Class started off with us watching a video on youtube.com. The video was called AIGA Get Inspired! This video is about AIGA the Professional Association for Design. AIGA formerly stood for The American Institute of Graphic Arts. This was a very interesting video because of how informative it is. They provide a lot of professional resources for those in the design field. Professor Moss also had someone named Rene come to class to talk about GAUGE. GAUGE is our on-campus AIGA student group. I believe that Professor Moss introduced AIGA and GAUGE to us in class because these groups can help prepare us as future designers. There are many resources from both groups. AIGA has a lot of resources on their website. They encourage designers to get involved and connect with other designers nationwide. For GAUGE, they have a lot of design events coming up and I looking forward to joining them. Especially for their portfolio workshop which is coming up. And the best part about the GAUGE events is that they’re free. I have heard of the names AIGA and GAUGE before but never really knew what they were. I am glad to have been able to receive more information on them and just how helpful they can be. Another event that is coming up is the One Day for Design on April 13th. It will be an online event where people around the globe get together to discuss design. This to me sounds interesting as well. Not sure if this has ever been done before but I may try to tune in after I am done with classes for the day. With so many available events at hand, and so much homework piling up, I want to believe I have time for everything. But if not, I’ll just have to make sure I make time for the events I believe to be the most important and beneficial.
The next part of class, we learned about mind maps. Mind maps are a quick way to get and explore ideas, a good brainstorming tool. We got see samples of a few mind maps. There wasn’t a set type of mind map, except that generally the idea started in the center, then branched out in every direction. I noticed that all the examples I saw, each person had used a different technique. Some were very vivid in color with a lot of drawings and sketches, others maybe had less drawings and more text. It was very interesting to see the variations and how many other ideas could come out of just one initial idea. Seemed like time management was a popular subject to map out. We then did an exercise in class of making our own mind maps which I thought was really fun. This exercise didn’t involve us going into a lot of detail by adding drawings or sketches to it, but more so to just write out our ideas and to get some experience in creating a mind map. I noticed as I was doing mine, there were a lot of ideas I could expand on, then other ideas I couldn’t expand on. Then at one point I did get stuck and didn’t know what else to add but I did already have a lot of ideas on there so I was happy with my turnout. We also got to walk around the room and look at our other classmates’ mind maps. We have a LOT of creative people in class. I really liked all of the mind maps I saw. Some were very funny. I believe that just by knowing what a mind map is and how to create one will help us as designers in the future when we have a project in mind and we need help mapping out the possibilities for it.
I had the same problem with the mind maps, I came up with a ton of things to say about certain ideas, but none for others, and at the end had no clue what else to add on. I think mind mapping will be useful in the future though.
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