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Visual Unit Studio

Work to have achieved:

Plan for the day:

  1. Guiding thoughts for Studio (5-15 min)
  2. Studio time (50-55 min)
  3. Exit note (5 min)

1. Gathering thoughts for Studio (5-10 min)

GIMP Notes

  • GIMP’s toolbox is kinda cluttered, but the tools are also indexed by category in the menu bar, helpfully, under Tools. (And every tool has a keyboard shortcut, too: may be worth memorizing your go-to instruments.)
  • There’s 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/cdm2020spring-criteria (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?

Timing Reminder / HW Preview

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.
At the end of class, I'll ask you to send me a note (email's fine) letting me know what you worked on, and how it's going.

I know your lives are busy; take advantage of this dedicated time free from other distractions and obligations to move your piece forward. At the same time, it’s worth noting that you’re working in a shared space, in a studio. If you have questions, or you want feedback on something, you have your classmates and your instructor on-hand. Try not to monopolize anyone’s time, but do be open to the possibility of getting farther together than you could on your own.

p.s. If you need sonic isolation to work, I recommend noisli.com, which lets you modularly adjust about a dozen different kinds of background sounds, from cafes to trains to white and pink noise.

3. Quick report back (with 10 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? Decide something about your project? Raise a question in a new way that you’d like some help with?

Take five minutes to send me a quick email. 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://www.canva.com/learn/font-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.
      • Sweet bonus: you'll also be able to use GitHub history to compare one .png to another, side by side, or even slide to reveal the change. Pretty cool, no?