18th Class (Last Blog)

Well we went over what we needed to do over the final project again today. I think it's finally starting to sink in that I gotta do all this stuff. It is interesting how this final project is completely unlike anything I have ever done before, involving a CD, Youtube video, and a postcard of all things. It is indeed a challenge and I do so hope that I pass this class at the end of the quarter. I do hope I have the resources to sort it all out. Not to mention I still have to film my video still, on top of everything else, while juggling all my other finals.

Jimmy Moss also went on a great deal about having the distinctions between fine art and graphic design, however, since he’s given this lecture so late into the project, I think it’ll be to late for many projects to fix, and most videos will be about fine art. This would have been a fantastic topic to think about at the beginning of the project when were planning things out. Oh well.

In the last week of school, I'll try and be as relaxed as I can, despite being more stressed then ever, cause it's vacation right after Tuesday. Also, been going over the self-assessment in my head and it doesn't look good for me at all. Guess the winds of fortune will help me pass this class, and not all my work. And my word do I have a crazy list of adjectives.

Luminous – Bright or shining in the dark. Or glowing with health and vigor.

Myriad – Countless, extremely great in number.

Harmonious – Forming a pleasant whole.

3-8-12 (17th Class)

Talked about Inception in class.  A great example on how a single idea could be the entire idea behind the movie, even the plot!  Jimmy Moss pointed out that the design brief was probably very vague which I thought was very insightful.  I do feel like I am learning things about the graphic communication profession, the pros and cons.

I also like that we discussed the AIGI student portfolio poster, which I never really liked.  Penguin with bling in a land of bubbles and rainbows?  WTF…  I’m glad it wasn’t a session of praising AIGI but rather an analysis like we had in the first week, seeing if the communication was there.  I also think in my opinion is that the demographics in the brief probably listed that the audience was mostly women, which lead to the poster made mostly exclusively towards woman.  When I saw the poster for the first time, it was very noticeable because it was so bright, but my instinct kicked in and I ignored it when I saw those rainbows and bubbles.  Student portfolio day isn’t Girl’s Day or Girlz only, and really should have been gender neutral.

Also, I’ll take the talk about Metro seriously and look into it more.

Taciturn – Silent by nature.  Reserved or uncommunicative in speech; saying little.

Succinctness - Expressed in few words; concise; terse.

Passive - Accepting or allowing what happens or what others do, without active response or resistance.

3-6-12 (16th Class)

Wow, writing this blog is going to be a tad difficult as the lecture went on without my notepad, so it’s kinda fuzzy.  In fact, I don’t really remember it all, shame I could get my notebook handy.

We also split into groups to do the 1, 10, 11, 100, sequence, and to find and explain what the next number would be.  In the end we did have some trouble working together as a group because we had large trouble building a consensus.  While I think I had a good idea and a clear way to explain it, I just couldn’t get it through with the group, and our presentation suffered for it, but at the very least we agreed to do that in the first place.  Maybe we lacked a leader in the group the keep order?

Later after class there was an interesting talk with the professor about the video project.  I hadn’t realized that the majority of the population of the school was Latina.  Also that the class had an unusually large amount of males in it, even though the girls still outnumber the guys by a margin.  I was also giving excellent tips on have a sort of tagline or motto, and for it to be proactive and positive.  I’m still not entirely sure what the second half of my video should be, but I have a direction for it, if not a concrete plan.

 

Focused – The state of maximum distinctness or clarity of such an image

Naturalistic- Imitating or producing the effect or appearance of nature

Revolutionary- radically new or innovative; outside or beyond established procedure, principles

3-1-12 (15th Class)

Watched the Maeda TED Talk in class, it was fairly interesting.  Learned that Wurman started TED talk, and I think I’ll visit the website sometime in the future for some of the interesting lectures.  I also learned a very important fact that the average human’s attention span is only 19 minutes.

The speaker himself talked about simplicity vs. complexity.  He seemed to be tired of simplicity and touted the perks of complexity (ie, sunset with clouds).  It seemed to me that Maeda just wanted graphic communication to return to the complexity of the 50’s.  Personally I think that simplicity and complexity work great together so long as you have a powerful contrast between the two.

