My Creative Process

Since I’m a New Media student, whenever I start a project I usually start by looking at my requirements and what the project ultimately needs to be. Since it’s school projects need to be done within a certain time frame, it’s hard to really have a moment of “inspiration.” To keep things fresh, I try to do something new on every project I work on so that even if it’s just another website or just another banner, I learned at least one new thing. I’ve never really broken down this process before and what each step really is for me, so this should be somewhat eye opening.

Inspiration
I define inspiration as something that usually sparks an idea in my head or gives me a flash of the final product I’m going to make. Whenever I’m working on something for school, time is usually a concern so I don’t usually get a spark of inspiration. I usually think of what it is I need to create and from there I create my own inspiration to help me get going on my project. But when it comes to making something for myself, which lately hasn’t been very often, I usually get inspired by the work of others or sometimes the patterns on fabrics, papers, books etc.

Idea
I define idea as something that is the result of my inspiration or analyzing the product. It’s kind of like the “big picture” of what it is I’d like to create. I’d almost say that idea and inspiration is the same thing. Inspiration is the spark that leads to idea.

Concept
I define concept as the game plan on how I am going to create this product. I may create a wireframe, a couple rough drafts or comps… just create a some drawings on paper to get the most out of the idea. Basically, this is all the pre-planning before I actually start working on the product.

Trial & Refine
I define trial as my first attempt at creating the product. Most of the time, the first attempt is not successful and so I will try again having learned from my errors, which would be refining. These steps may repeat a few times until I have a successful product.

Product
I define product as something that has reached all the goals that I have set forth and has come as close to my idea as possible. I’ve never created anything that has been exactly my idea. I usually come pretty darn close or I may create something better than what I had originally thought up.

Here is what I created:

I found my inspiration from my roots. When I first started using Photoshop, I used to do a lot of collages like the picture above. That was how I would learn about the different filters and figure things out on my own in Photoshop. I haven't made one of these in a very, very long time and thought that maybe I should make one again for the fun of it... the target audience being me. All the images I used are pictures I've taken myself. I used three pictures and one gradient map set to overlay. It was fun and refreshing to make something for myself and not have a specific target audience in mind.

Here are the pictures I used:

Field Trip!

So this week, we went on a field trip to a part of the IT building that I have never been to before. I finally got to see this big 3D room that everyone has talked about. It was pretty awesome to see and know that that is something our school has to offer. I have no plans to ever get into 3D just because that is something I really don't have an interest in (and it kind of makes me sick). He then showed some of the "web interested" people this 3D tool that could one day replace the mouse. That was very interesting to use and I would be interested in how it works. He then took us to another room that had a huge screen which can be used for editing projects with a high resolution. I can see that being very helpful for any photograph projects I could have in the future. I still don't know what I'm going to do for my Capstone next year but knowing I have tools like this available to me might be able to help me get some ideas going.

Breaking Rules

So for this assignment, we are to take a rule from our field of study and break it. Simple enough I suppose.

 The rule I decided to break was a design rule: Don't mix too many fonts. Whenever I'm designing something, I always want to make it as perfect as possible and I cannot for the life of me decide on one or two fonts easily. I will go through many, many font choices before I reluctantly choose one and always wonder if that was the best choice possible. So for this assignment, I'm going to make a simple graphic and go nuts picking fonts. And hey... it could look cool, right?

For this graphic, I decided to just pick lyrics from a favorite song (It's Beginning To Get To Me - Snow Patrol). I picked random fonts for some words while others kind of I started to pick out on my own. The poster itself isn't bad looking. I actually like it from "love" on down, which I started to pick out the fonts more carefully at that point seeing as the words kind of needed certain fonts to get it's point across. At the top, I wasn't as careful in picking out the fonts. In fact, I just picked random fonts. In the real world, you shouldn't do this. That's why there is a rule. Because I can't back up my decision in I picked the fonts for the top half of the poster. There is no reason why I did that. But the bottom half I could say that towards the end I picked those fonts because it seemed heaviest and brought more emphasis to the words. This poster is quite chaotic really. It could have made more of an impact if the fonts were limited and carefully picked out.

List of fonts, if you want them:
folks bold - We
the king and queen font - need
minion pro - to
[ank]* - feel
century gothic - breathless
didot - with
LT Oksana - love
Neutra display - &
the maple origins - not
arial - collapse
base 05 - under
cacavia01- its
ChunkFive - weight

Class Day 3

Class felt more of a continuation of our class from last week. We discussed a bit more of breaking rules and if that's something we can benefit from. Nothing really stuck out from this class that really gave me something to think about. Beth then gave us an assignment of breaking a rule in our field of study, which actually sounds kind of fun. I think I'll have some fun with this assginment.