OUIL403 Visual Skills - SB1 Day 1

To kickstart this brief, over the weekend we were asked to fill out a questionnaire, filled with questions designed to tell other people a bit more about ourselves. In session on monday, we were put into pairs, and were given time to interview each other and to get a feel for who we were as people.

I was paired up with Rosie, and we ended up having a very pleasant conversation as we actually had quite a lot in common. Unfortunately the conversation we had turned out not to be entirely helpful when it came to our first task of the brief - leaving to our individual work stations, we were asked to sum our partner up in ten words based on our conversation and the the questionnaire we had in front of us. 

This was the list of words I devised for Rosie

We were given a very short window of time to create this list and review the questionnaire in front of us. Fred then asked us to fold a piece of A2 into a 8x8 grid, making 64 boxes in which we needed to plot our ideas. Our eventual final pieces will be drawn in a black and white A2 portrait resolution.

We were given half an hour to fill this page. My first sheet, pictured above, didn't even make it past the 3rd row in that time. I was being far too visual with these - shoving ideas that could probably have spanned 5 boxes in one, like miniature scenes. This made it incredibly difficult to come up with more ideas, as I was exhausting concepts before i'd even got past a third of the page.

The second round of the exercise was much easier!! By reducing my ideas to single elements I managed to break out a great deal more than I did before. Swapping from pens to ink and brush was also productive as I managed to drop lines and shapes much quicker - allowing me to knock out ideas quicker as well. This sheet has a total of 6 rows filled compared to the 2 and 3/4 i'd done at first.

I'm finding these sheets incredibly challenging and though i'm not usually someone who has difficulty with coming up with ideas, the limited and generic information that we have to work with makes it a seriously hard task. Rosie did not disclose any specific interests - outside scifi, cartoons, internet, reading and TV but these are such far reaching topics that its very difficult to nail them visually when they're so...vague. 

Fred has set us a task for us to complete a minimum of two more of these sheets by friday - we've also been asked to fill the gaps on the remaining sheets that we have. Though the nature of the brief is to encourage fast paced idea generation I think I need to do some visual research to help me conjure up ways of visually communicating what i'm trying to get across.