Summary – Assignment 3

I learned a ton from this assignment, both technical and philosophical. Vignelli’s book, which I reflect about here, has incredible insights into the psychology of imagery. In designing my company logo, I was able to incorporate a lot of those ideas, as well as the ones in the DS106 handbook.

This is by far the assignment period I have been the most comfortable with, and think I did the best on. I love design, both product design (I work in the ThinkLab which I’ve written about here) and intangible design like advertisements, which I talk about here. I learned a lot from Vignelli’s book and Karen Kavett’s video Intro to Color Theory I was able to specifically use these ideas when designing a company logo which I explain in my process video.

Some issues I had with this assignment really came about when I was analyzing other designs for the design blitz. As I did at the beginning of Assignment 2, I began this assignment by reading it, and then just going into the world not trying to accomplish anything specific (I talk about doing this with A2 here). I took some pictures and saw some things but when I got to actually doing the design blitz, I found myself unable to adapt.

What I mean by that is, I would take a picture of something IRL with the intent of using it to make a point. I would then go to make that point in writing and realize the picture wasn’t quite right. I would then spend hours (like, 20 minutes) trying to force the issue until I got a headache and decided to go to Panda Express for some consolation orange chicken. In hindsight I realize that I was having difficulty accepting something as a learning opportunity (failure) instead of a solution. I don’t think I often have this problem, because I’ve got a ton of practice being wrong, but I think (having a background in marketing) I felt entitled to being right. My ego didn’t want to prove itself wrong. In the end, I think I accepted what needed accepting and completed the design blitz well.

I also had a tutorial video taken down from YouTube. It was for a GIF assignment, and I blogged about what I think went wrong (I swear I’m innocent!) in this post.

Outside of the mandated stuff, I’m continuing to tinker with my site layout, I found a better way to do my video tutorials that shows menus (before, if I clicked File, it wouldn’t show the options), and I’ve been using scheduled tweets really heavily. This last one is big because I find I complete a large number of assignments in some window of time. For the sake of example let’s say 4 hours. Then over those 4 hours twitter is saturated with my assignments. The problem is that people aren’t on at the same time as I am so my tweets will get buried. To solve this, regardless of when I complete the assignment, I schedule the announcement tweets to be about two hours apart (one if there are a lot of them). Contrarily, my site statistics have not shown any improvement – though frankly a three week course with motivation fluctuations may not (I can’t imagine it would) be sufficient to derive any accurate statistical correlations. I have been including links to the posts in every tweet I’ve sent, so I really don’t know how to interpret this unless its a general trend.

Anyways, your favorite and mine, LINK DUMPPPP!

Link Dump

Blogs:

Twitter:

Flickr:

YouTube:

Design Assignment 1668
Design Assignment 1767
Design Assignment 1887
Design Assignment 2002
Animated GIF Assignment 1532
Animate GIF Assignment 1976 | If you haven’t already, please read this to see why there’s no video currently

SoundCloud:

Wow, so much empty

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