Process Book

Isabelle Delfosse Introduction to Design ART 130 Spring 2022 St. Norbert College

INSERT CLEVER PROCESS B O O K TITLE H E R E

Introduction This book is to showcase the workings of Designer Isabelle Delfosse throughout the Spring Semester of 2022. The process of design work will be noted and spoken upon, as well as showing the final products of each project.

Note from the Designer: “I took this class as a requirement for my major, but it has turned into a larger passion that I hope to continue pursuing throughout my college life and beyond. I thouroughly enjoyed the process of each one of these projects and am quite satisfied with the results that came from it. Design wasn’t, but now is something I look forward to exploring.”

Crash Course Day 1 Design: “Okay everyone, for Friday’s class, please bring in super random materials that you think would be helpful in building something. I know, super specific right!?!”

To my surprise, this was my initial shock coming into design on the first day and this project being set in front of us. Although we were unaware of the details of the project going into the work day, it was a learning experience on how to roll with the unknown that is a major aspect of design. On our workday, we were assigned a random partner in which we were to go through a worksheet to talk about ourselves and get to learn something about that other person. This created a sense of community within our class even with the unfortunate circumstances of being stuck at home for the first two weeks of class.

The project itself was creating a product that would solve a problem for the partner we were assigned, based upon the information that they gave us. This allowed us as designers to get comfortable with the idea of working with potential clients, as well as creating products that may seem crazy, but crazy is where the best ideas first start.

Notes on in process worksheet done in collaboration with fellow classmate Nathaniel Mohoney.

Final Product: model of camera for the purpose of my client pursuing more of the hobby he enjoys, photography.

Engaging with a real person changed the direction of the prototype by allowing feedback from the other person on whether the prototype would help their need, as well as allowing for new ideas for the need they had. The engagement also allowed more insight to the person we were interviewing and what would be a greater need and the most beneficial product for them.

Doing the exercise online influenced the work due to the fact that with breakout rooms it was easy to stay within the time parameters for this exercise. Doing the exercise online also could have impacted the personal aspect of the conversations with the other person.

Showing unfinished work to another person was quite intimidating at first due to the fact that it’s unfinished and usually I like to show people finished products.

As the exercise went on, however, I became more comfortable and was able to set aside the fact that my work was unfinished and “not so great.” I actually quite enjoyed the process of showing unfinished work because I could gain feedback that I would not have if I showed the end result.

The pace felt very fast and I would have loved to continue the conversation aspect especially because it is hard to get to know someone in such a short time frame. It felt like it was necessary to get the point across instead of dwelling on unimportant details which is how I often tend to work. Thinking so quickly was a challenge but a fun one due to the fact that we had no time to second guess our thoughts and instead just go with it.

Based on what I learned I would go back and get more into the needs of the other person within the conversation, and why that person was having that need. I would go over the process of coming up with a product design and how I could meet their needs better with that product.

Who Designs To understand design, one has to see the work of other designers so they can relate back to particular aspects of professional designers and see why they are successful. Being a beginner designer, we were given the task of exploring and researching a particular designer which we would use to create a post of our thoughts about their design abilities and works. It is important to read the directions before building a house, and that is the same idea for design, it’s important to research and see the steps to a successful design before having the ability to accomplish that success.

Smiley Face sketch 4/16/22

Artist: Ruth Ansel Ruth Ansel has been a turning point of some of the most influential magazines of the 20th century and continues her work even today at her studio Ruth Ansel Design. Born in 1938 in New York, Ruth Ansel grew up in the Bronx where she became fascinated by films and movies that she would watch. Ansel attended Alfred University where she graduated with a degree in ceramic design. She married Bob Gill, an illustrator and graphic designer, but that marriage only lasted a few years. After her marriage ended, Ansel needed a way to support herself, leading her to seek out a job with Henry Wolfe, the art director for the magazine Bazaar, but found the head designer Marvin Israel instead. Israel took a big risk hiring Ansel due to her having a very small portfolio with little design work, however, he liked that he did not have to unteach her the cliches of graphic design.

After Israel got into an argument with editor-in-chief Nancy White and left Bazaar, Ansel, and co-assistant to Israel, Bea Feitler, became co-editors for Bazaar. Ansel’s work at Bazaar in the 60s opened up many opportunities which led her to the New York Times magazine in the 70s, House and Garden, Vanity Fair, and Vogue in the 80s, and then her own studio.

Ansel was the first woman in each position she held, which surprised peers and even Ansel herself. In an interview for Gale General OneFile, Ansel said, “Trust your instincts, take risks, embrace accidents, keep looking at everything, know your subject, be tenacious and be dedicated to your craft.”

Sources: https://go-gale-com.snc.idm.oclc.org/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&u=waicu_ stnorbert&id=GALE%7CA225055598&v=2.1&it=r&sid=ebsco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgf-aUKwo5k https://go.distance.ncsu.edu/gd203/?p=28127 Final product: Write-up of thoughts based on the works of professional designer Ruth Ansel.

