Personal lessons I learned:

1. Ugliness can be effective if it’s accurately expressive
2. Sometimes the simplest solution is the most direct one. (But subtlety is still beautiful; I’m still trying to get it right because it’s quite tricky)
3. Even pink can be creepy if you curate it right.
4. Curved upper lips make for a creepy character.
5. It’s okay to distort a character’s opaque glasses to give him more range of emotions.
6. If people have an emotional response to your idea, that’s a good thing if it’s exactly the type of emotional response you wanted. (Emotional= laugh happily, scared, creeped out, an ‘awww’, etc. Confusion is a state of mind but I feel like that means you have to work harder to elicit their emotions.)

Hard skills I learned:

1. Isometric rendering in Adobe Illustrator
2. Working around an existing magazine template
3. How to draw a centipede (very important)

What I enjoyed most doing:

1. Looking at other people’s artwork
2. Laughing (very heartily) at other people’s illustrations
3. Working with absurd concepts and making them concrete – in VisComm we rarely get to do absurd things out of the blue without a heavy research on why that thing is needed. Creating something fun for a delightful, imaginative concept is rather rare- so this is a breath of fresh air.

It has been a great semester. This post is up late but I would like to post it nonetheless as a personal note and future reference.