Touch up 2

Top is RGB, Bottom is CMYK. Somehow when after i upload the CMYK version on to the blog the colour becomes distorted. Added some shadow to the Basketball picture to make the contour of the alphabets more obvious.

Made everything simpler.New chosen level of abstraction. Removed all the buttons. As mentioned in the earlier post. What identifies the PSP is its ergonomic design.
Re done the typography. Changed the colour of the font to match the grey hand with knife. Aso move the text to be more in-line with the dog picture. The typography now follows the "grid "theory. I choosed a new font to make the words easier to be read.

More importantly made the dog picture brighter too.

Touched up!

First up is Assignment 1 "Me myself and I"I re-did the "C" and the "H" to make these 2 alphabets more prominent. Slight changes were also made to the last "Alphabet" to make the movement look abit more natural. I also redid the border of the alphabets with pentool which I only learned how to use during this semester.

For the first version I presented to the class, I did everything using only brushes HAha! More importantly I shifted the words to form a frame for the picture.. Hehe some visual theory here.
Changed the many many prawns to brown colour to add more constrast to the alphabets. Like somebody suggested I wanted to make it orange or red to make the prawns look cooked. But bright colours like orange and red tend to make the eyes tired and steal the focus away from the alphabets. So i decided on brown for the earthly tone.

And....

assignment 2!
Levels of abstractions! Most people had no problem with this so I kept it as it is.
For the chosen level. I refined it again with pentool haha..... Looks so much neater.

Assignment 3!

I needed a twist for my story so i decided to do the whole thing over again.
Picture 1: A half opened main door ! What happened?Picture 2: A pair of shoes??? A rather sluttish high heel?
Picture 3: A pair of jeans?Picture 4: Women's top?Picture 5: Boxers!!!??Picture 6: Bra!
Picture 7: Room door half opened...
Picture 8: Opening ....Picture 9: The culprit..
picture 10: Naughty Boy!

I had my lesson from the first version of this assignment. That is , its extremely hard to work with animals , so this time i'm smart enough to reduce my dog's involvment in the assignment hehe.

Assignment 5!
Had two version of this. I decided to print the second version and present it. However i didn't notice that the gradient when converted to jpeg made the colour so light that people can hardly see the words. The colour contrast for the printout was very bad. Everything was very light.

Oh and i was lazy in drawing cupid haha... Many others were too. Something i found very strange was. The assignment clearly written ," limit the use of visual content. Focus on only colour to bring out the theme". Somehow people like to spoil market haha.

Anyway the inside is pretty simple.
...

For the version2.
Redid the front part. Drew a cupid myself... not as nice as the one i downloaded. But still passable. Touch up the top right figure abit with pentool again. I left the guy as he is.

Assignment 6

Presented this as a bad poster in class. But people thought otherwise. They think its a good poster because its make them want to actually go and find out more about the movie.

When i choose this poster, I was thinking of the same too. I could have just anyhow choose a bad poster from 1980s but i wanted to do something different.

I choose this because i saw this line in the lecture slides. "analysis should be based on visual principles (visual form, visual harmony, colour and gestalt principles"

of course i knew this poster might not be really really bad. But base on visual principles alone it failed in communicating with the audience.

However, its a good poster that plays with the audience psychology.

So, lesson learned is that , in designing, visual principles must work hand in hand with communication and psychology theories maximize its efficiency.

Anyway, this poster was poorly received by the its target audience.. so they came up with some amendments for the international release.

There ya go, figure and ground.

Poster design

For assignment 4, we had to design a poster to save, stop or prevent something. The basic principle is to apply the visual communication theories we learned in the lecture and incorporate it into the poster design.

So its all about visual balance, positive/negative spaces, colour tones and capturing attention.

Like usual, it always starts with the brain cell damaging conceptualizing stage. I had to decide what I wanted to "save/prevent/stop".I was torn between going for the convention idea of saving something "normal" or going for something creative like one of my friend suggested "saving sanity".

