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Our First Unit Workshop: Guiding Attention with Visuals

Texts to have read:

  • tutorials toward your visual project and/or keeping track of it
  • your own goals and questions

Work to have done:

  • a full draft of your visual project, pushed to a GitHub repo you've shared with me
  • at least one new git commit per working session, with a meaningful commit message


Unit 1 Criteria, revisited (15 min)

I've taken the liberty of compiling what I thought was the gist of all your group notes on criteria for this unit, and putting them into a second draft on the Google doc.

Let's have a look!

Executive summary of changes:

  • Baseline criteria are divided: in the visual itself, and in the artist's statement
  • I've also added submission guidelines, whole cloth (not compiled from you at all, because we'd so far not mentioned them – oops)
  • There were a few things some groups suggested as baseline that I'm not sure everyone's on board with, but maybe you all are?

A Workshop Strategy: describe, evaluate, suggest (5 min)

There's a handout with more detail.

  1. Describe: What is the piece, and what's it trying to do?
  2. Evaluate: Given the goals of the writer and the unit, where's the piece working well? Where’s it getting stuck?
  3. Suggest: Given what’s working and what’s not, how can the writer get more of it to work?
  4. Plan: What's the take-away?

Workshop!

Let's aim for 10 minutes each. That's a little ambitious. Help me out, timekeepers!

Casey T

Annie

Casey R

Jill

Revisit criteria (10 min)

Take a few minutes to write: realistically speaking, what are your personal aspirations with this project? Do you think anything needs to be altered from our baseline criteria?

Before we leave...

If anyone's having trouble pushing to GitHub, or adding me as a collaborator, let me know now, and I'll help you. If you can't stay, please do email me!

Homework for Next Time

  • Administrative
    1. Next class will be all studio time, all the time. Bring what you might need to be at your most productive.
  • Inputs
    1. Read up on fonts from one of the most popular free font repositories, Font Squirrel, starting with their "Getting Started" guide and branching from there based on your interest.
    • NB: They'll ask for your email address. It's pretty easy to unsubscribe from their newsletter afterwards, though.
    1. Alternately, or if you'd like more depth, try one of these: TutsPlus: A 20 Minute Intro to Typography Basics | Canva: Font Design
    2. Review the collaborative criteria that we developed this week.
    3. Review any terms or concepts from prior readings that you want to firm up.
    4. Continue finding and viewing tutorials for specific skills, as needed. If you find an awesome one, let us know by adding a comment on my GitHub Issue Queue for this course.
  • Outputs
    1. Continue working on your project, adding at least one new commit for each working session, with a meaningful commit message. Export as .png in addition to saving your .xcf (or equivalent) project file.
    2. Push to GitHub if you want me to be able to see the most recent version!
    3. Optional, depending on our criteria: try out two new fonts, as a generative constraint and to link theory with practice.
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