An assignment by David Reinfurt, in his 2022 course in the Visual Arts Program at Princeton University, “Gestalt“:
Design an animated graphic that means “Wait.”
The result is an animation designed for an electronic screen. Read more detail on the dedicated website. This assignment is also featured in Reinfurt’s 2019 book “A New Program for Graphic Design” (p. 133).
An assignment by R.J. Thompson, discovered while listening to episode 51 of the DesignEduToday podcast. This project fills an entire semester in Graphic & Interactive Design at Youngstown State University.
Thompson describes the project at 15 minutes into the podcast:
I wanted a project that they could really sink their teeth into, completely wrap their head around and by the end of the semester, fully explain and articulate every design decision that they made. So, the OS project actually starts in Intermediate Interactive, it’s the last project in that class and it’s a five week long project where all they do is they design a universal operating system for smart-phones, tablets, desktops and laptops and video game consoles.
They effectively invent this concept and they use Photoshop and Illustrator to design the user interfaces for all of them.There are some specific caveats on what screens I want to see. Then they put all of that work into a presentation and we present it at the Youngstown Business Incubator. And we also globally live-stream those presentations so I really put the pressure on the students to excel here.
Here’s the live stream where students present their concepts (static mockups):
That’s only the first part. The project goes on:
They have to create a few different prototypes of their OS project. So generally, students create what I call a non-controlled walk-through. So they use Adobe Animate and they use the work that they had done previously with the OS project and they create a non-controlled walk-through of their operating systems, so boot up, type in your log-in, welcome screen loads, desktop loads, open a program, articulate a task in that program, close it and then shut down the OS. That’s the whole sequence and it could take a minute, it could take five minutes; it’s really up to student and what their narrative is.
Some of the non-controlled walk-throughs
The next step:
The non-controlled walk through leads to a controllable walk-through where we use Adobe XD and in some cases we use InVision. I leave that up to the students to determine which tool is best for them, but effectively they create a clickable walk-through, so we sit people down in front of an operating…an OS project and say, OK, here’s your task: you need to turn it on, log in, open a program, close the program and then close the OS. So, we bring in people to test.
An assignment found in a 1981 program of the Communication Design course, by Hans-Ulrich Allemann, at Philadelphia College of Art:
A kinetic exercise assignment of minimum five, maximum ten steps, for a Television station identification, using the existing Public Broadcasting System logo with a number twelve, the number of the Philadephia TV channel (1st-semester assignment).
A motion design assignment by Chris Pullman, published in 2014 on his website, given at the Graphic Design Masters Program at Yale.
One of the projects I assign, near the end of the semester, involves the visualization of poetry. I offer my students four or five audio files of poets reading their own poems. I ask them to listen to them all, then select one to work with.
He points out the objective of this assigment:
The objective is to shift the designer’s thinking from “composition” (getting all the elements into just the right spot and freezing them) to “choreography” (planning the path and behavior of multiple elements within the same time space).
Two examples are published on his website.
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.