My photoshop skills were pretty limited so I wasn't very sure that I could handle and portray abstract ideas graphically.

The conclusion was, I decided to play safe and do something simple and that is,to STOP animal abuse.

It was a pretty convenient topic as I have a pet dog which likes to gain attention by giving that abused pathetic look (he is extremely pampered).

I started taking photographs of him in various angles and I deliberate made his hair messy to make him seems abused
I decided on using this photograph as the model in my poster. However it wasn't good enough, I felt that the lighting needed to be darker to portray a more gloomy effect. I think when cute things are portrayed gloomy its gives that extra impact on the audience, particularly women hehe.TA DA~~~~Desired effect achieved. So i just had to crop and resize this image to suit my poster design.Here's the final product. Hand with a knife is a real picture I took, I used one of the photoshop effect(cant remember which) to make it blend in better which the colour tone and the overall feel of the poster.

I tried to applied the fear appeal factor in the poster by showing the hand with the knife and the text at the side tried to communicate the idea that animal abusers are potentially dangerous violent crime offenders.

The different elements in the poster were placed in such a way that it would lead the audience along. The word "STOP" is in caps and red colour to contrast sharply to the background. It was designed to captured attention. And the knife was placed in such an angle that it points the abuse dog. Hopefully the audience will follow the hint and move from the Stop to the knife then to the dog and eventually read the text beside.

Frankly, I have very short memory. I can't really remember all the comments from my classmates.

I can only remember someone saying the picture of the hand with a knife sort of steal the limelight from the dog. At first glance it does, but i think thats the whole point of it. As I deliberately designed the various elements in terms of their ability to capture attention base on the sequence the audience is suppose to follow. Starting from the striking red text to the big knife to the picture of a dog and finally the boring text.

Someone also commented that the picture of the dog is too dark. After checking the soft copy then i realize the printout is indeed alot darker then the soft copy in my laptop. So I guess for actual printout we should actually made our pictures a bit brighter.

Oh! By the way, I printed my poster at queensway shopping centre. The service and quality of the printout was pretty good. It only cost 3-4 dollar printing an a3 size poster on a hard glossy paper.

U see what I see!

For assignment 3 we had to tell a story by taking 10 photos. No words were allowed. It was extremely difficult for me because I have no camera!

Anyhow, I managed to borrow a digicam from my friend and I started to sketch out my story.
So the story is basically about me being late for school. My dog saw the timetable and wakes me up. I was thinking hard for a twist so I added 2 pictures of him indicating him feeling hungry, its like instead of him waking me up because I was gonna be late, he woke me up because he was hungry.

I think the twist part wasn't conveyed very well due to limitation of 10 photos.

Inititally, I had many ideas. The sad thing was it was extremely hard to get my dog to cooperate, he is being such a b**** when he is obviously quite the "opposite".

Frame 1
Frame 2
Frame 3
frame 4
Frame 5Frame 6Frame 7Frame 8
Frame 9
Frame 10

So after taking all the photographs I sort of changed the sequence alittle to make the story easier to understand.

As I was running late for my mid term test I only manage to get one comment from the class. Which is I should have took a picture with the dog carrying its bowl. The sad thing is, I actually tried but my dog just didnt want to cooperate.

Assignment 2 Abstractions~~~

Ok, so this week's assignment is about abstraction.

During the lecture we were given this exercise in class to draw an Iconic and Indexic way of representing an object.

Iconic= Simplistic representation of an object. Little details.
Indexic= Suggestive representation . Eg. Smoke->fire

I was checking my SMS at that time and i saw this...

Yes. My dog. So i decided to draw him.
Doesn't really look like him but i guess it will pass.

the object is a dog and the indexic representation is a paw.

For this week's assignment. (Assignment 2)

Its something about the process of selective omission of details from an object to convey a more generic meaning.

Sounds a bit "cheem" but its really simple. Its just removing of details till a stage whereby the object is at it simplest yet still recognizable.

