January 27, 2015January 27, 2015

TODAY

1) Icebreaker

2) Basics

3) What’s coming up

IcebreakerTo start today, I want you to complete what is likely to be a familiar sort of icebreaker activity. You will pair up with someone you don’t already know, and over the course of a few minutes you will interview that person.

The info you need to get is on the next slide.

Find out…1) The person’s name (obviously)2) What he/she goes by (if it’s different)3) His/her major and progress in the

program.4) Why he/she decided to take Visual

Rhetoric5) His/her favorite color 6) One piece of information that will help

all of us to remember him/her.

Now, then…..let’s leap into Canvas and talk about the syllabus.

Some quick Visual fun

Take a look at the next few slides and tell me what’s going on here. Look carefully. Sometimes you might need to squint.

These illusions depend on intricate line work, very specific color and contrast choices, the mind’s desire to complete shapes and patterns and the fact that our eyes jitter a bit normally.

If you squint hard and look at each of these images, they WILL become still. But not for long.

This doesn’t pulse like the last one, but I wanted to give you another cool visual design trick here. On the next slide, you’ll see two dots (and a weird image, and a white space). Stare at the dot in the middle of the image for 30 seconds, then shift your gaze to the other dot.

Homework

For Thursday read:

The first 5 chapters of Williams The Non-Designer’s Design Handbook.

And we talk C.R.A.P.