Word Compositions constructed with Adobe Indesign
Refined Word Compositions
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Project 3 Brief: What Language Looks Like
Project three, “What Language Looks Like” was assigned in order to help my classmates and I express the meaning of a word using size, placement, spacing, and letter manipulation in both 2D and 3D environments. Project three consisted of two stages. In stage one, my classmates and I were required to choose a word from a word list (I chose the word “Disrupt”) and express the meaning of the word through the use of spacing, sixe, foreground/background, and placement of the word on a 6”x6” 2D space. First I manipulated my word “Disrupt” by cutting and pasting it in different ways on a piece of paper, and then I refined those compositions in Adobe Illustrator. The next part of stage one was the group project. Each group was assigned a new word and needed to construct the word into a 3’ model that would be placed in a specific spot on campus that would best communicate the meaning of the word. My group’s word was “Compress,” so we decided to place it in the stacks of the Watson Library.
State two of project three was an group project documenting my group’s word. Each group member was assigned to create a photo book to document the process and execution of the group word construction stage. The construction and design should contribute to the meaning of the word, so I chose to construct a book where he covers are shaped like hands and the inner pages are folded into accordion style. Constructing the book this way shows that you can literally “compress” the book with your hands. Side note, all of our 2D and 3D compositions were to be constructed in the font Futura only.
Project 2: Make It Better Reflection
After all is said and done about my group’s project, I have to say that it was an overall good experience. I think us as group members worked very well with each other, and there were no major disagreements or arguments. We seemed like we were all in it for the long haul, and were excited about the outcome of the project and helping each other through it. I think that it was very helpful that we all were able to decide who did what task so our project was able to get done at an efficient rate. Overall I think everyone did a great job carrying out their tasks, and everyone was very supportive of each other.
What was difficult for me was the process book. I feel like next time I should work on gathering more photographs from the ideation stages of the project and create more sketches. I just felt like I did not have enough preliminary photographs or sketches to represent the project in my process book.
I think that the type of mapping/brainstorming techniques that worked best for our group was the word lists we created, but I do think that we should have done more. I have only made word lists and mind maps for different projects so I would like to try some different mapping techniques next time. I felt like creating a word list about our glue gun worked well along with extensive discussion, but like I said, I think we should do more next time.
Interviews About Our Glue Gun Prototypes
WARNING these are a little explicit...
Of the ten interviews I conducted about the glue gun and our group’s redesigned glue gun prototypes, it seems like everyone who I interviewed ended up saying similar things. Before I explained the flaws of the glue gun, most people agreed that the original design is very efficient. This was a bit surprising to me considering that our whole group agreed that the glue was was very annoying to use. After explaining the flaws people began to agree that the flaws may be a bigger nuisance than they thought. But after I showed them the prototypes, a lot of them said that they wish that the new glue gun design was as simple as the original. My interviews were all very long, so I will only include one in this process book, and I think it will suffice. Hopefully you will get a laugh out of some of this person’s responses as well. It is a bit explicit, so I have made the interviewee anonymous.
Q1: What is good about the glue gun’s design?
“It’s simple, easy to use, very few moving parts, inexpensive, easy to reload, light weight, that’s probably it.”
Q2: How could the design be improved?
“Make it more sturdy, just as inexpensive, more reliable, bigger glue capacity.”
Q3: What is good and bad about the pencil glue gun prototype design?
“It looks like a giant penis. But put that down as a negative. I know some women who would put that as a positive though.”
Q4: What is good and bad about the modified glue gun prototype design?
“What’s good about it? Just the things you said. It holds more glue, it doesn’t leave spiderwebs... But there are negatives too. It’s probably heavier, probably higher cots, it’s not as simple.”
Work In Progress
In Class Work
- Here are some of my group's brain storming, and also some initial sketches of the glue gun prototypes we were planning on building.
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My Task within the group
Creating A Story Board
My task within my group was to create the powerpoint presentation. We were asked to make the powerpoint look like a story board similar to a story board that an animation artist might draw out before illustrating a scene from an animated film. For my story board I decided to create a comic-like narration of our teacher, Austin Swick, using the hot glue gun and having a bad experience while using it. The narration functions as a fun and easy way to understand the flaws of the glue gun and what problems can happen when using it. Instead of just creating a powerpoint listing the flaws of the glue gun and what we were going to do to fix it, I think that using pictures to illustrate those aspects helps the reader understand why the glue gun should be redesigned.
The purpose of the powerpoint was to document our group’s process of how and why we picked the glue gun as our object to redesign. It also documents our progress of going from the original glue gun to our fully redesigned model. Basically my task was to create a powerpoint that documented each stage of our project and how we came to our final product. Through group discussions, sketches, the creation of word lists we sorted out the flaws of the glue gun and how we could fix them. Then we sketched out potential prototypes and carried out user testing and interviews about our final prototype. These stages and steps were all put into our powerpoint to properly and thoroughly present our project to our class. My final story board drawings and other slides are shown here.
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