2. TODAY
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
Icebreaker
The Syllabus-questions?
Oh, C.R.A.P.
Design Task Zero: You’re in the Movies now
Homework

3. Icebreaker
For today I want you to tell us all your name and your
favorite visual artist.

4. Mine changes daily, it seems,
but for today I’m going back
to my childhood hero, Todd
McFarlane

5. The syllabus
For today, you should have read over the
syllabus and major assignments. At this
point, do you have any questions or
concerns? Ask away! Don’t be shy!

6. AND NOW SOME C.R.A.P.

7. As funny as it is…
… making CRAP jokes, it really is a foundational premise of
design, and it’s deeply important (and thanks to our sense of
humor usually quite memorable). The letters, of course,
stand for:
Contrast
Repetition
Alignment
Proximity

8. You read about it
So I’m going to give these to you in my words,
along with a few quick examples, so you can
get a good sense of how it works.

9. Contrast
Basically stated, contrast means that things that are
similar look similar but things that are different look
clearly different. This keeps your reader from
becoming confused and creating relationships that
aren’t present.
It comes, of course, from literal contrast, the light-to-dark
or black-to-white of an image. In design it often ends
up being about color values.

10. This image is
a great
example, and
it is also a
hyperlink to a
great blog
entry on
contrast, if you
want to learn

11. Repetition
Maybe the easiest of these four concepts to
define, repetition is, just as you’d guess,
repeating something– a color, a logo, a
typeface, a type style.
It unifies and organizes.

13. Alignment
Alignment is about positioning on a page.
Nothing should be put on haphazardly. There
should be a reason and a measurement that
guides where things are placed in relation to
each other.

14. The image to the right links
to a post that has some cool
reflection on alignment.
And there’s all
kinds of
alignment
going on with
the new
Windows 8
start page.

15. Proximity
Proximity is very similar in theory to
alignment, but it’s more about grouping and
use of white space.
Basically: similar things are grouped together,
different things require space.

17. Activity
You should, I hope, have been thinking about starting the InDesign tutorial. I want to stress that in this course we won’t be
spending the time to go over all of the In-Design basics, but I will
be taking you through some of the set-up as part of in-class
activities, and I will be glad to offer an outside of class session if
people want to come in for some intensive just-tech training time.
But make sure you are working on those tutorials. They matter.
Based on exit comments and evals, not doing those tutorials was
the big difference between success and failure for the last classes.

18. But today…
I want us to use our new-found knowledge of
C.R.A.P.– which you will read a bit more of– to do a
little really basic Photoshop work. What I need you to
do is gather the following, quickly– let’s take no more
than 4 minutes to do this.
1. A photo of yourself
2. A movie poster you like

19. The task
Is to put yourself into the movie poster. I will walk you
through one way to do it, on the overhead, but if you’re an
advanced Photoshop user, you will realize there are more
elegant alternative ways to do this. When you finish, post
whatever you managed to put together to your Tumblr. That
will require you saving as a png or jpg. I can show you how to
do that if you’re not familiar.

20. Homework
For Monday:
Read for class: Wysocki “The Multiple Media of Texts” and
“With Eyes That Think and Compose and Think,” as well as
Barthes “Rhetoric of the Image,” Benjamin “The Work of Art in
the Era of Mechanical Reproduction,” (all on Niihka) and Kress
“Reading Images”
Don’t forget your Tumblr post and design activity (both
due Monday night)!

21. Design Task One
Your first design task is to create a remixed movie poster.
This means, basically, take one movie poster and elements
from another (or from some other place) to turn it into
something different that makes some sort of new visual
argument.
I have posted this prompt and some examples to the course
website.

22. And…
Work on the
In-Design tutorial!