Hamper shelter: easy to fold down, super light, easy to cover with waterproof material, and covered on all sides. Insides made out of stiff wire, and easy to repair. I was thinking waterproof denim to keep it super durable…
Hamper shelter 1
Hamper shelter 2
Umbrella shelter can fold up for easy transportation, but doesn’t cover all sides the way the hamper does. We would have to work on that. Probably harder to make than the hamper, and not as easy to repair.
Umbrella shelter
These were all pretty much an experiment on how far Photoshop selection could take me, and I think that they turned out pretty well. The first two ended up being my final images, even though I really liked the last collage with all of the light posts. It just didn’t fit in with the water theme that I had with the other two images.
VISU digital collage
VISU digital collage
VISU digital collage
Miranda Petrosky’s presentation was the most useful for me, even though Lynne and Dustin Meyer’s presentations were both really interesting. The different categories of design really blew me away; I realized just how many options I had, but that I could only access these options if I really hone my skills throughout the next four years. I know that at the beginning of the year I was thinking about working at an advertising agency, and while that is still definitely an option, I may also try to get into a design agency such as Arts and Recreation, or Helm’s. Another idea that I took away from that presentation was to pick one or two things, and get really good at them, because specializing in a whole bunch of things will just make it harder to be thorough.
http://volunteer.sxsw.com/internships (the graphic design internship)
Since my Gestalt project focused around South Congress after the rain, my final two collages focused more on the theme of water, as well as the play on continuity and negative space creation. I “took” all of the images with their formal qualities in mind, as well as the perceptual qualities of water in the final two images. I liked interchanging between solid shape and abstract motion, much like you would see in ripples in a water puddle.
Trash scans
This project was the first project that I had in formatting a large amount of text into a book format. The challenge for freshman me was choosing a typeface and a size that kept all of the lines in my book from having weird ends or hanging words at the ends of paragraphs. The commencement speech I chose was particularly challenging in this because of all the rapping throughout the speech, which demanded that certain sentences had to be put on separate lines the way that phrases in songs would. This was a really good first project as far as formatting practice goes.
1. I think that I definitely related the most to Alex Roka, and not just because we share the same name. First of all, he was a graphic design student, like me, and he began to discover the different areas that he wanted to go into while he was in school: the illustration, and the graphic lettering. I definitely want to be able to narrow down my passions into that category that I am the most passionate about, and to pursue it in my career the way that he did. I really liked looking at the different designs that he made too.
2. The lady who came from Pump project…? She probably surprised me the most. She talked about doing all of these really cool things with all of these Austin artists, and she ended up where she was because of the hard work that she put into it. It wasn’t even paid at first, but she put so much time into it that at some point they began to pay her, and the obvious enthusiasm that she had for her work felt contagious. I guess she just surprised me with the idea that the longer you work at something, the more likely it is that you will be rewarded. No doubt she had a measure of talent to go with that, but the way she talked, she didn’t seem to rely on her talent too much, which also surprised me.
3. The most valuable piece of advice that I got from the alumni was probably that I should just try to learn as much as possible, because that’s what this time is for. I should try new projects by myself, even without a teacher telling me to do it in a project. I should also network while I can, and put my name into the world so that I’m not completely anonymous when I graduate.
I really enjoyed how Dan Philips started off with his project, by explaining his various houses, and what he’s done to make each one recycled and reused. I think that this was a brilliant segway into getting into his main idea: the sheer amount of waste in the building industry, that comes from this mindset in the global age of materialism where everything must be perfect. I loved hearing about the different things that he’s made, or what ideas he’s gotten, and by accessing his audience through this fascination that I personally felt, he is able to continue into the large problem area extremely easily. He makes it relatable for the audience.
He first explains that the housing market today is a commodity, because of the human perception of continuity. If one little thing in the house doesn’t align with that continuity, then it gets thrown out, and it’s no big deal; it doesn’t affect the buyer’s life at all. He also blames these two different mindsets for this waste: Dionysian and Apollonian. With the perfectionist Apollonian mindset, it creates “mountains of waste”, and this cycle of perfection where everyone wants these things that must look perfect or it’s garbage. Having a Dionysian mindset would create mountains less of waste, because it focuses more on the gut instinct that all of us have.
We also tend to create this wasteful cycle of perfection through our ideas of how we think other people expect us to live. This happens to everyone; we all in some way are bothered by how other people think of us, and so we try to live up to their imagined expectations. In reality, that’s impossible, but we still do it. I thought that this living up to expectations was a really interesting point in the cycle of waste. I’ve never thought of it as such before, but it makes perfect sense: if there’s something wrong with your house, you fix it so that your neighbors don’t talk about it. And that’s called waste. It’s a hard thing to move past, but if we want to fix our environment, we need to stop throwing away all of this material just because we can. The amount of consumerism that occurs globally only helps this cycle along, and so the only solution we really have at the moment is reusing all of that broken material. It’s there, what else are we going to use when it all runs out? We need to stop living up to each other’s expectations in order to preserve our global environment.
