my design adventure

project two :: black squares?

you’d be pleasantly surprised what you can do with black squares and a white canvas.

when my instructor announced this project, i was ready to bounce outta this class. i thought i was here to learn design, not how to draw black squares. i mean i thought we learned this in preschool.

well, i thot wrong.

starting my first sketches, i tapped parts of my creative brain i never knew existed. it was a nice break from the computer science cortex that’s active way too often. there were so many elements i realized could play with, from space to scale to stillness. and when i came into class, i couldn’t believe the work i saw from my classmates.

i realized i still have a lot of work to do.

i wish i could say i have some sort of design process…but we all know how dishonest that is. i just began doodling on my ipad.

we were tasked with sketching five ideas for each of the following words.

we were only allowed black squares, but we can rotate, clip, and even extend them beyond the drawing plane.

the first item for each word was always the first thought that came into my head; sometimes that thought wasn’t very creative. in later sketches, i spent further time experimenting with the squares’ location and placement.

at times i was extremely literal. sometimes i broke the rules. but this was just an exercise getting thoughts and feelings down on paper.

when i came to studio on the first day sketches were due, i honestly froze in disbelief. my classmates used the black squares as elegant paintbrushes in order to craft specific emotions, movements, or stories. meanwhile, i basically chucked a bunch of squares in a box and hoped they’d stick…

my instructor and teaching assistant provided some constructive feedback: what things were working and what things could be tweaked. they emphasized the fact there were no right answers. the feeling just emerges sometimes after playing around with shapes.

the two main things they told me to experiment with were minimalism and scale.

i realized i had never really toyed with fewer shapes. usually the message created by minimalism is more abstract, but can be more powerful. plus most of my drawings were too centered and never played with the boundaries or sizing in creative ways.

using the feedback from the course staff and inspiration from my peers, i crafted the following iterations in adobe illustrator. some designs built off of previous sketches and others were completely novel.

let’s see how this goes.

the following images were my submitted work. i really hate to say the word final because i could honestly toil through each drawing for hundreds of more hours. and my classmates could spend hundreds of more hours dissecting/critiquing them (i don’t think there’s always an end for an art-piece). these were just the things i submitted for a class grade…

iteration. i think overall that was my keyword lingering in my when producing the above drawings.

and iteration is more than simply doing something over again. in design, i’ve learned that means experimenting and playing around with different objects. sometimes that means sleeping on an idea or bouncing it back and forth with other ideas. maybe its looking at an old idea in a completely new or opposite context. often times, it means being frustrated why a vision doesn’t necessarily correspond to reality. iteration can represent many things, but overall it represents the concept of process or journey.

cause honestly that’s what the process of designing is: a journey through ideas.

some designs i was extremely happy and confident with, maybe they required less iteration (ex. see playful). some designs maintained the same overall structure but required tweaking in order to enhance the desired feeling (ex. see congestion, order). others required completely new interpretations or a re-interpretation of the same idea (ex. see comfort, tension).

but all them required iteration, whether visible in the “final” product or not!

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