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Visual Unit Studio 1

Work to have achieved:

Plan for the day:

  1. Guiding thoughts for Studio (5-15 min)
  2. HW Preview: it’s a preview (and reading about fonts)
  3. Studio time, in pomodoros (2 x 20-25 min)
  4. Exit note (5 min)

Guiding thoughts for Studio (5-15 min)

Don’t forget permissions

As I hope you saw on the site resources page, there are lots of tools to help you find images you’re explicitly allowed to use, whether with Creative Commons or other permissive licenses.

You can also use copyrighted images if you can make a case for it being a Fair Use. That is, in either a credits file or your reflection (or both), you can argue that the balance of the four factors is in your favor:

  • purpose and character of the use
  • nature of the copyrighted work
  • amount or substantiality of the portion used
  • market impact

GIMP notes

  • GIMP’s toolbox is kinda crowded, but the tools are also helpfully indexed by category in the menu bar, under Tools. (And every tool has a keyboard shortcut, too: may be worth memorizing your go-to instruments.)
  • There are often extra tips for the tool you’re using under the editing window, in a tiny font; try holding shift, alt, control, command, etc while you click or drag to see what it says/does.
  • Remember our strategies for drawing attention, which you can use to signal your hierarchy through scale, value, color, proximity, and style: bit.ly/cdm2020fall-notes (see the section on “Keywords toward a Visual Rhetoric”).

Writing as Processing

According to Thompson (our reading from last week), you can reliably convey only about three levels of dominance; after that, it starts to get mushy.

Take a few minutes to write, with your own proposed visual argument / rhetorical collage in mind:
  • What options do you have for putting in your top three? What's next in line?
  • How would the layout need to change if you changed your ranking, e.g. if you put one of your current tier-twos into the top slot?

ALT: If your proposal already includes this level of planning, you can use the time to skim through the rest of the visual argument examples your classmates posted. Maybe you’ll find new inspiration!

Studio Time!

Some preview of the project will be due before next class, just to make sure you’re all getting started on it.

Therefore, the rest of today’s class is all about working on your individual projects! Find source images or text, level up on layering, watch relevant tutorials on effects or on layout, and see what happens when you apply them to your own digital canvas.

As usual, please set a daily goal in the shared notes doc, both for accountability and so I can look for ways to help.

Then consult the clock and your partners: leaving 5 minutes to return to the main room at the end of the class, do you have time for two 20-minute cycles and one 5-minute check-in? Three 15-minute cycles and two check-ins?

Make sure you agree, then start your timers. Each time the bell rings, ask each other:

  • What do you feel good about?
  • What challenges came up?
  • What questions do you have?

You can find me in the main room, or call me in to your breakout room if you have a question in common: just use the “Ask for Help” button ask for help button, which shows a question mark in a circle in your meeting menu.

To get credit for asynchronous participation, add your working goals to the google doc when you start your session, set your timer, and when the bell rings, add a brief reply to your initial note with a status update. (This can be very brief.) Run through this cycle at least twice.

NB: To make it easier for me to find your additions to the doc, please use either Comments or Suggestion Mode.

Quick report back (with 5 min left)

Just as a way for me to check in, I’d like to hear more about what happened today: did you find images? Level up on a particular GIMP skill? Which ones? Decide something about your project (what was it)? Raise a question in a new way that you’d like some help with?

Take five minutes to reply to your own notes in the doc. If everyone finishes early, we can hear from a few volunteers out loud.

Homework for next time

  • Read about fonts, if you haven’t yet, at https://trydesignlab.com/blog/how-to-choose-the-right-font-for-your-design/.
    • Optionally, play a font-matching game at 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 called hierarchy by “style.”
  • Compose a Visual Argument Preview: an early snapshot of your progress, to get the gears turning, to get practice with GIMP, and to start testing out the ideas from your proposal (or beyond).
  • To submit, please Push to your repository the following:
    • A layered GIMP project file (.xcf), showing the arrangement of your images and text so far (need not be a complete argument or collage yet).
    • A static screenshot (.png or .jpg) of your GIMP file in progress (for comparison later to subsequent drafts). If you can capture a moment of success or stuckness, all the better.
    • A plain text (.txt) or markdown (.md) file, explaining in around 300 or more words what you're showing us in this preview. Feel free also to ask questions or lay out next steps for yourself!
    • An updated assets.md file, now with the files you're actually obtained. As you go, add source documentation for any outside sources – and your permission to use them (e.g. licenses, fair use; see Writer/Designer p. 160-165).
      • If you prefer, you can create a new CREDITS.md file for this, preserving the assets list for things you're still seeking.
    • An exported .png file. As with Audacity, GIMP's default save mode is a complex / modular "project file," of type .xcf; should the project fail to load, it would be great to have a simple image file as a backup. We won't be able to see how you achieved your layout, but we will be able to see the image.