Narrative 1

Our main assignment for the narrative unit was to write a short story in English, which the majority of work in our other classes would be based on. We weren’t given any sort of strict prompt, our task was just to make sure it was a story with a strong character arc, with good use of figurative language.

Design Projects

Our major project in Design for this unit was to create a metaphorical visual representation of our short story in Adobe Illustrator. Our assignment was to find creatures that would represent our character.

Illustrator file for the project

My story was about a person who has to make a 2,000 miles road trip across the country from Seattle to Miami in order to turn down a job offer. The journey along the way is filled with lots of elements that are meant to symbolize their thought process and slowly guides them towards their final decision. Throughout their journey the constant rush for time combined with the importance of the drastic change they’re making in their life makes a lot of the surroundings feel less like real locations and more like a vast liminal space. They never stay in any place longer than it takes to pass through and they’re left for hours alone with their thoughts and as a result the only details that stand out are the ones that make them self-reflect and brings them to the story’s conclusion. The moment I tried to illustrate here was that final decision. The city in the background seems bright at first but it fades and the edges reveal cracks. The journey towards it is a mess of abstraction, and the character has decided to finally take that final leap off of it.

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Early Tracing of the creature

I made this using Adobe Illustrator, the assignment was to create a figurative representation of our character using a hybrid of various different animals. I chose to use a cat, a toad, a pigeon, a lobster, and a fire ant to represent my character. The cat and the pigeon are supposed to represent a sort of complacency, the toad is supposed to represent a sort of stubbornness and the lobster and the ant are sort of meant to show a sort of unhappiness. In order to make this I started out by tracing over images of the different animals and then taking the tracings and fitting them together then giving them a consistent color scheme in order to give them a sense of unity. The background is abstracted a bit to sort of show how the journey is more about the character’s thought process than any real locations. I think that my creature turned out well but there are still several things I think could be better, the texture could use more detail and there could be more movement.

Digital Media Projects

Our major projects in Digit

Project in Illustrator

For this project we had to create a light cover using Adobe Illustrator. Applying what we’ve learned earlier to create a physical product. If we took a vector drawing made in illustrator we could give it to a laser cutter to turn into instructions for cutting out a series of shapes which we would later snap together. My two designs which make up the light cover feature on one, a worm in the style of a Worm On a String toy captioned “Worm is all… All is worm”, and on the other design, the face of a Furby captioned “Löng.” These two are both very common inside jokes among my friends, so I thought it would be a fun and interesting thing to put on the light cover. The worm refers to a fascination my friends and I have with worms on a string, and a joke we have that string theory really means that the universe is made of worms. The Furby is captioned with “Löng.” in reference to Long Furbies, where you take apart a Furby and extend the torso significantly

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Cut And Assembled cover

I thought this project was quite interesting, there was a lot of free reign given which is always a good thing. This project was our first chance to see Illustrator being applied to create a physical product, which I thought was a good way to show the potential of Illustrator. I also think that this was a good way to encourage organization in Illustrator since extra, unnecessary, doubled up, or redundant lines will cause the laser to pass over parts of the plastic multiple times eventually causing it to melt or burn, something which happened to me on the first attempt of the worm design where I managed to double up the lines on the text, causing it to melt into an unintelligible blob. I only wish we were told in advance that we would have to write out this artist statement, so that I could have made something which wouldn’t require me to fill this page with unnecessary padding.

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Image of Illustrator file for this project

For this project we once again had to apply what we’ve learned in Illustrator to create a physical product.This time we had the ability to choose from a variety of products, including T-shirts, mugs, glass engraving, candle shades, stickers, or an embroidery patch. For my project, I chose to make an embroidery patch representing my friend group from Design. The design depicts a couple of inside jokes relating to worms on a string, Furbies, and a cult dedicated to geese, all of which surround the Illustrator icon for the pen tool, which is used to create just about everything in Illustrator. However, due to its initially unintuitive design, most of the other students tend to avoid using it, so as to design students we’ve been trying to help them get the hang of it in order to help them, master Illustrator.

This project once again gave us an incredible amount of free reign and due to the variety of options really helped us think about how to apply Illustrator, particularly in how some students tried to think of all the things that they could use the laser cutter for. I think that Once again though, I only wish we were told in advance that we would have to write out this artist statement so that I could have made something which wouldn’t require me to fill this page with unnecessary padding.

Final stitched patch
Final Version in Illustrator