ART3800: TWENTIETH CENTURY ART CUSTOM COURSE GRAPHICS
START: January 23rd, 2024
COMPLETED BY: January 26, 2024
DESCRIPTION: This week I was tasked with the training to create a custom graphics package for a LAITS studio course.
BRIEF
For this course, Dr. Fabiola Martinez Rodriguez, the professor of ART3800: Twentieth Century Art, wanted custom graphics that heavily took inspiration from the content of the course. One of her main requirements for this was incorporating a classic 20th century font and to look into Bauhaus and the International Style for design inspiration.
STARTING STEPS
To meet these outlined goals for Dr. Fabiola Martinez Rodriguez's course I started by creating a mood board of color schemes, mood-boards, and 1920-1930s art and design that I felt would align well with the Professor's and my vision.
After making this mood-board and getting approval from my director, I was able to have a better grasp on how I was going to incorporate the requirements of this assignment into something that also represents the variety of art as a discipline. In addition to this I was able to see the legibility of a handful of 20th century font and which one would be most effective for the main audience of this course, students.
When drafting my first iteration of what the main design of this course would look like I started with designs that were more illustrative, as shown below.
While inspired by the classic Bauhaus geometric and asymmetric composition, I quickly realized this illustrative style fell flat when it came to In-Studio assets that had to look engaging and clean in order to be transferable into many different graphics. After scrapping this idea, I went back to ideating and referenced my mood-board in order to see how I can convey my vision. BASE/BACKGROUND DESIGN After playing around with more options and getting feedback from my director. I opened up photoshop, inspired to create a collage of some of the most famous works covered in the course content.After playing around a bit with placement, color, and texture, I was able to create a puzzle-like collage of some of the most recognizable pieces of twentieth century art. After being happy with the final result of this image I moved to testing it to see if it would comply with the In-Studio Asset guidelines regarding how a professor is framed and how a student is able to view them.
My initial iteration of this idea, while cohesive with the styling the professor requested, had two main problems - the saturation of the image - the placement of certain art pieces In the feedback my director gave me, she pointed out the distraction of Frida Kahlo's eye peaking out behind the professor and the image of the cross coming out of their head. These two images along with the high saturation of it all made the collage a bit distracting for students when trying to listen to their professor teach. After applying her feedback and suggestion I was able to come up with less distracting placement and toned down version of my previous design in order to confirm students have a productive learning experience.
Final Background Design IN-STUDIO ASSETS After finalizing this design, I was able to move on to make the rest of the IN-Studio assets for this custom course. For these In-Studio assests I had to tweak this main design slightly to add variation and to fit the various sizes needed. For the custom course I needed to create 3 additional main layouts: the vertical monitor, the desk skirt, and the ipad overlay. Vertical Monitor:
Desk Skirt:
Ipad Overlay:
CANVAS COURSE GRAPHICS To finalize the course assets I additionally had to make canvas course graphics for the homepage, dashboard, and buttons. Due to the base design being completed this portion of the design process was not too much of struggle. Call-Out Buttons:
Canvas Dashboard:
Canvas Homepage:
ADDITIONAL GRAPHICS Animation: In addition to these course graphics I was also asked to storyboard a starter animation for this course that would play before the beginning of the lectures.
My idea for this animation was to make it look as if someone was cutting out the art pieces themselves to make this collage. I wanted to have a realistic almost magazine like feel of cutting out the images from these art pieces and gluing them to the page. At the end it would show the final collage and the camera would slowly zoom in to reveal the finalized background and the text desired. Powerpoint: I was also assigned to make two main example slides for this course. This task was fairly simple and required just slight adjustment to the background (black 50% opacity box) to make the text legible and comfortable for students to take notes on and read.
CONCLUSION + FINAL DESIGN MENU Overall designing this custom course was such an informative and fun process. It allowed me to be creative but also consider the usability for it target audience of students. The past user research done on what distracts and helps students learn in a digital environment helped me a lot when it came to this product and I will take what I learned designing "Twentieth Century Art" to future graphics and assets I create as a design STA.