I also thought it was interesting how designing phonebooks was good way for fresh students to enter the field of Graphic Design.

After that it was 10:00am, and it time to join the WALKOUT!

Saturated – 1. Unable to hold or contain more; full. (Fine Arts & Visual Arts / Colours) (of a colour) having a large degree of saturation

Desaturated - formed by mixing a color of the spectrum with white

Sopping - Saturated with liquid; wet through

2-28-12 (14th Class)

This was the class where we went over everything and anything we ever did in class.  Then we talked amongst ourselves for 2 hours.  Jimmy Moss put up the remaining schedule in a sort of visual graph which did indeed do spectacularly in helping me block out the remaining time I have left this quarter.  Oh and the list of great many things we went over this winter are:

Perception,

Brainstorming

Game vs Test

Teamwork

Critical Reflection

Mapping

Methodology

Presentation

Critical Evolution

Evaluation

Judging

Storyboarding

Visual Interpretation

Visual Literacy –(example: To read a picture)

Meaning

Analysis

Project Brief

Emotional Motivation

Salesmanship

Descriptive Language

Innovate

Punctuality

Professionalism

Networking

Critique + It’s Purpose

Growth

And Socializing, but that doesn’t count because it’s the same as networking.

As for the discussion about videos, I have a feeling that it might lose points for being so dark since the overall message is suppose to be positive.  I would still like to continue with my idea, because I like it enough, consequences be damned.

Also a note to myself: The credits on the video will look like:

Designed by Steven Steigerwald

Art 220 Concept Development course at Cal State La

Winter, 2012

Entropy – A doctrine of inevitable social decline and degeneration.

Ephemeral – Lasting for a short time.

Ephemeral Art – Temporary mediums, like drawings in chalk, or on a whiteboard with dry erase markers, or sand drawings on the beach. 

2-21-12 (12th Class)

Felt like this class didn’t have a plan.  Half of it was a team building game of ridiculousness.  The beginning was interesting as we discussed the GAGE speaker no holds-barred.  Frankly I’ve already wrote a paper discussing the speaker so there really no reason to write a blog about it.  The game itself I suppose was a commentary on working together as a group.  Seems like our group just didn’t cut the mustard in the end had to give up.  Not very inspiring ending.  I’m not sure what else to write about because that was the entire class.  The game was very repetitive and the speaker discussion was jut another part of something I’ve already written. 

2-16-12 (11th Class)

We finished giving our presentations this class and that was pretty much it.  Since I went last week there really isn’t much to say apart from some presentations.  I did catch some flak for commenting on the chess? Game because his presentation was similar to my own, even though I didn’t like his.  I’d argue that that presentation was vague, all over the place, with a good idea mixed in there somewhere.  Starting off funny is all well and nice, but if you don’t sell your idea, that’s all that someone is going to remember, and I didn’t like that his presentations was mainly just bashing the concept of chess.  Certainly would have been a great presentation if he bashed “standard” chess to sell his idea, but it didn’t come off that way, instead more like “chess is stupid, so I thought I’d do some things to it, but seriously, chess is stupid” which just rubbed me the wrong way afterward.

I did like the end of the class where we discussed and looked at some concept briefs.  It was insight into the inner workings of graphic design and I feel less intimidated at having one of these jobs if my instructions are so clear.  It’s hard to communicate a complex and detailed message if you always just “wing it” like I thought you were suppose to do.  I had fun writing my brief, though I didn’t have fun writing the GAGE SPEAKER EVENT paper, mainly because the speaker actually made me feel guilty at taking notes of her event.

I’ve noticed I’ve been writing very cynically lately, and I wonder why.  Can’t be healthy to be so negative and pragmatic…hopefully something will cheer me up soon.

