Unit Two -- Graphics

This unit focuses on working with images that, unlike photos, were not created with a camera, but instead created directly on the computer. These types of graphics are useful in things like flyers, magazine covers, company logos, advertisements, or your family christmas card.

However, there is a very important part of graphics that this course will only touch on a little...the artistic elements. To make good graphics, you must understand what images are most pleasing to the eye. Although this section will provide a few pointers along the way, to really understand this takes several courses of study, years of practice and a lot of hard work. Instead, this course will focus on some of the basics of how graphics work, and how to use a few tools to come up with some very basic designs.

If you want more information about the more artistic side of graphic design, you can start by reading through these articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_principles_and_elements
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_(visual_arts)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics

Temporary single page file, and es

Section 1 - Vector Graphics
Section 2 - Inkscape
Section 3 - Proportion and Space
Section 4 - Light and Color
Section 5 - Creating a Rocket
Section 6 - Illustrator
Section 7 - Diagrams

Other Graphic Applications

Publishing Layout

Once you've created a great graphic, you need to find a way to display it to the world. Sometimes that is done online, but often that means printing it out. There are a whole class of programs that revolve around making things look good when printed out, called Print Layout, Page Layout, or Publishing Layout programs. These go beyond the capabilities of typical word processing programs like Microsoft Word, which are generally focused on A4 sized documents. They allow you to create things like brochures, magazines, books, flyers, etc.

The most professional tool in this field is generally considered to be QuarkXPress, but Adobe also has its popular PageMaker and InDesign programs. In smaller companies and in personal use, tools such as Microsoft Publisher and the open source tool Scribus do this work.

3-D Creation

In this section we only talked about creating graphics in two dimensions, although sometimes we talked about making it look like if it were in three dimensions. However, all our creations were made to be viewed from one direction and were flat graphics (you couldn't turn them to the side or back). There is also a whole segment of graphic creation that involves creating things that are capable of being manipulated in three dimensions. When you have one of these objects, it is possible to spin it around and view it from all angles.

The two biggest packages for creating 3-D graphics are Blender (open source) and Maya (proprietary). They are often used to create characters in movies (like Toy Story or Big Buck Bunny), video games, or advertisements. (More animations with Blender)

In a tangentially related category, are object creation programs. These can be used to create objects for things like automated milling or 3-D printing. or they can be used to create objects for virtual worlds like Second Life or Google Earth. The most popular tool that people use for creating these objects is Google Sketchup, however, it is a simplified descendant of industrial strength Computer Aided Design (CAD) programs such as Auto CAD, Solidworks, and BRL CAD.

Animation and Interaction

The use of computers to view graphics over the internet has allowed them to take on a whole new property of interactivity. Computer driven graphics are capable of performing actions in response to events by the user (clicking somewhere, pushing a key, etc) or simply based on a timer that started when the graphic was opened. By far the most common way of displaying this content on the internet is through Adobe's Flash Player plugin for web browsers (the Gnash program is a compatible, open source version).

Because the Flash standard is controlled by the Adobe corporation, there have been two, somewhat joined, attempts to replace it with an open standard in the last couple years. The first was to build animation capability into the SVG format. This provides for some of the basic features that the Flash standard supported. Beyond that the new HTML 5 standard, which all the major browser makers have implemented or are implementing, has numerous animation abilities. It can deal with SVG files in more advanced ways, it also has what is called a "canvas" element, which creates an area on the page where all kinds of graphics and animation can be shown and manipulated.

Proportion and Space Exercise

Lets try that same example now. Here is the original file, with just the background and example trees. Copy and paste the trees into the background and change their size to match the correct proportion. Start in the back with the small trees, then move forward with increasingly large trees. Don't forget to leave an open area for our campsite.

