Design Reflection - Project 3

Which Designs Were Most Successful?

Picking out ways to define my word visually through the use of letters alone was quite difficult. The two designs that I believe were the most successful were my 'crossword' design and my jumbled square letter design. These two came together to define my word quite well. The 'crossword' design has various patterns of letters that come together to form my word, “connect”. The jumbled square design is effective because the letters appear to get closer as they approach the beginning letter (in this case, “c”). It's simplistic, but it is also nice to look at.

How Do Your Compositions Suggest Meaning? How Do They Come Together?

All of my compositions have a common characteristic: the letters of each “connect” to the other letters. The use of color really helped to emphasize the meaning given off by each composition. The color and space exercises helped to add depth to my colored compositions, showing the letters moving closer and closer to each other.

Project 3 Description

Project Description

For this project, my class was expected to construct word collages that symbolized the meaning of a word. Each student had to pick a single word from a given list and compile the letters of the word to represent its meaning.

We started by making 20 cut-and-paste collages. The original instructions were to only use the letters of the word and not repeat the word, though many students felt that this was a bit too limited. We then took these cut-and-paste collages and refined them on the computer. After that, we refined them once again, though adding color. The process of this project focused much on refining and working toward the finished project through baby steps. In the end, we refined 3 final black and white compositions and 6 color compositions for a total of 6.

Project Reflection

This was possibly one of the most time-consuming projects we have done thus far. The cost of ink for my printer and the cost of the black matboard left a bit of a hole in my wallet. All complaints aside, it was a fairly fun project. I love to work on the computer so this project seemed fairly worth it. The greatest issue I had was thinking of 20 different ways to display the word 'connect' with its letters alone. In the end, my collages looked fairly simplistic, though they still came together to represent my word fairly well.

Another challenge I faced was the use of color to display my word the way I wanted to. Initially I found that some of my collages had very awkward colors. As the project progressed, I was able to pick out better color schemes for my compilations.