keyword: speed project

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explore a WordPress pattern in seven ways

This assignments is based on a blog post by WordPress theme designer Rich Tabor: Exploring WordPress as a design tool (December 2022). Rich writes:

Last week I challenged myself to take one pattern, from one theme, and morph it multiple times — only using the design controls block editor. It’s kind of like CSS Zen Garden, but without CSS — just out-of-the-box WordPress block design tooling. 

One theme. One pattern. Seven ways. No additional blocks, nor custom CSS between scenes — just designing in the good ol’ WordPress block editor.

Every font family/size, color, border, radius, image, video, and spacing value were are all added in-editor.

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Dribbble UI design prompts

In 2019, The Dribbble platform introduced “weekly warm-up prompts” for interface designers to “flex their creative muscles”.

Read the introductory post.

Some examples:

To find more prompts:

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Layer tennis

Engage students in a tournament of “layer tennis” (also known as Photoshop ping-pong”. According to Wikipedia:

The players pick a starting image, or one is “served” by a player, then another player makes some sort of alteration to the image in any chosen image editor (matches are not exclusive to Adobe Photoshop). They then send the altered image to the other player or players, usually via e-mail or by posting the image to a Photoshop tennis forum, who then edits that image and sends it back to the first player. This process goes back and forth until a predetermined number of rounds have elapsed, or the players otherwise wish to end the game.

Ressources:

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People as pixels

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.

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One-line-at-a-time collaborative programming experiment

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.

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briefs

Font Collections

In this assignment, students are asked to create a “Font Collection”: a selection of typefaces related through some concept.

I carried out this assignment during an afternoon (3 hours) in November 2016, at Eracom, Lausanne.

The original project brief can be found here (in French). In short:

Concrètement, chaque groupe aura comme mission de:

  • Sélectionner un ensemble de 10 fontes.
  • Donner un titre à cet ensemble (par exemple: “Ultimate Monospace Type Collection”, “Grotesques et Arabesques”, “Fermentation Belge”, etc). Approchez la chose comme si vous deviez constituer une compilation de musique, une mixtape…
  • Créer un graphique servant de “pochette” à sa collection.
  • Créer un dossier qui contient les fontes (format TTF ou OTF), la pochette (format PNG), et un fichier README.MD avec la liste des 10 fontes, leurs sources, leurs auteurs.
  • Publier la collection sur GitHub.

The results are presented on this site: https://eracom-gr451.github.io/font-collections/

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briefs

20-minute music app

A brief created by Hike One, a digital product design company from the Netherlands:

We gave 32 of our designers the assignment to create a music app in 20 minutes, in teams of 4. Every group was provided with a set of basic music icons and some music related imagery that gave them a head start.

Source: Medium, February 2017.