Background-Empty.svg

Intentemos ese mismo ejemplo ahora. Abajo está el archivo original, con sólo el trasfondo y ejemplos de árboles. Copia y pega los árboles en el trasfondo y cambia su tamaño para que corresponda con la proporción correcta. Comienza en la parte posterior con los árboles más pequeños, luego continua hacia al frente (hacia el primer plano), con árboles más y más grande. No olvides dejar un área sin árboles donde irá nuestro campamento.

Background-Empty.svg

Logo Exercise

Creation of your logo - Part 1

In this exercise you will need to create a logo for an imaginary company.

1 - Think of your company. What will the comany do? What will its product be? It must not an existing company or its product. Write out your company and its products.

For example: Coca-Cola is NOT acceptable, Cola de Tomas is acceptable

2 - Write out a description of your logo. Include shapes, colors, and other important features.

Creation of your logo - Part 2

Use Inkscape to create your logo based on the description in part 1. Along with the submission of your logo, include the text you wrote from part 1, with any updates that are necessary.

Final Exercise

In this several part exercise, we will be creating an advertisement for the imaginary product/company you created in the Logo Exercise. This advertisement should be a full-page (A4 size paper) that could go into a magazine. It should include your logo from the Logo Exercise.

Part 1

Plan the layout. What will the advertisement look like? Will there be text, pictures, other graphics? How will the components be spaced out?
Write out the plan and submit it. If you are going to use any external material (pictures, graphics, etc) include their attribution.

Part 2

Create your layout with Inkscape. Submit the SVG and a PNG export that could be published. Include the original plan with any changes that you needed to make.

Vocabulary

Graphics - Images created without the use of a camera.
Vector Graphics - A type of graphics that can be stored as instructions for re-creating the image instead of in a raster format.
Shape - A object in a vector graphic. This can be a regular shape (rectangle, elipse, polygon) or something irregular such as a blob.
Stroke - A line. The most common use for strokes is to create the outside boundary of a shape, but they can also be used by themselves such as when drawing lines. The stroke can have properties such as color or thickness.
Fill - The properties of the area contained by the shape's stroke. The most common fill property is color.
Z-Order - Identifies the position on the "Z" axis, which determines which objects are in front or behind other objects.
Path - A sequence of lines or curves.
Node - A point on a path that determines its position.
Bezier Curve - A special type of path that allows the direction that the line takes as it goes into a node to be changed.

Attribution

Mountains, nicubunu, http://www.openclipart.org/detail/9452, Public Domain
Tree 10, nicubunu, http://www.openclipart.org/detail/9487, Public Domain
Tree 9, nicubunu, http://www.openclipart.org/detail/9485, Public Domain
Tree 7, nicubunu, http://www.openclipart.org/detail/9479, Public Domain
Tree 6, nicubunu, http://www.openclipart.org/detail/9481, Public Domain
Tree , nicubunu, http://www.openclipart.org/detail/9469, Public Domain
Fire June holiday's, valessiobrito, http://www.openclipart.org/detail/876, Public Domain
Tente, spadaddin, http://www.openclipart.org/detail/71005, Public Domain
Cardboard Box, molumen, http://www.openclipart.org/detail/1509, Public Domain
Subtractive Color, SharkD et. al., http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SubtractiveColor.svg, Public Domain
Gallery of soverign-state flags, wikipedia community, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallery_of_sovereign-state_flags, CC-BY-SA
Drawing a rocket with Inkscape is not rocket science, Nicu Buculei, http://howto.nicubunu.ro/rocket-inkscape/, CC-BY-SA

Resources

http://howto.nicubunu.ro/ - Open Source Graphics Tutorials
https://inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com/ - Lots of Inkscape Tutorials
http://kalaalog.com/2007/09/27/how-to-illustrate-palm-tree/
Start of a series of inkscape tutorials - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-zLZ6ilRRE
Start of a series of illustrator tutorials - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uAzk_hLRow

TODO:
Create exercise with golden ratio
Create exercise with empty space
Create exercise with light source
Create exercise with color