Today’s plan:
- Project One Description
- Recipe Assignment (in groups, on Canvas)
- Homework: Reading and Presidential Poster Research Assignment
Quick Reflection on White Space Chapter One
I’m thinking we need to develop some more language for talking about design. Many of you talked about how an object became obsolete more than how it went out of style.
How do we get a sense for how things look? What are some places we think would have high end design?
Presidential Poster Assignment
Our first major project this semester asks you to design and print a presidential poster in Photoshop. You will then print the poster. Some basic nuts and bolts:
- You should design the image in photoshop with a 300 pixel per inch resolution
- The image should be 11×17
- You need to save your image as a .psd file (preserving the layers) AND as a .tiff file (for printing)
I want us to spend today talking about how to make a presidential poster: what methods can we use? what do components do we need to think about? how can we familiarize ourselves with the genre. To help start this conversation, I want you to team up with another person and come up with 4 different possibilities from the Gries reading (specifically, pages 135-145). We’ll share your lists in class and try to generate a heuristic to aid invention.
I also want to have a few links ready:
- Perhaps your design process could be informed by a 20th century philosophy (or images from these movements–what happens if you search for existential images?)
- 12 Presidential Posters
- Some more presidential posters
- inside.gov on Presidential slogans
- 50 iconic images of the 21st century
- 21st century paintings
- Top visual ads of the 20th / 21st century
And I’m thinking about this tutorial for Thursday’s class.
From class:
- Past influences, an inspirational image or tradition
- Street Art, guerilla art, the obey campaign, propaganda
- a philosophy (phenomenology)
- a photo, a pose of the candidate
- Consluting the campaign for logo, language, goals, etc
- Considering the background
- Color scheme, greyscale, ect.
Homework
Finish Gries chapter 6. As you read, be on the lookout anything that could contribute to developing a poster, anything that could aid our inventive process.
There is an assignment thread in Canvas called Presidential Poster Research. I would like you to take 45 minutes and start putting together material for your poster. You can collect links to sites (but please write a sentence or two per link *or more* about how this is valuable), images (or links to images), google searches for key terms or more material, campaign research, third-party research, research on design, typography, etc.
Note that you can and should use the material we generate in class today to help with this assignment. You can do the assignment directly in Canvas or you can do it in Google Docs or Microsoft Word and upload a file. The purpose of this assignment is to help you document your process and workflow, and to keep track of the time you invest in the project. Developing systematic ways of tracking your work, and vocabulary for discussing your design process is an essential part of growing as a professional writer.
NOTE: Please use tinyurl.com for long links. And please hotlink URL’s (using the chain icon, don’t just paste in a long URL).