2-14-12 (10th Class)

So in the blogs we’re supposed to have to come up with at least 3 adjectives.  No where in the syllabus

instructions about blogs is the word “adjective” even mentioned.  So I guess I’m playing guessing games with this blog.  What will be missing from this blog this time?  Anyway, this class was just presenting our presentations.  Though, my presentation board was rather shabby, lacking the crispness of other boards.  I tried to spice up my actual presentation to the class, but I have no idea if this would improve my grade an anyway.  The professor said it was good, but I still don’t know if that means anything, because we may just doing practice.  Uncertainly sucks.  Oh wait, I mean uncertainly is “distasteful”, because I got to have a fancy vocabulary.  Oh, and even though I presented already, I got to bring my board bulky board back again, if I have to lug it around my other 2 classes again, I’m going to be “aggravating”

So what to say about other people’s presentations?  Lot of shyness.  I can’t help but understand, I too have a pretty bad case of stage fright.  I’ll admit, when we were critiquing, his mentioning of the need for constructive criticism is something I agree with wholeheartedly.  I’m tired of people just saying something was good or bad and being very non-descriptive.  I assume their trying to spare someone’s feelings, but still, you don’t learn anything if you don’t address the problems.  Course I don’t know if this exercise actually has any purpose, because it there is no grade involved, it’s completely  “superfluous” as my art class takes time out to be a speech class, despite the fact that I already did a speech class last year. 

2-9-12 (9th Class)

Not much to say about this class either. 

The entire class consisted of presenting our 9 game ideas in front of everyone.  Saw a lot of ideas, though oddly most were complex in a way that was boring.  Not enough simple ideas.  Also, the professor was pretty hard the people who had less then 9 ideas.  Frankly it was hard to get 9 idea, and a lot of mine were junk ideas because there really was not enough time to think these things up.  I feel these people who really didn’t get to present their ideas will have sub-par projects as a result of the lack of feedback.  I guess it’s nice we’re getting feedback from the professor this time...

Also, minor grip.  It’s annoying having to do a project of one of our ideas when we turned in our sketches.  I had to rewrite the rules from scratch and I’m sure I forgot a few.  Nothing having the sketch with me sure slowed me down on this project.

2-7-12 (8th Class)

Not much to say about this class.  We all brought games, and we played them.  Learned I'm not that shabby at chess.  The homework however, 9 orignal ideas for games, is going to be tricky...

2-2-12 (7th Class)

So, spent the first hour of class trying to name a boring pie chart while the Professor looked for a projector.  Wasn’t a waste, but I probably should have gotten breakfast and came to class slightly late.  After the professor found the projector we did watch a truly interesting video by Sir Ken Robinson, where he discussed our archaic education system.

I do think it was an interesting commentary about how people don’t discover what they are actually good at or love to do, causing a life crisis.  Talent is buried deep and education isn’t designed for finding talent.  He equates our current education system to fast-food.  Standardized, and of reasonable quality, but impersonal, and completely lacking in innovation.

I also found the segment of him talking about removing tonsils being in fashion way back when, and no longer, and equating it to the ADHD phenomenon.  I can attest to that as a first grader, I was given A.D.D. drugs cause my first grade teacher said I needed to them.  Even though I never felt the drugs do anything, I was taking this damn medication all the way up till middle school.  Certainly the message that there was something wrong with me didn’t do my self-esteem any favors, and in fact to this day, it still pretty low.

1-31-12 (7th Class)

Another morning class today, but then again, I should expect no different, it’s a Tuesday.  And the day got started with the thrilling topics of mapping.  Cartography, pie charts and statistical mappings, wow, with such intense topics, it’s a wonder I could keep my eyes open!

Later on we were treated to a Design Process Model that resembles something like that you’d see in a computer chip.  Something about how the analytical research stage generates the ideas, the concept development filters them and refines them, and the Design + Production process is the refinement of the best idea.  After that came a study of the syllabus, then we were given in hour at the end of class to make a process map with vague instructions.  I admittedly liked this because this meant I could goof off on my laptop while researching process maps online.  With some time management, I was able to complete the assignment minutes before it was due, while not feeling stressed at all.  Ingenuity and laziness go so well together…

I am annoyed at the homework being another Process Map being I had already researched them doing the first one, the second one will end up no different…

1-26-12 (6th Class)

Went through the day with only 3 hours of sleep, so it's a tad murky.  Picked 10 different headlines for a random picture picked by the group. Definitely learned that a group is better at picking titles that provoke a wildly different emotion. Rarely did a single person pick more then 4 good titles. The professor did come around with a blank coffee cup and ask for a title for a the craft arts of school, to show how many ideas we could come up with.