There were a huge variety of different points that were made throughout everyone’s different pieces, and I thought that a lot of them were really good, and connected in some way to my own work, particularly since the presentation of it was nowhere near what I had hoped. Overall however, there were several that kept popping up in multiple presentations, and so I believe them to be the most pertinent to the reflection.
1) Editing the grouping of all of the photos. I admit it, I did not give myself enough time to fully edit all of my photos. I was not the only one who wasn’t so great at editing though. Looking at all of the images together is really important to make all of them cohesive. It can have a lot of different purposes, like all of the different versions that I saw in many presentations, such as emphasizing a certain group of photos. Two pictures may work together to make each other stronger, or maybe some of the photos cannot be viewed without being grouped together, because when alone they are just too visually boring. Honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure how some of the photos were able to work together, but I suppose that that would really depend a lot on the viewer’s own aesthetic, and how well the images speak to each other.
2) Explaining your purpose is important. It gives the photographer the benefit of the doubt, particularly if they are able to articulate the different functions of their photograph well. A lot of presenters had some difficulty in talking about their work, including myself. The idea was to explain how each of the photographers took the theories of Gestalt and applied them to their photographs, and it was hard to define just how and what principles were at play within each photograph, or what allowed one group of photos to work when compared to other pictures. If anything, we as a group really need to learn how to speak about a larger idea that all of our pictures are trying to convey.
3) Composition of the photographs is really important during editing. Some people simply were too close in their frame, and were unable to see the big picture of the assignment in every photograph. Because of this, many of their pictures were disconnected, or simply claustrophobic. In some cases, the composition just wasn’t clear enough in displaying one type of Gestalt principle, and would have needed many more examples to get the point across.
Overall, I think there were some pretty great photos from everybody. If I were to change my own post though…
1. My greatest strengths in Foundation Art and Design include: creating new ways to view lines and circles in the projects, turning the projects in on time, adjusting to the critiquing done by my fellow classmates.
2. For greater success in this course, I need to: take more time to review my projects so that they result in my best possible work.
1. My greatest strengths in Samurai Secrets include: following the conversation and asking good questions.
2. For greater success in this course, I need to: practice the meditation that the class teaches more often, so that I can understand the material that we cover more fully.
1. My greatest strengths in VISU 1100 include: finishing all of my blog posts! Paying attention to the classes.
2. For greater success in this course, I need to: participate a little bit more in the huge class discussion parts.
1. My greatest strengths in VISU 1300 include: taking compositionally beautiful photographs of South Congress.
2. For greater success in this course, I need to: work on the grouping of my photos, and attempting more of the stuff shown in class that we never get to practice.
1. My greatest strengths in Theologies of Community include: participating in the discussion, paying attention to the important points that are brought up during discussion, and enjoying the overall fun of the class.
2. For greater success in this course, I need to: try to focus on a deeper reading of the assigned reading for class.
1. My greatest strengths in the Honors’ seminar include: paying attention to the particular points made by each weekly speaker.
2. For greater success in this course, I need to: ask more questions of the speaker in order to clarify their intentions or ideas a little more.
Computer skills:
Research & writing skills:
ACTION PLAN
VISU 13111:
1) Attempt the things we try in class more
2) Give myself more time to look over my whole project
3) Have more people critique my photos
4) DO EVERYTHING EARLY
5) Ask more questions during class
6) Pay more attention during lessons
7) Turn blog posts in earlier
8) Double check to make sure presentation is correct
9) Reflect a little more on the assigned reading
10) Ask if more revision is possible before the final grading
Part One:
This first picture from a project that focused on how to actually take a picture, focusing on the ideals of Gestalt. Containment was a huge element to the picture above, and I really liked how clear the picture came out in the reflection, and how the actual ground remained so out of focus. I tried to look at the different elements of Gestalt separately, finding images that contained more of one thing than another, and that clearly happened with the above.
This second picture came from my Foundation Art and Design class, where we had to study the different element of line, and play around with the effects that line could have. This was the finished product, although the beginnings of the project can be seen behind it. I mainly focused on the negative space that could be achieved with the multiple lines that I was given, and experimented with the sheer chaos of overlapping those lines.
Part Two:
1) The strongest aspect of my work from the Gestalt project was probably the actual composition of all of the images that I put together. I think that post-production turned out really well.
2) My weakest aspect is by far the images that I ended up grouping together in the final product. I definitely did not give myself enough time to properly edit myself, and I think my selections have suffered because of that.
3) I think if the final product is going to be a grouping together of images to demonstrate one compositional aspect, then I need to take photos whose compositions are all fairly similar. I don’t think that the pictures I chose were very similar in that regard; they all demonstrated the same principle, but in different ways, which draws away from their similarity.
4) Conceptually, it really could have used better grouping. That would prove my understanding of the Gestalt principles, and would have made the whole gallery of photos make more sense in relation to one another.
5) Technically, I think that the individual photographs themselves need more explanation. The layout of the gallery felt rather limited to me, but I don’t know enough about how the blog site works in order to change that.