Held: Friday, 15 April 2016

Back to Outline 39 - Pause for Breath. On to Outline 41 - Project Kickoff.

Summary

We introduce the course project and consider some basic design principles that will inform your projects.

Related Pages

• About the Project
• Reading: Elements of 2D Design
• EBoard 40 (Source 40)

Overview

• Background: About the project.
• Some examples.
• General elements of design.
• Relationships between elements.
• Broader design principles.
• Some examples.

Administrivia

About the project

• For the few weeks of class, you'll be working on a project that we call "a procedure is worth 1000 pictures".
• Broad goal: Think about the tools and concepts you've learned and apply them in a different way.
• Your goal: Write a procedure that, given a number, n, and an image size, produces an interesting image.
  • Different n - Different images.
  • Same n - Same image.
  • Different sizes - Scales appropriately.
• Note that different people find different things interesting.
• One of my colleagues in studio art suggests that a piece is interesting if the viewer cannot easily look at the image and say "I get it".
  • Sometimes you add interest by violating expectations or by contrasting opposites.
  • Sometimes you add interest by referring to things outside of your work (most typically, other works in the history of art).
  • Most often, you add interest by thinking carefully about a variety of design principles.
• I find that you can often make more interesting work by focusing on relationships: The relationship between different components of the piece, the relationship between the piece and others in the series, the relationship between the piece and the broader world.

Quick code examples (not this year)

• We may look at a few incomplete projects.
• One project we'll develop together and is intended to give a sense of negation.
• One project is intended to explore issues of repetition and scale. It is based on an approach by Colin Brooks '14.
  • We divide the image into n+1 columns.
  • We fill the first column with one oval. We fill the second column with two ovals. We fill the third column with three ovals. And so on and so forth.
• Another project is intended to explore issues of self-similarity. It is based on work by Benoit Mandelbrot and problem 8 of the exam.
  • We turn each point in the plane into a complex number in a relatively limited range.
  • We count the number of times we can call a function and still stay within a designated range.
    • We use the function (+ (square current) original) to compute the next complex number.
    • We ask whether its distance from the origin is less than 4.
    • After some number of times, we give up and just assume that it stays within the range.
  • We use that count to select a color.

Some design components

• Color is certainly a huge component of your design. Refer back to things we've said about color and color palettes.
• The picture plane is the surface on which you compose your image.
• A line is an explicit or implicit connection between two or more points.
  
  • Curves connect a lot of points.
  • Implicit lines are typically straight lines.
  • We can also talk about qualities of the line - thin, thick, varying, color, ...
• A shape is a coherent area on the surface, typically distinguished from the surrounding area by a line or by different color values.
  • Some shapes are regular.
  • Some shapes are geometric.
  • Some shapes are more "organic".
  • We can play with positive/negative shape (what's the fore, what's the ground?)
• Texture is the visual or tactile quality of a surface.
  • Some textures simulate real textures in the world (wood, fur, etc.)
  • Some textures are fully or partially invented, such as the color blends we make with image-compute.

Relationships between elements

There are many ways to show relationships between the elements of an image, and these relationships are at the heart of your image. Broadly, you should think about unity (how are things the same) and variety how do things differ.

• Proximity of two objects provides one connection. (Contrast Distance)
• Grouping of elements is possible. (Contrast Separation)
• Repetition of elements provides one form of repetition, and gives a sense of rhythm to the piece. (Contrast Variation) I find images that combine repetition and variation particularly interesting)
• We can put the elements in a regular (or not so regular) grid
• Scale and proportion show additional relationships.

Broader design elements

(Yeah, it's a slippery slope as to what we classify where.)

• Different objects have different weight. Larger objects tend to be heavier. Color also makes a difference.
• Balance - How is the image weighted.
• Depth - Does the image seem more three-dimensional or flat? How do we achieve that sense.
• Successful images often carefully draw the eye across the image.
• Context - How does it speak to or draw upon the broader world?
• Orientation

Deck Wars

We will look at a variety of images. For each, we'll consider what design elements dominate.

Disclaimer: I found some of these analyses the most frustrating part of my art history courses.

• Deck 1: Images from past sessions of CSC 151.
• Deck 2: Famous works of art, prepared by Matt Kluber for a previous session of this course.