This time round I took my time and walked around before finally settling on drawing a PSP.
So I chose picture no.4 as the one that I felt is the simplest yet still recognizable. At first I was more keen on selecting picture no.5. However, after some thought I felt that losing the shape of its outline makes the PSP looks erriely like a microwave. The ergonomic design of the PSP is definitely one of its most distinctive features.

During online discussion today, some people from the class suggested that I retain the L1 and R1 button of the PSP as it is the distinctive feature. However I feel that the L1 and R1 button sort of blends into the outline of the PSP main frame. Physically its not so obvious to non user.

Others suggest that I could have removed or futher simplified the 4 buttons at the bottom. After some consideration I decided to adopt their advice, because like many suggested the bottom buttons are small details with not much significance in relation to the PSP. Therefore, its perfectly reasonable that they be removed.

Assignment 1 (Me myself and I)

This is an introductory exercise to help me learn basic tools and process of designing and presentation.

For the first assignment we are to name something we like or hate and integrate it creatively into our names.

During the lecture we were suppose to come up with 8 rough sketches of the assignment. I was thinking really hard but all that I was able to come up with are these...I came up with 3 poorly drawn designs. It was really sad because Julian(the lecturer) said that "If you cannot come up with 8 designs ,then maybe designing is not for you"

But anyway, for the first tutorial we were suppose to use 4 designs from the initial roughs and develop them into a5 size prototype. These are what I came up with.

I have decided that my hatred for seafood is so strong that I should stick to it. I had this concept to incorporate my name fully into the body of a fish but due to the lack of artistic talent it turned out looking really like some alien drawn by a kindergarden kid.
Another idea was that I make all the alphabets look like some seafood, and due to the lack of idea I used 2 seahorses as the "Es" in my name. (Apparently chinese eats seahorses too)
Ok I admit I was kinda lazy on this one. In the lecture Julian said that "if the idea isn't a good one we shouldn't hesitate to scrap it and start all over again" . So i did away with the love "singing". Instead I started loving basketball more.

So in this concept I basically wanted to make all the alphabets look like the texture of a basketball. However after the presentation in class I suddenly realize that this concept doesn't shows the the integration of design into the alphabets. It is merely decorating. So I had it scrapped shortly after. And more importantly , I realize nobody love basketball. People only loves playing basketball.
This is the design that I'm more in favour of. I wanted to make all the alphabets look like people playing basketball but apparently I only managed to think of one .

I had over the Chinese New Year to improve on my designs. For the next class we were suppose to develop 2 printed copies of our designs.

So I went to the drawing board and furiously sketched various alteration to my "people playing basketball" design.Some possible ideas I thought of. I had problems with the alphabet C . I have no idea why basketballers doesn't play in a C like position.For the fish design, I had suggestion from the class to use the seafood concept instead of the lone fish as it brings out the idea of hating seafood more. A lone fish would make me seem like I only hate fish.

However I still prefer my fish concept better, so I decided to merge the 2 ideas. And i came up with this. My name forming part of the fish and the rest of the body are filled up by various seafood
i.e prawns, crabs, lobster etc. etc.

I did a prototype for this idea. It wasn't well received among my friends as they thought it looked like vandalism from some kids.
However I still liked it , so I went ahead and developed a full scale copy.There. I used all the dull murky colours for my alphabets to portrait the hate, the alphabets were deliberate drawn jagged to show the errie-ness and the rest of the body was filled up by prawns because prawns are absolutely disgusting. The class didn't had much problem with this design of mine except that the last alphabet is too similar in colour tone with the prawns.
And the final version of the basketball concept. Generally the feedback was that no one can tell what the first alphabet (supposedly a C) was and some said that the H looked like an R.

Its really weird because, to me, it seems perfectly obvious. I think thats what Julian meant in the first lecture when he said that effective communication must be specific to the audience group. Maybe its because I play more basketball thats why I see it differently, or perhaps its because in my mind I already had the idea of what it is, therefore I see what I wanted to see.

But anyway, the first 2 alphabet failed to communicate the idea, therefore its back to the drawing board again.