Held: Tuesday, 12 November 2013

Back to Outline 38 - Another Image Model: Iterating Over Positions. On to Outline 40 - Project Kickoff.

Summary

We consider some basic design principles that will inform your projects.

Related Pages

• Reading: Two-Dimensional Design
• Some slides from previous projects: http://mediascripting.wordpress.com/gallery-2/student-examples/
• EBoard (Source) (HTML) (PDF)

Overview

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

Administrivia

• This Friday we will be moving our class to ARH 302 (3rd floor lecture hall) to hear Hilary Mason '00. Class starts at 12:45.
  
  • We won't have a quiz this week.
• Grading:
  • Homework is reduced to 5% of your grade. The other 5% goes to the best of homework/quizzes/labs.
  • I will see how much I can grade through this coming weekend (which is the next reasonable chunk of free time I have).
    
    • Default grade on ungraded work is "check".
    • After you get the grades back, you can request that I grade any ungraded assignment.
    • Note that I need to grade both classes, and I do have to do class prep and things other than work.
  • Default on all past assignments
• Today in class we will watch Sam engage in "Deck Wars" (no, not the TV show version; the Powerpoint version).
• Upcoming extra credit opportunities:
  • Town Hall, Wednesday, November 13, noon or 7:30 p.m.
  • Learning from Alumni, Thursday, 2:15: Atul Gupta, Trustee
  • CS Extra, Thursday, 4:30: Hilary Mason '00
  • Informal chat with Hilary Mason, 8-9 pm
  • CS Table, Friday, HCI
  • Career Connections with Hilary Mason '00, CLS, Friday, 4:15-6:30 (I don't know how Career Connections work; I expect it's really 4:15-5:00)
  • Swim meet Saturday, noon; Beth swims at 3pm.
  • Football, Saturday, noon (TJ and Jake are lots of fun to watch)
  • Basketball, Friday and Sunday
  • Digital Commons talk Monday, November 19, 7:00 p.m. or so
  • Hamlet, some time soon.
  • "Data Sovereignty: The Challenge of Geolocating Data in the Cloud", November 25, 4:15 JRC 101
  • Showing of "Gold Fever" by Andrew Shurburne '01 or so, 7:00 p.m. Monday, November 25, ARH 302
  • Tuesday, November 20, 4:15 p.m., JRC 209 a gaming event with the game [d0x3d!]

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 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 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.

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?

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.