Also a random honesty test came and I voted to not want to participate...and won?  Well at least it wasn't your standard test.

The class concluded discussing the topic of Methodology, and about our own creative process. Homework was to think about it even further, which was interesting. This conversation would probably continue next class.

1-24-12 (5th Class)

So let’s see, this last class mostly revolved around that video by Elizabeth Gilbert (writer of Eat Pray Love) that she did talking about writers and how they were perceived by the general populace.  Mostly it was talk about the crushing pressure of being a writer, and about the expectations of failure that she had.  Overall she confirmed that the pressure exists and she does examine that society’s stereotype was vastly different then say, expectations of a chemical engineer.  I think she was being very frank, about her success being freakish and the perception of pressure, it wasn’t some sugar coated pep talk about the future and the keys to success, instead being more casual.  Perhaps that was the theme of the class, casual, rather then sharp deadlines, are the keys to creativity.

Other notes about the class: I was kind of disappointed with was our pictures project where we took random pictures and formed a story with them.  We had 4 groups and when all done, only one group got any critique, everyone else wasted their time.  I also thought coloring the comics (the homework from the class before this) was a waste of time as not even a single word was said over them; we just turned them in at the end of class for a grade.  I should have spent less time coloring them…

1-19-12 (4th class)

I'm a little late posting this blog, but oh well.  As I recall, the professor talked about having to shift gears because he teaches 3 classes, and each classes are different.  Ok, not so different then perhaps a student taking several classes, very understandable.  This class in particular seemed to be about team work and evaluation.  Without context, we were supposed to evaluate everyone’s comics (the homework assignment) and rank them from best to worst by ourselves.  This was a mixed bag, as we seemed to get the system to work, till it broke down at the last second.  There was a lot of room for improvement, but you could only tell them from hindsight, as I said, everything started without context.  Going from anarchy to efficiently ranking 26 pieces of art wasn’t all together that bad.  Sure there were problems, like say only the confrontational people were heard (like me).  The entire time we were rating, no one really got any feedback or constructive criticism, and we botched the decision on who got first place.  I suppose we did learn about what to look for in art, such as the idea, the presentation, the clarity, storyline or the just the amount of effort put into it.  Though, I thought the colored comics were overrated.

1-17-12 Class (3rd class)

The class did start with a concept I had already heard of, "Gamifying Education" Where contrasts were put between games, and the 18-century Prussian Education model.  Games are fun, and rewarding, tests are stressful and punishing, naturally, people do not enjoy tests as much as games.

Also viewed a family photo of the Professor’s and attempted to use visual analysis (like a CSI might) without making conclusions.  Also the Professor the theory that it was possible was photo shopped, and not an authentic 60’s family photo.  Why some good points were made about the ability of Photoshop, the reason I don’t buy it is simply motive.  There would be no reason to hire models, dress them up in 60’s clothes, put them in an awkward pose with an old background and crop the picture to be crap.

Also talked a bit about color theory, mostly about the color red, nothing really new to me, except for the fact about Fast Food logos.  Never realized that most of them were red.

The Second Class

A fortunate day as I learned that I got added into the class.  Also I learned how to add a class.  Also learned some back history of the professor (giving up a high paying job for one for half pay with worse hours) perhaps leading to the implication that adversity leads to better art.  Less pay and more work leads to better or at the very least, more creative art.

Also a class tip taught was that one should always have the end goal in mind when creating something.  I normally try and apply this to my art but often I'm told I'm thinking too far ahead.  Guess this tip really is just a matter of opinion. 

I'm unsure if I should get a laptop, never had one, and I'm afraid to spend a good deal of money on something I might not use much since I have a desktop at home.