Personal Geography- Cognitive Map

This is the third of a three part mapping project. Students were required to create three separate maps, each depicting the same trip. This project taught me how to use abstraction and utilize symbols and colors to communicate a message without text. The cognitive city is the product of the brain and its experiences: how the inhabitant structures his or her perceptions and links them to the physical network (Mark Treib). Part three of my mapping assignment was to map my decisions on the way to school from my home and show how they affected my following desicions.

Personal Geography- Perceptual Map

This is the second of a three part mapping project. Students were required to create three separate maps, each depicting the same trip. This project taught me how to use abstraction and utilize symbols and colors to communicate a message without text. The perpetual city is a negotiation between the artifact and the human being (Mark Treib). Part two of my mapping assignment required me to map my perceptions on the trip from my home to class.

Personal Geography- Artifact Map

This is the first of a three part mapping project. Students were required to create three separate maps, each depicting the same trip. This project taught me how to use abstraction and utilize symbols and colors to communicate a message without text. The artifact city is: the physical, indisputable, the network of streets and urban places and the buildings that surround and define them (Mark Treib). Part one of the mapping assignment entailed designing an artifact map from my home to class.

Symbol Methodology Animation

This is a short interactive animation project that shows the certain parts of the symbol methodology project- the matrix, the iterations, and the final symbol. The video was made in Flash and requires the viewer to click buttons in order for the video to progress. To start the video, click on the word "telecommunications". During the video, you will be asked to click on a symbol of your choice. Only one of these symbols will progress the video. At the end, there is also a replay button.

Symbol Methodology Project

The following images are from a Graphic Design I project titled "Symbol Methodology".  The idea is to create three symbols for an institution by using the methodology. The institution I chose was telecommunications. The three categories I chose to describe telecommunications are: visual communication, text communication, and audio communication. We began the methodology by coming up with 100 words to describe our institution.

From the three categories- visual communication, text communication, and audio communication- we came up with three attributes from each. The attributes are- visual communication: smoke signals, photography, and video chat, text communication: letters, email, and texting, and audio communication: magnetic recordings, CB radio, and morse code. From this, we created one symbol for each attribute. For each category, one of the attributes symbols was photorealistic, one was hand-drawn, and one was abstracted.

With these original symbols, we then put them into "the matrix". The matrix allowed us to create 12 new symbols by "breeding" the originals together. Per category, we combined the hand-drawn+abstract, hand-drawn+photorealistic, photorealistic+abstract, and hand-drawn+photorealistic+abstract.

The next step involved picking one hybrid symbol per category and vectorizing it in Adobe Illustrator.

And finally, we chose one final symbol per category.

Ducky

Our first mini-project in Design I was to trace an image of a duck to practice using the pen tool.