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Intro to GIMP and Visual Design

Work to have achieved:

  • Read about graphic design principles (positive/negative space, dominance & hierarchy, rhythm & movement)
  • Find a graphic or visual design that makes a claim or argument
  • Analyze the designed artifact through the lenses of graphic design principles.

Plan for the day:

  1. Building our vocabulary (5-10 min)
  2. Using our vocabulary (10-20 min)
  3. Introduction to GIMP (15 min)
  4. Practice time (30-45 min)

1. Building our vocabulary (5-10 min)

A bunch of new terms! Let’s try to annotate these – just a few key words each - so we know we’re on the same page. Head on over to bit.ly/cdm2019fall and jump down to “Keywords toward a Visual Rhetoric.”

  • Visual Dominance
    • Scale
    • Value
    • Color
    • Style
    • Proximity
    • Density
  • Visual Rhythm
    • Repetition
    • Pattern
    • Flow
  • Positive and negative space

2. Using our vocabulary (10-20 min)

Let’s look at some strong examples of design from the forum, to get a better handle on how they’re making an argument through visuals.

Possibilities:

For each, ask:

  1. What does this image want us to do or realize?
  2. What arguments is it making?
  3. How does the design function in terms of…
    • positive and negative space: Is the negative space significant here?
    • dominance and hierarchy: What has the most visual weight? Second-most? Is there a third level? Beyond? Is there a unity of design?
    • rhythm and movement: How does your eye move across the image? Does it come to rest, or keep moving? Why?
  4. Would you say the artifact is effectively designed for making the arguments we’ve identified?

3. Introduction to GIMP (15 min)

I’ll demo, using “Fly Me to the Moon, by Way of a Hot Air Balloon” (2009) by Beverly & Pack, on Flickr. CC-BY-2.0.

Points to hit:

  • Single window mode
  • Lots of selection tools
    • Quick Mask to help see what’s currently selected
  • Pay attention to the tiny text at the bottom: shift, control, alt can modify how the tool works.
  • Extracting objects from background.
  • Paste Layers.
  • Layers! Of course layers
  • Clone tool; tool settings window
  • Scale layer, and why it’s often one-directional. (Rasters vs. vectors.)

4. Practice time (30-45 min)

Option 1: take your profile image and an alternative background you find online (use that fair-use search tool) to put yourself in a new location.

Option 2: take the image you found for homework and alter it to get a better understanding of how its parts add up to a greater whole.

Homework for next time :

  • Read about fonts at https://www.canva.com/learn/font-design/.
    • Optionally, play a font-matching game at http://www.typeconnection.com/ to get a sense of (a) what sorts of fonts are out there and (b) how designers go about pairing fonts for what Thompson (in the reading for today) called hierarchy by “style.”
  • Choose at least two tutorials from gimp.org/tutorials, and practice what they teach. For beginners, GIMP Quickies and Simple Floating Logo are probably good places to start; Layer Masks is probably intermediate; and you can get quite advanced as you scroll down the page.
  • Review the resources page, this time with an eye toward visual resources. As before, note that there are sections both for finding images and for getting help thinking visually – and, as before, feel free to suggest additional resources if you have any!