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.

so it begins!

despite this being the first blog of the rest of my life and all, i present it to you without any particular ceremony. it is here that i will be documenting my progress throughout the kcai graphic design program. thus far i have experienced one day of graphic design classes, a monday. it was a prototypical first day of school, complete with gut-wrenching nervousness and new notesbooks.

we were introduced to instructors, syllabi were looked over, academic dishonesty was heavily discouraged, and other necessary information was imparted. my classes on monday were color/form/production as led by kelly ludwig and level one typography by marty lane. each gave the genesis of this blog as homework.

the big department chat at the start of the day cut into kelly's class, so we dealt mostly with introductions and chose which black and white classic logos we wanted to use for our first project.

i chose nasa! reaching for the stars and all that jazz. we're about to redraw them, if i understand correctly. i will perhaps post a screenshot mid-vectoring because a final vector image exported to post online doesn't look any more impressive than the original jpg we're working from. oh well.

marty's typography class lent itself more eagerly to visual documentation that first day. we met the five fonts we'll be studying first. none of us really named them on the first go-round and we mostly looked very embarrassed about it once their identities were revealed to us. given that they are the namesake of our classrooms and all, they should've been a little more obvious. oh well, first day, we'll get there.

we spent time studying the lowercase "a" from each of those 5 typefaces, and learning to draw them, determining what made them distinctive and how to accurately replicate it. i did this very unprofessionally on lined paper with a pen. consequently, they're a little scribbly and a little smudgy. more apt supplies are required for the next class period. honestly, i'm probably going to bring some crayons? maybe. maybe something more unobtrusive, like pencils. maybe both.

in any event, some drawings of a's, no further ado

(postscript: the second day of school was pretty okay, too.)