Month: October 2014

Here we were assigned a map of St. Edward’s. Personally, I spend most of my time on campus because of my double major. Much like the coffee shop map, I wanted to map out where I could go on campus for either work or leisure. My choropleth, or informational layer, was where I worked, where I relaxed, or both. Because JBWS ended up being a mix of both, I added a floor breakdown of my productivity.

I made the structure 3D with crooked lines because I wanted to have a fun style. I settled on shades of green for my roads as my base color. I was trying to avoid using white again. I selected pink for work because of it’s intensity, and yellow for leisure because of it’s position on the color wheel near pink and its mellowness. Originally, I did not have the gradient key in the top left. The key was in the subheader with the bolded and colored words “work” and “leisure”. After a few critiques, it was obvious this key wasn’t enough, so I added the gradient key as well. Buildings that I don’t venture into were left very neutral so the choropleth could have extra emphasis.

Logic played a large part in this assigned because we were making language and sometimes avoiding existing language references. Because I had not done an activity like this before, it took some getting used to.
First, we picked out our symbols, three traced, three stylized, and three abstract. The traced and stylized objects had to be somewhat tangible. The abstract seemed to be mostly adjectives.

Next, we spliced together iterations. This was weird. Combining abstract and traced symbols seemed forced because I wanted something realistic, not weird and spliced. It took me until the next round of iterations to realize that I was supposed to go crazy mad scientist and create a new, unique symbol cyborg.

I finally started getting the hang of it, although I felt like my original symbols almost started holding me back because I hadn’t had as much direction when I was first creating them.

Finally, we got to our last iterations. I’m happy with the process. In the end, I learned the basics on how to create a good symbol. My results were appropriate for a sophomore who just started symbol making, I feel that I succeeded in regards to the purpose of the assignment.

A rubric would judge heavily on process. It would be good to measure improvement between iterations. It may also be helpful to judge mastery of the pathfinder tool in Ai by how well the vinyl cutter versions came out.

I would also like to note that many beautiful symbols had strong symmetry. I will try this in the future.