Visual Unit Studio 1

Work to have achieved:

Review the resources page and unit assignment goals and options
Read/watch anything that seems like it would help you, especially the LinkedIn Learning tutorials on GIMP (or maybe Photoshop)
Write a visual rhetoric proposal

Plan for the day:

Looking ahead
Guiding thoughts for Studio (5-15 min)
Studio time!
Exit note (5 min)

1. Looking ahead

In a moment, I’m going to let you dive into your own projects; I’ll float, and when I’m not needed I’ll do my best to answer questions in the order of greatest interest. In some cases, I, too, would like to find a good tutorial: learning can be lifelong, especially with complex tasks and complex software!

For those diving in, I will ask that you begin by writing some goals and intentions in the google doc, and that you end by replying to those notes with how it actually went.

To help you think about possible goals, I want to preview the homework and share some advice that should apply broadly.

2. Guiding thoughts for Studio (5-15 min)

As in the past, I’m going to put these words of advice here for you to peruse at your own speed. Please do look at them before you get too far along.

Remember our strategies for building unity and drawing attention

To unify your project, i.e. to help give viewers a gestalt impression that your design is a single thing, consider using...

repetition of shape, color, texture, etc;
symmetry and alignment; and
a limited number of common regions (to distinguish figure from ground)

To draw attention, draw contrast: break from the repeated elements above in terms of size, color, texture, value, alignment (including rotation), or implied movement (including gaze, if you have eyes).

Assume that you can reliably convey only about three levels of hierarchy; after that, it starts to get mushy. At some point as you work on your proposed visual argument / rhetorical collage, therefore, you might want to reflect in writing:

What options do you have for your top three objects of attention? What's next in line?
How would the layout need to change if you changed your ranking? That is, if you put one of your current tier-twos into the top slot, what rearrangements would that entail?

Tips & reminders on navigating GIMP

GIMP's toolbox is kinda crowded, but the tools are also helpfully indexed by category in the menu bar, under Tools. If your tools are hiding / nesting behind one another, but you'd prefer to see all the tools in the sidebar, you can change that setting in Preferences, under Interface > Toolbox: toggle the Use Tool Groups checkbox. You'll find color preferences under Toolbox, too.
Something not behaving as it should? First check that you're in the right layer. If you are, check that the layer is big enough; you might need to use Layer > Layer to Image Size. (Or give yourself more room overall with Image > Canvas Size.) If even that's not working, check the tool settings area (usually below the tools, but they're movable).
Did you know you can group layers so they move (and scale, and hide) together? Click the folder icon in the layers toolbox to create a new group, then drag or drop layers into it.

Tips & reminders for GIMP and Photoshop

You can rename your layers! In fact, I highly recommend it: filenames from sites like unsplash or flickr aren't known for emphasizing their content.
Every tool also has a keyboard shortcut, and it will save you time to memorize those for your go-to instruments.
Remember that 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. Most of the time, these are temporary adjustments to the tool settings that you can also change more long-term in the tool settings area.

Don't forget to document permissions as you go

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. Don't forget about https://search.creativecommons.org and the Usage Rights options under Google's Image search (click the Tools link just above your search results).

You can also use copyrighted images if you can make a case for it being a Fair Use. That is, in either your README 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

Note that this is especially important to think about if you're explicitly naming a brand in your proposals or planning to use their trademarked properties!

3. 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, for the usual reasons: to build accountability, to seed your later reflections, and to help me find teachable moments / chances to be helpful to you.

You can keep your own time, or coordinate to chat with partners at regular intervals (say, 15 or 25 minutes). In the latter case, each time the interval runs out, ask each other: What do you feel good about? What challenges came up? What questions do you have?

Don't forget to save as you go:

the project
screenshots
meaningful commit messages, when you're satisfied with something you've made

4. 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/Photoshop 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. (NB: you can do this now or over the weekend, depending on when you have time.) I’ve added Midori Nediger’s blog post, “How to Choose Fonts For Your Designs (With Examples)” to Perusall, on Canvas, so you can annotate it with anything surprising or important, ask questions, reply to each other, etc.
- 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 Thursday, 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) (or Photoshop .psd), 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).
- An exported "flat" .png or .jpg 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: if you keep the same filename for every export, 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? (That said, I won't be mad if you want to give each exported draft its own name. Just: please don't do that for the .xcf, okay?)

Where possible, bear in mind the guiding thoughts from above