GD 2 Project 2 : Narrative Pattern Triptych

The pattern triptych produced some of the most visually interesting and illustrative work I have seen in GD2 — and some exceptionally strong visual storytelling. Students who began with frottage arrived at Illustrator with motifs that were genuinely their own. You could see the hand in the finished work. The narrative arc — the way meaning shifted across three panels — gave the work a quality that purely decorative pattern projects rarely achieve. I still think about some of what students made in this project.

What I came to see over time is that it was pulling in a direction that did not serve the course. The social justice thread that runs through the semester had no real foothold here. A student could produce a beautiful triptych about dissolution or growth and never once connect it to the issue they had been researching. The work was strong and may lead into another project, but it wasn't working here.

I also noticed it was becoming a digital illustration project. That is not a criticism — it would work well in a digital imaging course, and I may bring it there. Pattern-making still matters to me in this curriculum. It now lives inside the chocolate packaging project, where it has a job to do. I replaced it with the Logo Intensive because the curriculum needed a project that carried the research and argument of Project 1 directly into the brand system of Project 3.