Ruth Ansel: Bazaar magazine covers

Dot/Line The dot and line project is one to engage the designer in the challenge of using minimal subject matter and requirements to create a composition that evokes a specific emotion. With a limited color palette of black and gray, as well as using simple paper cutouts of these dots and lines, the designer's mind is further challenged by going back to our childhood roots of arts and crafts. Through trial and error of composition, relationships between the objects, and proper use of space, the designer should be able to represent a complex and strongly emotional word through simple dots and lines.

In Process sketches of chosen words

Gestalt is how objects relate to the rest of the world or other objects.

When we talked about it in class, gestalt had multiple principles that related to art and they were concepts such as similarity, figure and ground, pattern, proximity, and parallelism.

These all have to do with objects relating to one another and in turn this ties into our project by the fact that we had to create a way that different sized dots and lines were able to relate to one another to create the representation of a word.

This project affected my idea of abstraction due to the fact that I never thought abstraction could be so simple. To explain, abstraction has always seemed like this grand image that has a bunch of colors, shapes, lines, etc.

I had not thought that abstraction was something that could be so simplistic and use a couple dots and lines like we were using.

Abstraction, to me, has expanded in the ways that it can be applied.

For some words it was quite difficult to illustrate them, and for others it was not difficult. The words I did were chaos, scarcity, and rejection. The word chaos was by far the most difficult word to represent because I wanted to challenge myself and do something other than the first thought that I had, which was similar to the other interpretations of chaos.

However, giving personalities to the shapes made it easier to create a representative piece because with us being emotional humans, we can relate to that. With scarcity and rejection it was easier to represent them because I gave the objects those emotions.

Using gestalt and abstraction in other contexts would allow me to have a mindset of art within an everyday setting by seeing an object and being able to grasp a concept from a simple object. It will also help in other projects moving forward if there is a representative aspect to the project. Specifically pertaining to me, I would like to be an art teacher, so I may be able to implement a project similar to this into my classes once I get to that point in my career.

I am very particular about the projects that I make so it is very easy for me to make a “well-crafted object.’’ I would rather take my time and spend extra time on small details. I love spending my time to perfect the details, or at least attempt to perfect them, because I like to be as satisfied as possible with the final result of the project. When it comes to art, I can get lost in the work because I want it to be as good as it can.

Final Iterations: Scarcity (top) Rejection (center) Chaotic (bottom)

Letterforms

Typography has been around for centuries and therefore there are many variations of text styles. The task at hand with the letter forms project is to use one of the simplest fonts out there to create multiple artistic renditions of a word that is three to five letters long. By using the simple font, the designer has the ability to compose a more complex composition of their word. The final product includes four of the renditions spanning from straight letters to complex visuals with the word incorporated properly.

I learned that letterforms are a lot more particular than meets the eye.

There are a lot more specific parts to a letter than what is initially seen and it can completely change the rendering and feel of a word solely based on the way the letter is created. It is also important to note that the parts that are added to a form of the word like other lines, shadows, textures, etc. Can make a huge difference in the feel of the word as well.

If I were to continue working with the letters, I would have worked closer with the different meanings of the word “nerve” and looked at it in a much more abstract and literal way.

I would have also played with the interpretations of the word that I already had and worked with variations of the existing work that I had.

Final renditions of “Nerve” (top left: letters only, printed “straight”; top right: letters & modifications; bottom left: One more of my choosing; bottom right: Letters & typographic variations)

Iterative Illustrations Moving parts. This was the main requirement for the iterative illustrations project.

Taking an animal or object with moving parts and creative variations of styles and concepts was the task given. This process allows for greater understanding of how style and composition of an object can result in a drastic difference in feel of the design work. InDesign was used to create a poster of all the iterations.

The use of InDesign allowed for learning experience of Adobe software that is widely used in the design world. Overall, the product of this project is an introduction of how multiple aspects of design can correlate.

In process practice of “one line drawings”

I had a rocky mountain goat and I learned a lot about the creature through this process. I learned that they scale mountains on a daily basis and are able to balance on rocks that are only inches wide. They are extremely intelligent creatures. They live in mountainous areas but will venture to flatter lands if that is the way that they are headed. They are found in Alaska and Canada in the rocky mountains (the name gives that one away a bit). They can actually jump 12 feet high and are extremely fit.

The media that was by far the most challenging was the collage iterations of the animal. It was difficult to find images that resembled the different parts of the animal while keeping it to the correct scale and not having one part of the goat be much larger or smaller than the rest of it. The most enjoyable one I found out was the master artist iterations due to the fact that I had two surrealist painters.

I quite enjoy painting and Magritte and Dali have been some of my favorite artists for a very long time so it is cool to find a way to apply their style to my own work.

