Reflection on Digital Graphics, Animation, and Desktop Publishing

After taking this course, I have started paying more attention to the drawings I see on magazines, books, newspaper, and so on. The four design principles of Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity (CRAP) in the first assignment has really helped me to understand better how and why designers of magazine covers deign the way they do. When I stand at the check out lane of the grocery stores, my attention goes to these four principles I see in the magazines stands. The four design principles are very useful information I learned in this course. These were new information to me as I did not have any idea of these concepts before I took this course. The readings for the design principles were very detailed in explaining the design principles. Furthermore, the assignment helped me to master and understand the principles better.

The logo assignment and readings were also very beneficial to me. As a technologist for my school, I am charged with designing logo for my campus. This logo design lesson helped me to carry out this responsibility effectively. I used the knowledge I gained form the reading to design my school logo.

The most fun part of this course was the animation assignment. It was very amazing and interesting to create objects and make them move from location to another. This lesson helped me to learn how to use Macromedia Flash to make animation. I used to think it was very difficult to make animation. But after this lesson I found out that it was not that difficult to do. Animation is something that I would love to teach my students and colleagues at my school.

The digital newsletter lesson was also useful. Though I have had many opportunities to design newsletters for my school in the past, but I did not really know all the terms that go with designing newsletter. This course taught me such terms as nameplate, masthead, pull quotes, and so on. I will apply all these terms to my future newsletters.

Having opportunity to discuss on the discussion board and having classmates to comments on our discussions was very beneficial. I was able to learn and get ideas from my classmates from their feedback on the discussion board. It was also good to be able to post our opinions and writing on blogs and wikis. This helped us to keep electronic portfolio of our work to be referenced to later in the program.

Reflection on Ancient Manuscript

After looking at this image, I had to ask myself, what message the illustrator was trying to convey with this script. The image looks to me like a rug design with pictures of eagles and what looks like an angel in the middle of it.

The design principles I can see in this script are:

Contrast – The designer used combination of colors. But the one color that stands out the most is the yellow color that was used to border round the four pictures. The four pictures also caught my eyes.

Repetition- Repetition can be found everywhere in the script. One repetition is the yellow border around the four images. The designer repeated the yellow border four times in the script. Also repetition can be seen at each corner of the script. Furthermore, the designer repeated the arc drawing in all four sides of the script.

Alignment- The four corners of the script are aligned to level with the corners of the paper. Also the four bordered pictures are aligned to have equal size. I believe the designer did a superb job of aligning this script. In all, the script has a look of centered-aligned image.

Proximity- This was kind of difficult for me to determine. The only observation I can make regarding to proximity is that the cross (+) signs are placed closer to each angels in the picture.

The author used pictures of angels in different forms to illustrate that this is biblical and religious content.


The manuscript can be found at http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/bok/img/pl04.jpg