ILLUS-3400

IMAGE DESIGN

Faculty: Kim DeMarco

Course Level: Junior, Senior, 5th Year

3 CREDITS

CONCEPTS ELECTIVE REQUIREMENT: This course fulfills the additional concepts elective requirement for Illustration majors.

Milton Glaser once commented that a good designer “sees a way to unify separate occurrences and create a gestalt, an experience in which this new unity provides a new insight.” Excellent design is much more than the sum of its parts; its unified totality presents a visual reality, a world with its own inherent logic. This class will investigate imagery that is both picture and graphic form. In rigorous pursuit of the orchestration of shape, structure, movement, color palette, figure/ground, and pattern we will examine the tools and processes that lead to dynamic image design. While studying influential figures from the history of visual communication, students will undertake projects including posters, illustrations, symbols, logos, icons, information graphics, and other forms of imagery which explore the intersection of illustration and graphic design.

This course seeks to apply a design sensibility to the creation of illustrations. The formal characteristics include flatness, strong graphic quality, awareness of figure/ground, scale, color, placement – these all take precedence over naturalistic concerns, rendering and perspective. This is a stylistic approach that lends itself to clear, conceptual communication. The goal of communication is always primary; and assignments will require problem-solving as well as development of a clear and refined graphic approach. We will use form, geometry, pattern, white space, and perhaps, letterforms to achieve, as Milton Glaser put it “the unity and conviction that emerges from dealing with the total surface.”