Black Square Activity

Week 4 - Session 1

I completed the Black Square Activity with skills gained from Illustrator Essential Training 2024 videos and Design Thinking.

The most interesting and effective technique for me is Group Selection. It was applied when I didn't want to group many details but still wanted to return and select to move them around again. The action I needed to do was name the saved selection so that I could find it easily later.

Some shortcut keys are also essential during the process. For example, shift + drag to create a constrained shape; Cmd + 0 to fit the artboard; Z for zoom (drag left to zoom out, drag right to zoom in) which was convenient while working on this big artboard with lots of small frames and elements.

There were also shape drawing techniques I could try but Cmd + C and Cmd + V were enough for this black squares activity.

Design Thinking

Empathize: Target is everyone, specifically those who are finding creative ideas and are willing to figure out different perspectives in definition and mindset by observing those black squares.

Define: To let the audience realize and have the ability to criticise those black square illustrations to find the appropriate keywords. Viewers probably can't understand the intention when first looking at only squares. The composition could be misunderstood or related to another keyword.

Ideate: Expand the limit of meaning, imagine different aspects of each word, and come up with a new composition symbolising each layer of meaning, as many as I can to reflect and consider after that.

Prototype: Start producing the compositions, based on the initial idea and recreate when feeling like it doesn't work.

Test: Search the keywords on the internet to see how they were illustrated and if mine matched and made sense.