Week 10 - Origination

Reading Quiz - John Maeda, Laws of Simplicity: Law 9 – Failure

Using the student exhibition as an example, describe an aspect of your work or something you have worked on, where you have found a symbiotic relationship that is both complexity and simplicity

Complexity and simplicity is always around.

I recently was drawing a page in a story book about a teddy visiting the butterfly farm. I wanted to draw (in illustrator) the butterflies enclosed in a cage, but after hours of attempts realized it wasn’t working. Things got too complex and decided to take the simple approach and not have a cage at all. The time factor also came into account here.

Provide a conceptual example of a situation that has arisen during this project where you have had a return on failure?

Originally we were going to do a teddy bear story and the adventures he had on a trip to the shop. We realized that there are already so many teddy books around, so we changed the story to have more of a Darwin flavor – the fun teddies (or children really) can have in Darwin on school holidays.

Provide a short explanation and example of how FAILURE can be turned around using the law LEARN. Describe how this relates to the TIME law.

Learn from your mistakes – make sure you save a copy of any illustrator images before you flatten them.

If Illustrator keeps crashing make sure you save your file regularly and in two different places!

Make sure you print your finished product out with plenty of time to spare to allow for any problems that might occur with the artwork. Don’t finalise the story (text) too late, give yourself plenty of time and get it proof read early, a change in story can affect the image layout and vice versa.

 Lets hope that this business learn from this experience - Poor font choice/kerning!

 

This is a really bad layout. The placement of the womans head and the green label really change the Magazine name drastically. Hopefully the designers learnt from this.  OR - was this a ploy to get attention and thus publicity?

 

This video shows some tips when designing book covers. It says to make the Authors name quite prominent (tip 1), in my recent book cover designs - although I did have the author name in the bottom right hand corners, I believe the colours, fonts and layout that I used made it fairly prominent. It also says no clutter (tip 2) - I believe I got this right on the Brownie book, nice and simple, not too many images, but it clearly shows what the book is about, not sure if I got it right with My Captain Ron book as I have every animal on the book covers - but I think it is well spaced out and looks good. The last tip (tip 3) says don't use a standard font - I think I got this right I tried to choose a font that had the right look and feel to the story.

How are you using the laws in relation to your contribution to The Ten Squared exhibition? Provide a short explanation and example for TWO of the laws so far. Use your work towards and your examples..

Originally I was just using the pen tool in illustrator to create images, however Paul showed me this great tutorial using the brush tool. This method saved me time and I learnt a new method – um so I guess that’s the TIME and LEARN laws covered.