Hitchings | D054 | Fall 2023

Category: Project & Assignments (Page 1 of 4)

Assignment 7 Design and Development

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Getting Started

Phase 3 Design Development Before moving to this stage, make sure you have:

  1. Refined your thesis statement
  2. Collected, organized and written all your content
  3. Found some excellent examples of professional work that can serve as inspiration and reference
  4. Developed a few sketches and settled on the one that gives you a clear plan forward and supports your thesis statement
  5. Experimented with a grid structure
  6. Started to develop the visual assets (graph, charts, images and photos) that you will need to visualize the piece
  7. Settled on a typeface that is functional and in style with your piece

Mission

Visually tell a story through researched and fact based information. The following two designs can be presented together in one poster or separately in two:

Project 2: Visual Diagram – a clear, beautiful and stylized visual (photography, or an illustration – digital or hand-drawn) that shows the appearance, structure, or workings of something.

Project 3: FlowChart/Timeline (sequential story) – presenting an information sequence that explains a concept through a series of steps: A. B. C., 1. 2. 3., etc. The steps do not have to be presented sequentially but they need to be read/ understood within the context of each other.

Continue to go back to your thesis statement, all components or your design solution should support your thesis statement, keep revising.

Document Specs

Set up the document in InDesign. Chunk your outline into sections and lay them out within your decided gird.

  • Tabloid Poster – 11×17 inches (Vertical or Horizontal layout)
  • Margin: 0.5”
  • Bleed: 0.25”
  • Set up a grid
  • Gutter: .025”

Optional: You can choose to work larger – 20″ x 30″

DUE – First Draft

Week 14 Monday 12/11/23

  • Please make a folder with your name and save your design comps as PDFs into the >>Assignment 7: Design Development Dropbox folder

Assignment 6 Content Development

Phase 2 Diagram and FlowChart/ Timeline: Concept Development Now that you have spent some time understanding and learning about your topic, gathering, organizing and assessing content, it’s time to start to think about your visual solution.

As you begin to sketch and visualize your ideas keep go back to your thesis statement, all components or your design solution should support your thesis statement, keep revising.

DUE

Week 12 Monday 12/2/23

  1. Browse tips posted here: >>Lesson/ConceptDevelopment
  2. Please make a folder in the class Dropbox with your name and save your concept sketches and design comps as PDFs into the >>Assignment6-ConceptDevelopment

A. Organize Content

  1. Your project should have one main focused thesis:
    • What’s the core message?
    • What’s the main question being answered?
  2. Organize your content into a clear outline
  3. Use bullet points to organize details for each section
  4. If appropriate gather the right data to support your thesis.
  5. Identify the type of graph that will help you visualize this data: >>The Data Visualisation Catalogue

B. References

You can find references and explore some excellent design work here: >>Lessons/Inspiration

  • Gather images from a variety of sources that help to inspire and guide you
  • Identify at least three designers who have successfully completed work that is inspiring and perhaps related to aspects of your project

C. Sketches

Create at least 3 sketches of your layout and related ideas:

  • Each sketch MUST have a border around it, in proportion to the actual final work in order to clearly specify the dimensions of the space. Sketches can be scaled much smaller.
  • Sketches should give you a sense the of the space you are working with and show how you might organize the content to fit. Reference your outline from your content document. Work within a grid.

D. Defining A Grid

Set up the document in InDesign. Create several pages with different grid systems. Chunk your outline into sections and lay them out within the gird.

  • Tabloid Poster – 11×17 inches (Vertical layout or Horizontal)
  • Margin: 0.5”
  • Bleed: 0.25”
  • Set up a grid
  • Gutter: .025”

E. Asset Building

  • Begin to create and collect needed images. If you are illustrating your piece make sure you set aside the time to create the illustrations. If you are using photography, make sure they are high-resolution and visually consistent
  • Set up a file in Illustrator and continue to build and experiment with the graph tool

F. Typeface

Carefully select (no more than 2) typefaces you would like to work with for your project. Do your research and show your research.

  • Study the typefaces available to you in the FONT folder on the computers in class
  • Choose two different typefaces that compliment each other, perhaps a serif and a sans serif
  • Try to choose typefaces that come with a large variety of of fonts: Light, Condensed, Heavy, Extended, etc.

DUE

Week 12 Monday 12/2/23

Be prepared to present all of the above items with the class. Please make a folder with your name and save all the above work as PDFs into the >>Assignment6-ConceptDevelopment Dropbox folder

Assignment 5 Thesis Proposal and Research

Diagram and FlowChart/ Timeline – Phase 1: Research. Understanding your topic and gathering, organizing and assessing content. Please create a document that includes each of the listed headers below:

Name of Topic

Resources

List (at least 5) online (re)sources from:

  • Academic One File has always been an excellent general database for undergraduate research. The depth of full-text offerings has recently been improved.
  • Ebook Central is an expansive collection of ebooks that can be searched either through the catalog or as a standalone database. Here you can get Meirelles, Isabel, the recommended reading listed above.
  • The Wall Street Journal is free to the entire City Tech Community. Activate your free subscription today!
  • The New York Times Sign up for your free academic pass or renew your subscription
  • You can also use other sources but they should be reliable

Thesis

Compose a paragraph statement of your thesis. The thesis statement should describe your objective – ‘take-away’ – for your audience.

Supporting Sections

Outline at least three components that describe your thesis and give context to it. Think beginning, middle and end. This can include background information, facts about the subject matter, current state of the problem.

Facts

Find at least 10 facts that support your thesis (include citation from where you find your fact). These can included numbers, comparisons, words, dates, quotations, definitions, etc.

Words Associations

Begin to develop a long list of words associated with your topic. At least 20 words. Think pictogram and ideogram.

DUE

Week 11 Monday 11/20/23

  1. Browse research tips posted here: >>Lesson/Research
  2. Please make a folder with your name and save your research word doc or PDF for Project 2 Phase 1 into the >>Assignment 5: Research Dropbox folder
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