Easy Four Icon Challenge

What better to do on a lazy Sunday afternoon while waiting for a batch of applesauce to cook down then make lazy art? My previous attempt at the ds106 Visual Assignment didn’t fit neatly into the assignment’s paramaters, and I’m perfectly alright with that. In fact, it’s a general principal of mine that students are always welcome to change the assignment as long as it still gets across the learning objective or goal. In this case, the goal is to summarize a movie, story, or other event into four basic elements, and then further reducing those elements into simple icons. As I said, in my previous attempt I summarized the film Fantastic Voyage using 5 icons rather than 4, but I felt it tied together the assignment in a much more pleasing way in terms of design, and I was still able to get across the basic elements and plot devices of the story through only 4 of the icons.

In completing the above image I wanted to stick strictly to the assignment’s guidelines. It didn’t turn out all that bad, and actually serves as a much better example of what teachers and students could do in the classroom to help visually summarize stories. While previously I had used a rather expensive, but powerful piece of software (a free 30 day trial of Adobe Illustrator) to create a much more refined look, the image I created this weekend would be much easier to accomplish using a free piece of software like MS Paint, almost any word processor, or a free piece of image editing software like GIMP.

You could certainly accomplish this assignment using just a pencil or pen and a piece of paper, but creating it digitally would make it easier to share with others online, have students upload their work to a wiki in the process of a collaborative book study, or record in a digital learning portfolio.

P.S. If you think you know what the movie is, feel free to post in the comments…..I tried to make it pretty easy.