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Techniques of Imagemaking 3

Course video 7 of 46

This week we are going to look at how images function in terms of conveying denotative and connotative messages, I'll show you a range of analog and digital imagemaking techniques and discuss how they work. In the first peer review assignment you'll create your own series of images, experimenting with formal techniques. Later, you'll have the opportunity to rework those images to enhance their ability to communicate an idea through connotation in an optional assignment: give it a try, it'll help you develop your communication skills as well as your formal skills!

Graphic Design is all around us! Words and pictures—the building blocks of graphic design—are the elements that carry the majority of the content in both the digital world and the printed world. As graphic design becomes more visible and prevalent in our lives, graphic design as a practice becomes more important in our culture. Through visual examples, this course will teach you the fundamental principles of graphic design: imagemaking, typography, composition, working with color and shape... foundational skills that are common in all areas of graphic design practice. I don't just want you to watch a video of someone talking about design, I want you to MAKE design! If you want to be a designer you have to be a maker and a communicator, so this course will offer you lots of opportunities to get your hands dirty with exercises and with more practical projects. At the end of this course you will have learned how to explore and investigate visual representation through a range of image-making techniques; understand basic principles of working with shape, color and pattern; been exposed to the language and skills of typography; and understand and have applied the principles of composition and visual contrast. If you complete the course, along with its optional (but highly recommended) briefs, you will have a core set of graphic design skills that you can apply to your own projects, or to more deeply investigate a specialized area of graphic design. To succeed in this course you will need access to a computer. You can complete this course without one but it will be tougher. Access to, and a beginner's level knowledge of Adobe Creative Suite programs, such as Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign will help you, especially if you want to complete the optional briefs.

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您將學習的技能

Creativity, Graphics, Design Theory, Color Theory

教學方

Michael Worthington
Faculty, Program in Graphic Design

腳本

Another aspect of image-making to think about is cropping.

What this means is how close up to or how far away you are from your image,

and this determines exactly what you're gonna see of the image.

So here for instance, we can see a closeup of the apple, but

we can still determine that it's an apple.

There's still enough visual information there to let us know what it is.

So sometimes it's useful to think about, what is the closest that I can get to my

object and still represent it in a recognizable way versus what's

the furthest away that I could get from my object and still have it be recognizable?

And this notion of recognizability can really be pushed in image making.

Particularly in an exercise like this,

where you're making a lot of different versions of images of the same object.

So for instance, this image might only really look like an apple

in the context of you seeing it in a group of images with a bunch of other apples.

On its own you might have a hard time recognizing what it is.

But that's okay in this instance, because part of what we're trying to do here

is get you to experiment with different techniques,

and they're not always going to work.

So try things that you don't know how to use.

Try things you haven't done before, maybe for some people that might mean looking at

technology and trying to use new programs that they may be uncomfortable with.

For other people it might be getting more hands on skills and

working off the computer.

But try whatever you can and just really experiment and just see what happens.

Part of what I think is valuable about this kind of visual experimentation,

is that you really push the boundaries of denotation and understand where they lie.

You're really testing when is this image going to break down, and

stop being readable as the object that it was intended to be readable as.

When does this apple stop being an apple?

Another aspect of image making that you can think about is texture.

We quite often think about things being very flat in a digital world, and

having a pixel texture.

But if you're making images by hand, and with objects, and paint, and raw materials

onto different surfaces, quite often that texture can be much, much more important.

So sometimes even the simplest element, the simplest representation of that object

with a little texture, can be really interesting.

And one of the things that can accentuate the texture of an object or

of an illustration can be a contrast.

So here we can see there's two different ways of making this image.

There's the soft crayon line, but

then mixed with this very rough and textured collage element.

So the contrast is actually what's giving the texture, or

making the texture be visible.

So often it can be really interesting to take different processes and

different kinds of materials and image making techniques and mix them up.

Mix them together.

So maybe take something you're very familiar with and

something you're less familiar with and see what happens when you pair the two.

One of the best things about this is quite often the images that you make

can end up being quite surprising.

And again, surprising to the viewer, but also to surprising to you as an image

maker, and that means they get to be fun to make.

And quite often, the more that you can mix these different ways of working, and

the more unexpected the work becomes,

and the image making becomes, then the more original the image becomes.

And you start to make things that, not only, surprise yourself, but

they're images that you probably haven't seen before, or

you haven't seen them made in this exact way.

And that's really great.

It starts to get an originality and starts to get you

developing your own personal style and your own way of image making.

And trying to get at this idea of originality or

an original way of image making, can quite often mean

that you have to do some things that might surprise yourself or seem a little silly.

So here for example,

some of these images are made by not taking the pen off the piece of paper.

Or by deliberately drawing in a naive way.

Well here for instance, these drawings are made blind so the designer,

the illustrator isn't even looking at the piece of paper while they're drawing.

Again, here the image is made by just one continuous line without taking the pen

off, but it's in a totally different style.

It feels much more like a contour map as a way of drawing the apple.

Be inventive and try and think of strange ways to make images.

And that can sometimes be taking a low tech or guerilla approach to image making.

So this image, for instance,

is made just by putting the apple core straight on the scanner and

scanning the image without really knowing what it's going to come out like.

Or here's the same idea with a different low-tech device.

Here the apple is cut in half and

just placed on the glass surface of a photocopier, and again

what's great about this is you can get very surprising images very, very quickly.

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