Illustrator exercise

To get used to Illustrator for the upcoming assignment I filled out the template provided in class, helping me produce a large number of quick designs. As you can see above the task was to express the meaning of the six words with eight quick designs made with four black boxes.

Active skills I learnt

I had used Illustrator in the past but never for anything major, so it was nice to get a refresher on what each tool did. I mainly used the Selection(V), Direct selection(A), and Pen(P) tools to manipulate the boxes along with shift dragging the corners to scale, and plenty of Comand C + V🫠 The brief didn't allow any manipulation of the boxes, with the only loophole being cropping with the frame🙈

Passive skills I learnt

I guess I learnt how churning out loads of garbage can clear your mind a little and can sometimes make the most random and fun ideas, for example, I found that as the prompts got more specific my ideas got more representational e.g. many of the tension designs were tightropes, swords or sharks teeth.

Design thinking

I dashed through parts of the design process with each iteration of the graphics. I definitely found myself empathising with the word prompts by repeating the word or finding synonmyms😰 I defined and created plenty of iterations on my ideas and the final favourite pick was sort of like a prototype(not really but sort of) and you could say that I was testing my designs by showing peers and comparing them?

Assignment two themes🤔

"Create a suite of nine unified and responsive graphic icons in a flat design style, arranged on a simple HTML5 webpage. Each icon must provide some audiovisual feedback in the form of an image swap, and a distinct, thematically appropriate sound effect when the user either hovers their mouse over, or clicks on, each icon. You must choose one of the following concepts to prompt the subject and aesthetics of your suite of icons:"

Out of the themes I've decided on future. I did a little brainstorming to narrow down my ideas but I was pretty excited by the 'future' theme immediately because coincidentally I've been making a sci-fi board game with a couple of friends and have been discussing how great it would be if it were digitalised🤩

• Growth
• Home
• Movement
• Climate
• Community
• Future
• Empty
• Legacy
• Calm
• Memory
• System
• Dream

Platform: Online browser. Hosted on a website to be played on a computer but potentially compatible with mobile

Context: Video game UI

Audience: Demographic: Age 16+ made for any gender but often male. Psychographic: Potential interests in board games like Catan, Risk, ROOT, Pandemic or fans of the science fiction genre.

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