I learned a lot about Photoshop that I have actually already used for a piece I was commissioned to help work on. It was an image that I needed to take the background out of so the photographer I was working with could lay that over another image and have it look like a cohesive image. Having the skills to use Photoshop to color correct and erase sections of an image with ease is really nice to know and have available.

There are lots of different iterations I would consider doing with the mountain goat if I had a whole year to do iterations. I would definitely make more iterations based on the works of the master artists I chose due to the fact that both Magritte and Dali have many very interesting pieces with diverse subject matter that I could include in the piece. I would also consider working more on continuous line iterations and adding more shadows and details. I would also try and come up with some different mediums to work with if there was no requirement for the iterations to be in the mediums that we had already worked with. There are many possibilities to try.

Final Composition of all rocky mountain goat iterations

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PSA Poster

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S ENG Plastic bags are highly recyclable, but not through your curbside bin. Bags and film wrap around sorting machinery, which can shut down the entire system.

To recycle your plastic bags, look for appropriate locations on the SNC campus, or find local drop-offs at bagandfilmrecycling. org.

To learn more about what items can be recycled curbside in De Pere, visit recyclemoretricounty. org/waste-wizard.

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personal style that I can use in future projects. In this project in particular it was especially easy to be able to accept that there were going to be some pretty awful ideas that came out of my head at first and they were very apparent on the thumbnail page that I drew up.

But there were also some pretty good ideas that I would like to continue to explore and modify to my personal style.

Working with a client was intimidating at first but as the process went on, I became more comfortable with the whole process and realized that all it is a process, so it was okay to not be so good at it at first.

As seen in my final piece, I used the concepts of scale, opacity, rhythm, orientation, and negative space to create a visual hierarchy in various ways and in different sections of the work. I used scale to create the ultimate hierarchy of the title in making it large, using a slightly smaller text for the subheading, and an even smaller text for the additional information and contact info because it was the least important information that would be used by those who were attracted by the heading and subheading. In terms of opacity and rhythm, this is seen within the subheading of the piece because of using solely the stroke of the text and then repeating the text to create a pattern. I took orientation into consideration through how one commonly reads something, from left to right, top to bottom, and had the starting information starting at the top left, and then as the viewer read they would know where to go next because of that typical reading pattern. Negative space was lacking in my piece, however, it was filled with patterns or a shade so that the important information could be noted first and then if so desired, someone could look at the design closer.

Final PSA Poster

If the money was guaranteed…

If I were guaranteed it would support me financially, I would want to make a living off photography. Photography has always been something I was interested in for as long as I could remember. Since about fourth or fifth grade, I would take my mom’s camera out and take pictures of anything and everything no matter if it looked good or not, it was always just fun. That is until I got my own camera and then it became something super important to me.

I was able to afford a proper camera in the midst of high school which allowed me to excel at the craft and people started to notice.

I was just getting really good with it and even started doing some free photo shoots with my friends. And then COVID-19 struck and photography had another meaning entirely to me.

Amidst the two year period of major isolation, I was able to find comfort in photography as a way to feel connected to something important and find peace in an art form in such a chaotic time. Now that the world has shifted away from that major isolation period, I have been able to get out more and more. Every time I go out, grabbing that camera brings me that sense of comfort again and that is why I would want to do this for the rest of my life. I want to always feel comfortable in my craft. And I plan to start a photography business of my own to one day achieve this dream that has become so important to me.

Curious Man sketch 4/16/22

Good vs Significant Life A good life is a life where you take the animal by the horns and are content with the ride.

Allowing yourself to recognize what you should appreciate and when to let go is key to a good life.

Recognize the fact that there can be bad days and that it is okay to accept that it’s a bad day.

Recognize that humans are not perfect and mistakes happen no matter who or what you are.

Recognize that when life gives you lemons, you can choose to make lemonade or throw the lemons away.

Sometimes things have to go very wrong for them to be good again, but it is always good.

Sometimes you have to remember that your mindset is what makes life good.

Sometimes the life in front of you is more important that the life behind you, so focus on that.

You can choose to focus on all the bad things and live based on the past, or you can choose to take the mindset that you are not alone and have good all around you, just make sure to look.

Self portrait 2/22/22

A significant life is a life where you take the animal by the horns and ride, but change course if you want to go another way.

It is never too late, or too early to make a life that you want to live. Life is short, yet has no time limit to when you can accomplish your goals. All you need to do is start.

Start taking the steps to change how your life is structured so in the end it resembles a goal or dream.

Start evaluating each aspect of your life that is necessary to your happiness, and the ones that would not be a shame to have go.

Start seeing things how you want to and not allow others to dictate the direction or path of a life that is beautifully yours.

You have the power and you can change or keep things the same, there are no rules to what you see as significant.

You have the power to make the best or the worst of things.

You have the power to live a life you are proud of, and if you are not, it is essential to have the courage to stand up and change it.

You are only one decision away from a totally different life, so make the ones that add happiness and therefore significance.

And the truth is, nobody will know you’re living a significant life except you.