Intro to Design

This is my family at Fenway Park in Boston, 2024

Introduction

I signed up for this course so that I can learn my way around the fablab, because it is an amazing resource. Also, I love to create things at home and find out how things work.

Something that I would really like to make during this course is anything with a motor, maybe a boat or a plane.

Recently, at summer camp, a friend and I built multiple things out of sticks, hammock straps, and other objects that we had around. We built a swing, a fortress, and a couple of benches to put around the village.

I work well in groups, and love to have many ideas working together.

I love Mark Rober, who is a YouTuber I have watched since I was little. He builds many interesting contraptions and makes science very fun to learn. Link

Sketch Book

These are my early sketches from the first and second week of school. They include my sketchbook cover and bird's eye views of both the fablab and the Gates Mills campus. My favorite of the three is the cover, because it pushed me to show my name in a creative way. I was able to include my first name and last initial, R. Can you see how?

This is my sketchbook's cover

This is my sketch of the fablab's floor plan

This is my sketch of the Gates Mills campus from a bird's eye view

Daily Design-Circles

To create these designs, we first worked on ghosting a circle. This means that you repeatedly make circles very lightly in pencil, until the motion feels very circular and natural, and then you press harder to make your final circle. On the next page, we worked on becoming fluent in creating the circles freehand by making small boxes, making arcs on the midpoints of each side of the boxes, and connecting the arcs as best we could. After that, Mr. DiGiorgio gave us a challenge by setting a timer, in which we had to fill as many of the circles as creatively as we could, emphasizing quantity over serious quality. Once the time ran out, we took a gallery walk for inspiration and filled in our final circles. Finally, we singled out our favorite of our designs, and made a more detailed drawing of it.

These are our two notebook pages, the left being the ghosting circles, and the right being the connected arcs.

This is my favorite of the sketches that I made. It is Kirby, who is a small comic and video game character whom I love.

16 Types of One Letter

I really enjoyed that in this exersise, the main focus was getting your creative juices flowing. You were uspposed to get as many ideas down onto a page, but also make them as unique as you can, which led to some of my favorite designs, such as the wave crashing onto the beach, the boomerand, the pipe wrench, and the copyright symbol. I learned that all that I had to do was sit down, and imagine as amy curved things as I could, and then design those things into the shape of a C.

The pipe wrench was one of my favorites because I felt that it was one of my most unique ideas.

Initials Sketches

For this project, we continued developing our skills of quantity over quality, by brain dumping as many combinations of our initials as we could. We also focused on line weight and negative space. We also learned about the golden ratio, and how many different large companies use it in their logo design for proportions. After our brain dump, we narrowed down to our three favorites, and lastly our very best work.

These are the narrowed three favorites, drawn with more detail in 2x2 inch squares.

This is our page of idea sketches for our initials. My favorites are lightly circled.

This is our final sketch of our best work, on non grid paper.

Logo Designs

In this assignment, we combined all of our previous skills learned in past assignments, and put them together to produce a logo for ourselves. we first practiced brain dumping, making a full pagespread of initial sketches for or logo. In this, we made sure to use different line weights, negative space, and even color. We then narrowed to our three favorites, but I had four, and once again came up with our best work. Our logos didn't need to be based on our initials, but I found my best inspiration there.

this is our pagespread of initial sketches. In the top right hand corner, there is a "noun list" of things that could represent me and my interests in my logos.

These are the narrowed four favorites once again, still in more detail.

This is my final product for my logo! I used the darkness of the letters to differentialte the B and the R, while still keeping the representation of the tri-force, which is an object from my favorite video games.

Illustrator Design 2B

In this assignment, we started to play around and get framiliar with the tools and possibilites within Adobe illustrator. We mastered the pathfinder tool, which allows you to combine shapes in many different ways. After that, we were tasked to use the pen tool try and recreate one of te shapes, and finally, to create your name with the text tool, and continuing to use the pen tool to explore making outlines.

Keychain

Name Stand

In this assignment, we were tasked with creating a standing nameplate engraved with our first name, but in a different design than what we used for our name tag. We practiced more with the text tool, but especially with pathfinding, the pen tool, and creating outlines, since our top and bottom had to fit perfectly into each other without getting stuck or being too loose.

This is my design of the stand within adobe illustrator. If you look close, you can see the very thin red cut lines. They are 0.001 pts wide!

This is the final lazer cut product! It can stand on it's own, and the top is safeley connected to the bottom.

Page updated

Report abuse