel good about how things turned out.
