Samantha Nolte-Yupari
Visual Images on the Web
The images on this page represent the work of a group of undergraduate, non-art majors taking an introductory online art class. The course work was constructed to introduce students to preparing visual and verbal media for presentation online with special emphasis placed on the aesthetics of image making and interaction with visual culture.
Students worked to create their own personal blog space and learned to anlayze, critique, and curate collections of their own original images using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Students condsidered the work of other bloggers, online photographers, artists, researchers, and writers in order to build their own online projects and space reflective of their personal style and aesthetic.
Taking Photos of Daily Life
In this project, students (most of whom were beginning photographers) worked to develop their photography skills and curate a gallery of images that documented their daily lives. Students had the option to work with whatever camera they had available--be it an iPhone or a digital SLR--but were told they could not edit their images after they took them. Any and all technical work on the images had to be done by considering both the hardware of their camera (e.g. shutter speed (settings), aperture, "film" speed, and focusing) as well as artist choices about framing, negative spaces, rule of thirds, and focal points. Students carried their cameras with them for a four day period and took pictures of their daily lives. After taking at least 100 photos they curated a gallery of their best 8 images posting on their blogs both the images as well as reflective descriptions about their photography process.
Graphic Resumes
For this assignment students demonstrated their growing competency with Adobe Illustrator, and explored text as a graphic element by taking their resume and turning it into a graphic resume. Student used the class Pinterest account to examine examples of graphic resumes and Dafont.com to explore typefaces and fonts not available in Microsoft Word. Then after chosing a color scheme and a typeface scheme students experimented in Illustrator to find graphic ways to represent their resume information. This assignment was especially effective because it reframed something familiar--text--in a new and different way.
Combining Words and Images
After learning about free source imagery and analyzing online examples of changing connotations and cultural meanings caused by artists' appropriation and juxtaposition of popular images, students demonstrated their competency with Adobe Photoshop by combining found and taken images, and textual quotes that were meaningful to them, to create a digital collage. Students built on and continued to apply their knowledge of framing, composition, color, and typography from prior assignments.
Creating Infographics, Creating Visual Data
For their culminating project, students learned about infographics, visual data methods, and gestalt psychology and synthesized their knowledge of previous course concepts of photography, color, text, juxtapostion, etc. to create inforgraphics on a self-chosen topic in Indesign and Illustrator. Students researched and created a bibliography, analyzed pre-existing infographics for their composition characteristics, collected inspirational photographs and sketched out rough drafts.