Process Website

Comic book showing Bear making faces and saying it is its artistic process. Don't judge.

Documentation of your creative/design/artistic process is an integral part of your creative practice; it records the many steps in the inception and creation of a piece of work. This is important because it allows you to:

  • Review & Reflect
    Process documentation allows you to review and reflect on the iterative journey of your ideas and their physical manifestations over time. Being able to do this is vital when you’re seeking to refine your process. 
  • Save Ideas for Future Projects
    Process documentation can often be the catalyst for future projects that derive from some unexplored thread in the original idea.
  • Recapture
    Process documentation captures previous points in the life of creative works, it records points and alternative thoughts/directions that you may need to go back to if the chosen path does not prove successful.
  • Share Your Process
    Process documentation provides ample material you can use to communicate to a public audience the narrative of your work, the evolution of your ideas, the morphology of materials and forms and maybe most importantly, your unique thinking process. 

With this in mind, throughout the duration of the semester every student must carefully document all of the work created in this class, from brainstorming sessions with post-it notes, to pages in a sketchbook to rough prototypes. You will post this documentation on your process website on a daily or at least weekly basis. The idea is not for this documentation to be “perfect” but for this to be a place to collect all the most relevant discoveries, steps taken, observations and thoughts that will be invaluable to draw from during class presentations and sharings. 

Remember: you never know who may discover your process website. 

grading criteria 

As mentioned above, you won’t be judged on perfection and polish as process can be messy, but you should focus on: 

  • Providing a detailed enough recollection of the ideas, steps you took in your process, things your tried and how you have come to make the decisions that your designs are showcasing;
  • Experimenting and utilizing different media to add depth to your documentation and to help your reader in better understanding the journey you embarked on, through words but also photos, illustrations, videos, captions etc. 
  • Reflecting: thinking back on your steps, sharing questions you still have, things that need clarifications, ideas the work so far has sparked, the lessons learned or interesting findings and how those are possibly shaping the next steps. 

Process documentation will account for 15% of your final grade in this course because documenting your journey is THAT valuable.

ONLINE DOCUMENTATION PLATFORMS 

You have MANY options:

  • Create a dedicated wordpress via NYU Web Publishing;
  • Create a dedicated Medium or WordPress or Tumblr or Notion (etc.) site for this course only;
  • Add a designated category to an existing site you already own and maintain.