The first thing that occurred to me while working on the Notan project was how difficult it was to keep from making more than one design each day—I had a lot of ideas I wanted to try and it always seemed easier to use the first design that popped into my head. It was difficult at first to create freely with such strict guidelines, but those same guidelines helped me create what I think are visually appealing designs.

I found it much easier to create asymmetrical designs that included organic forms, but I found it more appealing to make designs that relied on symmetrical, geometric shapes. At first using shapes like circles and squares was difficult as I tended to want to cut them out so that when glued down the cut-out and negative space together would appear uniform on all sides. Using asymmetrical, organic forms made the gluing easier as I could easily discern with little thought how they would have to be placed to balance the negative space left by the cut-out.

Starting out with simple shapes was best at first, but as I became more confident I found I could try more complicated designs as long as I tried to do a bit more planning before I began to cut. Most of my designs include geometric shapes—I tried in my last few designs, including the color designs, to use organic forms, but I did not feel I could get the same complexity of design I achieved with geometric shapes.

I enjoyed making the black and white designs better than I did the color designs, as with simple black and white I could concentrate more on the shapes I wanted to use. While making the color designs I found myself focusing more how I would need to place the shapes I cut out—even though I only added one color (I used red and black together), I felt this limited me in choosing how I would cut each shape.

I wish I could have made more than just 15 black and white designs as I don’t feel I achieved the complexity of design I had hoped for. I wanted to try a strategy of trying to expand the square as much as possible—I wanted to cut out as much of the square as possible so that the cut-outs themselves would define the square far more than the original black square itself. I may try this at another time.