Category Archives: visual

Rebuilding Foundations: 2012 Colour Studies – Unit 2

Unit 2: Colour Energy

Continuing with my self-directed study of colour by following the telecourse Colour: An Introduction.

(Check out all my colour assignments here.)

These notes give more detail on my experiences while completing this unit of study:

Click image to view the gallery for this unit:
Colour Studies 2012, Unit 2

The goals for this unit of study were:

  • to explore the impact of various contrasts:
    • contrast of extension, warm/cool, tonal, theoretical relationships of colour to shape

My experiences while completing the assignments:

  • Again, the lack of control in drawing on the Playbook tablet forced me to complete some drawing aspects (the round-cornered squares and triangles of the secondary colour-forms) on my PC, using Photoshop.
  • For colour selection, a few different tablet paint programs were employed, according to the abilities of the colour picker in each versus the requirements of the assignment: one program’s colour picker made it easier to find less saturated colours, while another allowed me to more easily select a warm or cool variation of a colour.

Rebuilding Foundations: 2012 Colour Studies – Unit 1

Unit 1: Basics of Colour

I thought I’d dive into a self-directed study of colour by following the 1980s telecourse Colour: An Introduction. It’s always good to re-tune your instrument once in a while.

(Check out all my colour assignments here.)

Even though I’ve worked as a designer for over 20 years, and have had a good sense of colour for as long as I can remember (at least in my opinion), this telecourse has challenged me and refreshed my thinking on effective colour use, theories, visual perception, and visual literacy in design.

These notes give more detail on my experiences while completing this unit of study:

Click image to view the gallery for this unit:
Colour Studies 2012, Unit 1

The goals for this unit of study were:

  • to establishing primary and secondary colours
  • to define colour wheel model
  • to explore light/dark (tonal) properties of the primary and secondary colours
  • to explore  warm/cool (temperature) properties of the primary and secondary colours

My experiences while completing the assignments:

  •  I’ve completed most of the assignments on my Blackberry Playbook. I thought it might be a convenient and capable tool for colour exploration and basic mark-making. It’s a convenient tool for some things, but not ideal for everything.
  • In essence, I have much less drawing control than I’d like. With the generic stylus I’ve been using, painting little freehand lines and figures or little blobs of paint is quite easy, but drawing clean geometric shapes is cumbersome, because the stylus isn’t that accurate and the paint programs that I chose (free ones) leave much to be desired in terms of drawing tools. Some drawings, like the colour circle, had to be completed in Photoshop.
  • Check your tablet’s brightness setting before you begin, or all your colours may be too light or too dark.

Reflections on a multimedia career…

All through my post-secondary education (four frantic, sleep-deprived, incredible years at art college), I seldom knew exactly what I wanted to do in art and design. I just knew what ideas excited me.

In the summer of 1985, once I learned that I was accepted the the Emily Carr College of Art and Design (after I peeled myself off the ceiling), I started to do a few things.

First I panicked, thinking “Gawd – can I do this?” I got over that phase.

Next, I began to imagine what it would be like to be an art student. Unfortunately, nothing but stereotypical images of painting and drawing came to my mind.

Finally, I realized that I needed to prepare myself in a few ways. I needed to assemble my portfolio and I needed to develop a little confidence, so I took a life drawing course at a small studio on Granville Island. I blushed self-consciously while trying to avoid the eyes of the nude model. I scribbled, muttered to myself, and produced a bunch of weak and tentative scribbles that I probably threw out later. As I was packing up to leave, I looked to the model as she was reaching for her robe, and she shot me a smile and a knowing look that both reassured me and told me that she knew just how green I was. I laughed on the inside, and walked home feeling some pride in having tried in my first life drawing class. I proudly announced to my Dad that I had done my first life drawing class. Once Dad realized that “life drawing” involved a nude model, he became very angry, growling “Why can’t you just draw fruit?!” Screw him, I thought. I was proud of myself. It wouldn’t be long before Dad felt proud too. That was pretty cool.

Fortunately, I passed my portfolio interview (and I still don’t know how I got through), and began Foundation (first year) studies at Emily Carr.

One of the first places where things really clicked for me was in Foundation Computer class. Even though it was 1985, and we were using Commodore 64s (and in one class, I swear to god I had a Vic-20 with a datasette), I became fascinated by those little machines that were capable of turning key-presses into little glowing blocks of colour and shape. I remember trying to memorize MS Basic character string functions like “Chr$(32)”, and trying to understand how BASIC worked. A year later, the college bought dozens of Macs, Amigas and Atari ST PCs, and we all began using mice and creating real computer-based graphics and animation.

I also began to consider the schism within myself: artistic and instinctual on the one side (my Mother), and structural and technical on the other side (my Father). Early on, I did not know how to reconcile these two aspects of my personality, but I knew that they would co-exist, and eventually, I developed the idea that they would interact or influence each other in some way.

In the following years, I developed a keen interest in multimedia, animation and video, and began to learn how these technologies were gradually converging (read Stewart Brand’s book “The Media Lab”). I absorbed as much media theory as my instructor Gary Lee Nova provided, got technical help designing simple electronic circuits from Dennis Vance, and studied on my own a lot (relationships between art, science and technology, cybernetics).

More than any other teacher I’ve had, Dr. Tom Hudson was a massive influence on me throughout my art student years. Under Tom’s tutelage and inspiration, I learned about visual literacy, and undertook experiments in colour and drawing in the Bauhaus and British post-war traditions. The main difference was that all my “vis-lit” research for Tom was executed on a microcomputer, using a commercial paint program. We were actually exploring and developing work in computer-based visual literacy. This extracurricular research work was used in Tom’s educational television series “Mark and Image”, and also published in two of his academic articles for the British Journal of Art and Design Education. These events remain my academic high-water marks, and form the springboard of my interest and development as a digital designer.

By a couple of years after graduation, I was developing icons, layouts and animations for the user interface of what was to become North America’s first home-based banking system. From there, my interest in GUI design and web design was born. Since that time, I’ve enjoyed working with software designers on GUI design projects for TV, game consoles, PC and web-based applications. The essentials of visual literacy, colour, design, perception, and user expectations have all been developed and refined through those practical, real-world design projects.

Now, 21 years after graduating from the ECCAD four year program and receiving my diploma in fine arts, I look at the preponderance of digital media and information systems in the world around me, and I’m amazed at how much that culture and technology have converged, and have even seemed to become practically inseparable.

I think that good digital design is more important than ever, and being able to work in multiple media, multiple formats and multiple modes of thought (artistic, technical, exploratory, practical) seems to me to be more important than ever.