Student Software Workshops

This spring, the McGraw Digital Learning Lab and the School of Architecture present “Building a Portfolio,” six advanced design workshops for students who are interested in developing a portfolio for summer travel awards and internships, graduate school applications, employment opportunities, and more. The series begins on February 15th with “Portfolio Building,” an overview of key design concepts and tips for sharing your work professionally via print and digital formats. Subsequent sessions offer insights and sample workflows for desktop publishing in InDesign (2/20), editing images in Adobe Photoshop (2/28), building vector graphics and drawings in Illustrator (3/02), technical drawing in AutoCAD (3/07), and 3D modeling in Rhino (3/08).

Each workshop will meet from 7:30-9:30pm in the Digital Learning Lab (DLL) at 130 Lewis Science Library. For more information, and to register, visit https://mcgraw.princeton.edu/spring-workshop-series.

2/15: Portfolio Building
RSVP
This Portfolio Building workshop is open to architects, artists, designers, engineers, programmers, or anyone else who is interested in creating or improving a portfolio. The first half of the workshop will be an overview of how to build a print and digital portfolio; we’ll cover content, design, tools and resources. Also, we’ll look at examples of portfolios across different mediums and fields. The second half of the workshop will consist of a critique and design/creation time. Feel free to bring projects that you’ve worked on or your current portfolio, if you have one! We’ll take this time to discuss your portfolio as a class; afterwards, students will work individually on starting or improving their portfolios.

Instructor Bio: Crystal Qian ‘17 is pursuing a B.S.E. degree in computer science and a certificate in visual arts. After graduation, she’ll be doing software engineering-related things at Google. Check out her portfolio here: cjqian.github.io.

2/20: InDesign
RSVP
This Advanced Adobe Indesign Workshop will build off the basics from the beginner workshop to look at how to set up a book/design portfolio project in Indesign. The first half of the workshop will focus on setting up the framework for your book content, including master pages, grids and guides and paragraph styles. In the second half of the workshop, students will individually work on re-creating a book design, provided by the instructor, or have the option to bring in their own material to develop in class to practice and troubleshoot techniques.

Instructor Bio: Jessica Colangelo is in her final year of the Master of Architecture program at Princeton School of Architecture. She received her Bachelor of Architecture at Rice University and has worked at architecture practices in Houston, Boston, and Los Angeles. She has extensive experience in using InDesign within an architectural context, including making slideshows, booklets, presentation boards, and portfolios. For examples of Jessica’s work check out www.somewherestudio.com.

2/28: Photoshop
RSVP
The essential purpose of using image-processing software like Photoshop is to help better deliver their design ideas through drawings. This Photoshop workshop is a practice-oriented class to help students learn how to efficiently approach certain representational graphics using mixed tools in Photoshop. At the beginning of this class, students will be given a raw image and its final representational drawing. The class will go through the process of how to turn the raw image into a beautiful and compelling one. At the end of this class, students should be able to create a drawing close to the given sample image if following each step of the tutor. However, self-inventional approach is also encouraged as it is even better to develop one’s own graphic language than to follow existing ones.

Instructor Bio:  Lixing (Ivy) Feng is a second-year graduate student in Post-Professional M.Arch program. She originally majored in Urban Planning and later transferred to Architecture. She worked in SOM New York from 2014-2015. You can view her portfolio here: https://issuu.com/ivyfeng/docs/school_project_of_ivy_issuu_b10caff38bdcae

3/02: Illustrator
RSVP
This Advanced Adobe Illustrator Workshop will focus on mastering the use of the primary tools for creating and editing drawings in Illustrator. The first half of the workshop will go over techniques for drawing tools (pen, pencil, eraser, shape tools), coloring tools (color, line weight, gradient, patterns, live paint) and selection and editing tools (lasso, select by appearance, layer management). In the second half of the workshop, students will individually work on re-creating a poster design, provided by the instructor, to practice and troubleshoot the techniques.

Instructor Bio: Jessica Colangelo is in her final year of the Master of Architecture program at Princeton School of Architecture. She received her Bachelor of Architecture at Rice University and has worked at architecture practices in Houston, Boston and Los Angeles. She has extensive experience in using Illustrator within an architectural context, such as making architectural 2d and 3d drawings, diagrams and presentation boards. For examples of Jessica’s work check out www.somewherestudio.com.

3/07: AutoCAD
RSVP
The Advanced AutoCAD workshop is aimed at improving drawing efficiency and sparing needless labor. The first half of the session will introduce tips and shortcuts that reduce drawing time and avoid redundant commands. Then, we will look at ways of organizing objects and layers to make drawings cleaner and easier to work with. Finally, we will learn about the plot and line-weight settings, as well as how to deal with exterior images and references, so that students can plot final drawings directly from AutoCAD, without exporting to and editing in Adobe Illustrator.

Instructor Bio: Weiwei Zhang is in his final year of the Professional M.Arch program. He studied architecture at Yale University and worked at Sou Fujimoto’s office for a year before coming to Princeton.

3/08: Rhino
RSVP
During this Advanced Rhino workshop, students will explore the various tools for creating freeform curved and orthogonal models using 2D and 3D tools. By the end of this session, students will learn how to model complex curves in clean and efficient ways. Students will also be exposed to the various ways of preparing a 3D model for perspective renderings, drawing packages, and, fabrication, such as laser cutting.

Instructor Bio: Leen Katrib is a first-year Post-Professional M.Arch student. She received her B.Arch degree in 2014 from USC, where she provided Rhino tutorials to undergraduates.