Projects

The Confection Project

In Photoshop, create an image that visually summarizes and analyzes a complex idea, theory, or extended narrative in a single eye span. The image could to serve as a frontispiece or poster-insert for a book, as an academic poster, or as an artistic rendering of a concept. Edward Tufte's Chapter 7 from Visual Explanations discusses the techniques and history this genre of visual rhetoric,calling it a visual confection. More....

Software

1. For this project, you will need to use a image editor. If you do not already have access to a good image editing program like Photoshop, you will need to purchase and download Affinity Photo for $49.99. For Mac, download the app from the App Store. For Windows, download it directly from Affinity.

2. We will also use Google Sites (available through your UMD Google account) to insert the image onto a web page and publish it. The project will be turned in by publishing that page to the web and sending the page URL to a particular Moodle forum.

Visualized Data Project

Using principles from Edward Tufte's book Visual Explanations, create an analytical graphic that makes a point or argument by presenting and visualizing a set of numerical data. In essence, this graphic will both provide the data itself (in tables of numbers and a few written words) and visualize the meaningful relationships and revealing patterns among those data points (e.g., distances, proportions, locations, time, change, etc.). See the assignment page for details.

Software

For this project, we'll combine use of Affinity Photo and the data-visualization function of software like Microsoft Excel or the online service like Chart Builder. Excel is available free to UMD students as part of the Office 360 package for UM Faculty, Staff, and Students.

You will also use Google Sites (available through your UMD Google account) to insert the image onto a web page and publish it. The project will be turned in by publishing that page to the web and sending the page URL to a particular Moodle forum.

Motion Graphic Narrative Project

In this assignment, you will create and sequence a set of images as a title sequence for a ficticious television series or TV-movie of your own invention.

The sequence should comprise between 12 and 30 images.

Using software or online services TBA in class, you will compose the images or "shots" and then sequence them into a video presentation. You will add background music to the sequence. More....

Software

This project will combine use of Affinity Photo with the free, open-source video-editing software Openshot. You are welcome to use other video-editing software such as iMovie (Mac) if you prefer as long as it enables you edit together individual still images and other media into a slideshow/video that can be exported as a .mp4 or other web-compatible video file format. We will also learn to edit a sound file to add to our video with the software Audacity.

We will use Google Sites (available through your UMD Google account) to insert the image onto a web page and publish it. The project will be turned in by publishing that page to the web and sending the page URL to a particular Moodle forum.

Essay: The Cultural Work of an Image

In this last assignment, you will write a five-to-seven-page essay on the "Cultural Work of an Image." More...

You will also give a presentation to the class on your paper topic and its argument.