The Process of Creativity

This project lasted 6 weeks and involved creating letterforms and a poster image. When I was defining and observing the project, I wasn’t sure if I could manage to get all of the letters of the alphabet just by taking photos. But when we had the exercise to take photos, I realised it was a lot easier than I thought to find letters in the natural and built environment. It forced me to change my perspective and rethink the landscape in terms of letters. I decided to photograph more of the built environment, as they provided more opportunities for me to find letterforms. Then I recorded the information through photoshop, I realised that some letters didn’t fit with what I wanted to do, so I had to reshoot them and select my images again. I planned reshoots for some images when I got into the city on the weekend.

While refining the image in Photoshop, as I haven’t used the program before, it was difficult finding the settings and making the images what I wanted them to look like. I figured out a process of editing the image, and it would involve using the geometric lasso to only edit the ‘Alphabet’ portion of the work, then saturate and make it brighter and distinctive. Then I would invert the selection and work on making the background desaturated and lowering the gamma and brightness settings. I repeated the same process for all the images, as I wanted them to feel consistent, and not edit it to the extent where I can’t recognise the individual letter. I wanted the letter to stand out so that people can see it from far away. For most images it worked, but for some, it turned out messy and amateurish, so I am redoing those ones by doing the reshoots. I found using the selection tool and magic wand a new exciting way of editing an image selectively, and I wanted to explore that while editing the image.

Setting up the proof sheets for the refinement process was not a hard task, except for fiddling around with InDesign Settings, and having to be helped by the teacher to navigate the settings and how to speed up the process of duplicating all of the images into the sheet. I also ran into a problem with the file sizes, as I had accidentally set them to 72 dpi, when it was supposed to be 300 dpi. I also made the mistake of saving the images as a PNG and not as a JPEG, which was needed for the assignment and is a larger file size for printing. So that problem in itself was easy to fix but took around 25 minutes to convert them all into the correct resolution and file type.

Here is an example of how the finished work would turn out on the right. Even though the colours are very different from the original, the contrast stands out more and highlights the alphabet more than the original. I figured that using this method would help for consistency, otherwise I would spend lots of time just fiddling around with one image while getting nowhere. After establishing a method that seemed to reliably work, I used it and I am happy with the majority of the results!