Create a fictious mobile application, with a prototyping app (Sketch, Adobe XD, InVision…).
Found in the student portfolio of Felecia Wilkins, from Elon University, assigned in Visual Aesthetics class: https://feleciawilkins.wixsite.com/portfolio
Create a kinetic typography video that accompanies an audio of your choosing.
Found in a student showcase from Elon University: https://feleciawilkins.wixsite.com/portfolio (archive)
In my Visual Aesthetics class, which focused on graphic design principles, we were given the task to complete a kinetic typography video that accompanied an audio of our choosing. I chose the poem titled “The Dream Keeper” by Langston Hughes because I found it to be inspiring and uplifting.
Each illustration was made in Adobe Illustrator and imported into After Effects afterwards to be animated.
Recent decades have seen the emergence of micro-genres or movements, that defined their own esthetics, often through combination of previous cultural expressions.
A classic example is Vaporwave, “a microgenre of electronic music, a visual art style, and an Internet meme”. Other examples:
Examples of new genres that students could create:
Students have to design a “Robocall”, using the audio capability of Adobe XD.
An exercise in web design: improve the homepage of Tim Berners-Lee :
https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
An experiment carried out by John Maeda at MIT (Computational Media Design Course) in 1996. Described in his book Creative Code (p.216):
As a continuation of the collaborative coding process, we attempted an experiment to better understand visual design on the computer. In the atrium of the Media Lab, we rigged up a camera on the fourth floor pointing downward; in the lower lobby, we projected the image seen from above so that the students (as pixels) could see themselves. The idea was that each student took charge and “programmed” the pixels, whether by script or direct commands.
Maeda mentions the source of this idea:
My inspiration for this experiment was a Bauhaus story of an old Master taking his students to the gymnasium to walk on the paths of large circles to graps the form’s essence.
An experiment carried out by John Maeda at MIT (Computational Media Design Course) in 1996. Description from his book Creative Code (2004):
One day I brought a computer and projector to class. I opened up an empty Java program skeleton, and asked the class to edit the program as a collaborative process, whereby one line of code was entered by each person.
An assignment by Manuel Schmalstieg at EAA La Chaux-de-Fonds. The students had to produce a survey of tools and methods used in a professional field.
A class of Interactive Design students created a “2018 survey” of design tools used by digital agencies, in Switzerland and France.
The tasks involved:
Time available: 28 hours (in 7 sessions).
The initial brief: https://github.com/eaa-imd/designtools
The resulting website: https://eaa-imd.github.io/designtools/
An assignment by Meylin Bayryamali, for a UX workshop at ISCOM Paris, a prestigious business school.
I divided the 62 students into groups of 4 (2 groups of 5). Every group had to deliver a prototype of either an online shop or dog sitting website.
The students had to deliver: personas, user flows and 5 pages prototype of a desktop website.
Source: https://uxdesign.cc/figma-in-the-classroom-439814cd9e6d
Typeset a classic novel in HTML/CSS. A proposal from Robin Rendle’s newsletter, Adventures in Typography:
If I could go back in time to teach my younger self about typesetting then I reckon that this is where I’d start: “Take your favorite book,” I’d say “and design the absolute heck out of it.”
Let’s say you want to learn how to set type on the web, for example. Then I would argue that it’s more important that you get the fundamentals of typography down first before you go and learn about React or some giant-framework-to-do-app-thing. And the easiest way to learn the fundamentals is copying all the text from To the Lighthouse or Moby Dick or whatever your favorite book happens to be, and throwing it into Codepen. Then you can try and make it all easier to read, slowly, bit by bit.