Back to School

There's a nip in the air, leaves are starting to fall, we're harvesting things from the garden...

And all the kids are going back to school.

It makes me jealous. I have mostly loved school in my life. Up until sometime in high school, I would wake up excited for the coming school day. Not surprisingly, the point where I began to dislike school was also when my grades dropped. I was still a good student, but I'll always remember that one math class that I skipped about 60% of the time. I would only show up for quizzes and tests, the rest of the time I would go to the library and read.

I'm still not a fan of math. In fact, my personal opinion is that schools should stop requiring years of algebra, trigonometry, and calculus. If I were to become queen over America's school systems, I'd make sure schools offered math classes that focused on building the math skills needed to manage personal and business finances. More of an accounting focus rather than a scientific one.

That might possibly be a bad idea. It's a good thing I'm not queen of the schools. But I personally never used most of my limited algebra skills in my life after high school. I would have been far better off graduating high school with a knowledge of how to balance my checking account rather than knowing how to reproduce the Pythagorean Theorem.

I'm way off topic though. This is a blog about art and design, for pete's sake!

And it's back to school time.

In honor of that, I'm giving myself an assignment.

Every week, I'm going to post an example, created by me, of each of the elements and principles of design. I'm hoping it will help me brush up on my design skills. It's easy to get sucked into fads and gimmicks.

Asymmetrical Balance

This assignment I'm giving myself is a rip-off from one of my college classes where we did this very thing. At the end of the semester, I had a binder full of little cut-paper examples of design elements and principles.

The binder was subsequently commandeered by my design professor, and last I checked, she was using it to teach her class. The image above was the only one I was able to rescue.

That's a point of pride with me. I sorta, kinda made a textbook that students still actually look at and learn from. It makes me not mind so much that I don't have it any more.

So there you have it. Keep checking back to see whether I've turned in my assignments! And to see whether they deserve an A or an F-!