in a staggering feat of time management

i finished tomorrow's homework before it even began to infringe on my sleeping! i promise you this is a thing to be commended: it's great strides for me and all.

yesterday's production class struck a beginning into adobe illustrator cs5, which is a cs with whom i am less familiar, but a program with whom i have grown up. we used the vector pen tool to redraw our logos, and then compared that to the results of illustrator's built-in livetracing tool, which we were then to tidy up a bit to make it usable as well. it makes me feel a bit old when i think about using illustrator back when adobe streamline was the only way to auto-vector. (and typestyler was how you warped your type, oh, typestyler was so endearing!)


i figured out the keystroke to get a nice screencap of my nasa in progress:  so many tiny stars!















so that's that, then. i've been charged with playing with the perspective tool and other things i have never experienced. i'm a little terrified. we'll see how that goes.

anyway, then we finally had visual communications class with jamie gray. first we drew 100 arrows in ten minutes. there were a handful of approaches to this problem... i took the path of trying to devise 100 separate, unrelated arrows, brainstorming without duplicating. as you might have guessed i did not get 100. it did not occur to me to shoot for the number by using repetition, or grouping. everybody's got different priorities, i guess... i hope my someday-clients are relatively specific about what is most important to them when they present me with real life problems to solve?

then we tried to convey concepts using only stickynotes stuck to walls... with moderate success. this segued into a discussion on abstract versus literal presentation of ideas, and how the simplest, most succinct and universal depiction is a very important thing to be able to figure out.

our assignment from there was to visually describe a handful of abstract concepts using only ten or fewer black circles. this began with 40+ thumbnail sketches and ended with 3 letter-sized compositions with cut black paper.

for this, i finally got a self-healing cutting mat. it was on sale. it is the most magical device i've seen in a while (no offense, macbook).

here's an action shot! and the final compositions.

it was difficult in places to determine if i was being literal or abstract in my thumbnails. sometimes maybe both? i'm going to be really curious for how critique goes. hopefully it won't hurt too badly.

well, i'll find out in a couple of hours, anyway.