10 Years of Waves

I recently found some music that I made in college, including the very first tracks I ever made. This academic year will mark 10 years since I graduated— it’s a good time to look back at who I was and who I’ve become. For this project, we were asked to use a color palette of 6 colors to represent ourselves and create compositions with just those colors. For the work below, I used the first 10 seconds of each of the 6 early songs that I found and visualized those as wave forms. I applied color to those waveforms and then placed them on a black canvas with white text of the number 10. I sized the waveforms differently and zoomed in close to the waveform to obscure the number 10 and create compositions that sometimes skewed each/any of the components of the image.

Below the gallery, I included the image of the full canvas. Note: when actually creating the compositions, I sometimes moved/deleted waveforms and the numbers, so what’s on this canvas now is not how it was set up for the compositions.

If you want to hear any of the tracks used for this piece (and maybe try to match the track to the composition), here is a private Soundcloud link.

Expressive Words

Last week in class, we focused on the form and function of typography. Our assignment was to choose 3 words and express them visually. A true test of whether I was effective with the assignment will be whether the words I visualized speak for themselves— so with that said, I’ll keep the writing brief.

I created each of these in Sketch, and spend some time just learning some functionality with modifying vectors in Sketch. I did not use animation for the assignment, but could use the other parameters of static illustration — things like color, shape, position, blur. A big part of this assignment (and dare I say a lot of visual design) plays on our biological tendency to make connections and associations between objects we view and meanings that we’ve stored in our brains. The images below communicate their meaning because of our associative brainpower; for example, rage = red, blur = the narrowing of our peripheral focus when enraged.

I said I’d keep it brief and let these words express themselves. So that’s all for now!