Generating Visual Ideas

Work to have achieved:

• Read about graphic design principles (principles of gestalt, contrast and similarity, figure & ground)
• Find and post a graphic or visual design that makes a claim or argument
• If you can, analyze the designed artifact through the lenses of graphic design principles. (If not, that’s for today!)

Plan for the day:

1. Building (with) our vocabulary (20 min)
   • Ben’s highlights
   • Group activity:
2. GIMP Practice and concurrent GIMP Demo (20-25 min)
3. Loop writing into offline sketching (15 + 10 min)
4. Homework for next time

1. Building (with) our vocabulary (10-15 min)

I know that was a lot of potentially new terms!

For my purposes, what’s most important is how they help us think about directing attention, and for that purpose there are a few key highlights to hit:

1. The principle of emergence: we see the whole image first.
2. Contrast draws attention, and works best when used sparingly: as Bradley puts it, “When everything is the same, you get tedium. When everything is different, you get noise. The best designs have a healthy mix of similarity and contrast.”
3. “By giving visually similar characteristics to multiple elements, we communicate that something is similar about the elements.” And vice versa.
   • Size, shape, color, value (intensity), texture, alignment (parallelism), common fate (direction of movement) – all these elements become means of signaling similarity or establishing contrast.
4. Visual groupings produce a hierarchy:
   • common regions (via enclosure or background) group things more than
   • connectedness (via lines or “common fate”) groups things more than
   • symmetry or pattern groups things more than
   • shared color groups things more than
   • proximity groups things more than
   • common shape.
   • usually.

Group activity: noticing layout, wholes and parts

In your usual groups, share the images you posted online. Think out loud about the way the image works to create a hierarchy:

• What are the biggest areas, or groupings, defined in the space? How are they defined?
• How is negative space (ground) used to teach us how to read the positive space (figure)?
• What (else) did the designer use to guide your eyes through the image? Do you all agree on where your eyes are drawn?
• What about this image’s design strategies might you want to emulate? What might you want to avoid?

EXT: If you’re done with yours, skim through the others posted on the forum.

EXT: Done that, too, and still waiting? Try the in-class exercise in the visual argument assignment repository.

2. GIMP Practice and concurrent demo (20 min)

I want to give you another chance to practice with GIMP. For those who aren’t sure where to start, you can follow along with me as I do some noodling around! Alternately, I highly recommend the LinkedIn Learning series on GIMP Essential Training, which is also linked on our course site Resources page and in the homework assignment, below.

I’m going to focus on a fairly common task, extracting a foreground object from its background, so you can move it (sometimes to an entirely new background). Here’s what I’m using, and you can find it already in your repo (under “in-class exercise”):

A few options to consider:

• Scissors select (edge detection)
• Select background and Invert Selection
• Fuzzy select (“magic wand”: contiguous pixels by color similarities)
• Additive/subtractive selection with shape tools (rectangle, ellipse) and Free select (lasso)

Once we have our selection, we can…

• Copy and paste to create a new “floating” layer
• Secure that new layer more permanent status
• Play around with sizes and colors
  • NB: This is a raster editing program, so once something gets smaller, you can’t guarantee you’ll be able to make it bigger again: pixels get thrown away
• Transfer to a new file

There’s quite a bit more, of course, and I encourage you to find tutorials for any task your imagination suggests to you!

3a. Loop writing (15 min)

For this generative exercise, adapted from one by Sondra Perl, you’ll need somewhere to write and somewhere to draw. Printer paper would be great; a notebook is also okay; the computer’s probably not. I like pencil, but your preference may vary.

Let’s take a few minutes to think in writing about the visual arguments you might want to make. I’ll read a series of questions aloud. Repeat them silently to yourself, and when you feel yourself answering, make a list.

These lists will remain private, unless you choose to share. I won’t ask for them.

1. What ideas do you want help remembering?
2. Or what do you want to persuade others of?
3. Is there something you’ve noticed that you want to bring to the attention of others?
4. Is there anything else you’d like to add? Something from a course? From an activity or group you participate in? Something you’ve been reading about? (If there’s an idea you thought of working on before coming to class today, be sure to add it now.)

Take a moment now to read back over your lists. Is there something that stands out, that says, me, pick me? Choose one thing to work with, at least for today, and mark it in some way. Then copy it into a clean page.

With that chosen subject, write again:

1. What terms or images come to mind when you think of this subject? … Think about categories of words: actions vs things. Descriptors.
2. Is there anything you’re forgetting to add to your list? A line from a song? A color?
3. Who else might be interested in this? Who, that is, could be your audience?

See if you can summon up the whole of this idea, like it’s right here in the room with you. Where does it live? Is it above you? Inside you? In the palm of your hand? Just sit with your idea for a moment, feeling where you connect to it.

3b. Offline sketching (10 min)

And now, draw. Take a piece of paper, fold it in quarters, and in each quarter sketch out some possibility, some version, of what your idea might look like.

If you can, try to make each image significantly different from each other, to give you options; you can use your lists for inspiration. If you can’t think of very different ones, then work to make just some change.

We’ll work here for a while.

Homework for next time:

• Review the unit-assignment goals and options for the rhetorical collage / visual argument, including the Parachute Prompts if you’re not sure what to propose.
• Write a project proposal, thinking in words about what you’d like to make:
  • What idea or argument will you try to represent? What claim will you try to make – or, at least, what is the triggering idea (starting point) of that claim?
  • Include or link to a prospective assets list, i.e. a table of the images you think you’ll need and where you might be able to source them. You can choose to include that assets list in the proposal or place it as a file in your repository, to more easily track changes.
  • Link to your project repository, so it’s easier to find when we get to group work.
• Post your proposal to the appropriate forum on the Issue Queue.
• Skim the visual media resources on the course site, and read/watch more deeply in anything that seems like it would help you, whether advice or material to work with.
  • In particular, I highly recommend the LinkedIn Learning series of videos on “GIMP Essential Training.” I’ve been using GIMP for years, and I confess I learned some things even from the basic tool options videos. The whole series is about 5 hours of material, but I’m not asking you to watch the whole thing in one go! Instead, I’ve marked some highlights and starting points: please at least view at those, which total around 45 minutes runtime.
  • Note that there are exercise files, should you want to follow along and make sure it works in practice.
  • If you have trouble accessing LinkedIn Learning from my links on the Resources page, try this LIL link instead, which routes through MyPitt; you should have to log in with Pitt Passport once, but then all those direct links should just work! (Fingers crossed.) I am also happy to troubleshoot with you during office hours.