In the final CDF exercise, we are given the opportunity to create a bound book with any imagery, illustration, graphic, or abstract that matches and enhances the content. It is the culmination of my design skills to make my thinking visual.
After spending the most unforgettable time of my life here at CMU, I decided to make my CMU life the theme of my visual book. I knew graduate from Carnegie Mellon would be one of the happiest moments in my life and this is the unique joy distilled from all the bittersweet moments here at CMU. It will be an aggregate of the memorable courses I took, projects I did, people and organization I interacted with, life events and activities, and use this visual book to put a perfect ending to my college career. It will be a gift for myself for working so hard during these years, soaking up so much knowledge from this campus and making up so many unforgettable moments in memory.
The overall theme of this visual book about my journey at CMU is going to be an 8-bit pixel art style. Pixel arts carry out the feeling of games, more importantly, retro pixel games. When readers flip through the pages in my visual book, it is as if they are playing my journey at CMU as a game. A book designer gives form to contents. In this book, I want to feature the classes I took, the activities I have done, the people I have interacted with, the unforgettable experiences I acquired at CMU can all be conveyed to the audience in a fun and interactive way.
In the “Play CMU”, the following classes are being featured:
15–112 Fundamental of Programming ,24–101 Intro to Mechanical Engineering, 16–311 Intro to Robotics, 15–294, 15–394 Rapid Prototyping, 16–385 Computer Vision, 18–220 Analog Circuits & Electronic Devices, 18–349 Intro to Embedded Systems, 18–340 Hardware Machine Learning, 16–384 Robot Kinematics, 18–447 Intro to Computer Architecture, 18–500 ECE Capstone, 16–450 Robotics Capstone, 51–262 Fundamental of Design.
Instead of making the book into a course catalog, I have infused various elements into the book to make it more interactive and fun to read through, while achieving the goal of showcasing the classes and projects I have accomplished that are most memorable throughout my academic career at Carnegie Mellon University.
After some initial sketches, I was pretty set on the overall style of my visual book and the content of each page to feature.
The cover page looks like any retro game’s starting page with a famous phrase “press any button to continue…” to bring the reader immediately into the setting of a game. When the reader is in the mode, he or she should be ready to interact with the visual book of Play CMU. Another notable design is the famous motif of Carnegie Mellon, “My ❤ is in the work”. Throughout the entire book, ❤ is a recurring theme in the book with various meanings.
In each of the page in the book, the body of the text are enclosed in the following retro pixelated style dialogue box to simulate the effect of being a game. I turned the highlight of the course into the “mission” of the current game level. The hearts are meant to denote how much effort the mission takes (or literally how much “heart” is in the work). But it is open to interpretation and can be understood as to how much I enjoyed taking the course and how much the outcome of the course impacted me as a person. The yellow hearts have special meaning to the “mission”, namely it gave me the most memorable moments of college and I contribute back to the course by being a Teaching Assistant in that class in the future semesters.
The following is the initial digitized version of all the spreads of the “Play CMU” version for interim critique.
There were a number of feedback I got from my peers during the interim critique. First one being the Fipps typeface of “CMU” looks particularly like “GMU” because fo the negative space in between “C” and “M”. Therefore, the solution is to fix the kerning of the type.
There were a lot of complaints about the first page being too busy. When the page was printed, the fonts were not very legible and the background brings too much distraction to the message being delivered.
The way to pixelate the pictures is through a software called the Pixelator.
Each image/icon is meticulously being put into the software for a pixelated effect and trial and error with different pixelation threshold values. But the effect is quite interesting.
Thirdly, the QR code placement is of a random choice on each page and introduces visual discordance to the overall design. In addition, some of the pixelated pictures appeared as if it is a “low resolution” picture as opposed to having the intended artistic pixelated effects. Therefore, I need to play around with the pixelation threshold a little bit more to make sure the intended artistic effect is better conveyed to the readers.
Fourthly, the shadow on the main text is not clarifying the type on pages with less contrast. And the use of a different type might also take the reader out of the feeling of a game.
Lastly, the final spread does did not adopt the pixel art style because of the pixelated effect of the logos were not visually pleasing. It was a designer’s choice to keep the original design instead of including the pixelated version. however, the flatten logo design throws some people off because of the style inconsistency in contrast to the previous pages.
After the interim critique, I have made the corresponding updates to the feedback I have gotten from my peers and instructors.
And here is the full spreads.
Each spread is now having the aligned QR code placement and the course subtitle has an increased font size. The shadows for the text has been fixed for better visibility. And each QR code has a short headline giving the reader a sneak peek of what’s behind the QR code.
On pages where there’s more information to be featured, you can find a QR code that brings you to a webpage that either contains a website or videos showcasing the projects done in that course. In this sense, each page is like a pointer to more content that wasn’t able to be displayed on paper. This is transcending the physical print into the digital world.
The way to scan the QR code is simply open the Camera App on your phone and the QR code will automatically redirect you to the webpage I created to showcase more information behind the page.
In this visual book project, a lot of the efforts were behind the scenes in creating the contents embedded in the QR Codes. Initially, some of the pages did not have a QR code or presentable information to be showcased. In order to showcase the projects and the coursework in “Play CMU”, I went the extra mile in creating either a website or editing a video in order to be better shared through the QR code.
Here’s the video of the digital flip of my visual book: Play CMU.
In conclusion, my visual book, Play CMU is the summarization of my undergrad academic career and I definitely want to make this unique, memorable and personal to myself. Through this visual book project, not only was I exposed to a new art format that I never had experience in, but also gave me time to reflect upon myself. Thinking about the past, present and future. My heart was truly in the work in the past few years and I hope it continues to be this way in my future career and keep making my thinking visual.