Project 2: Design 15261 A
Introduction
In my Communication Design 51261 A course, I was assigned to create five thumbnail drawings of three-word pairings: playful and serious, noisy and quiet, plus anxious and calm. However, the thumbnails could only contain squares and ampersands. After digitizing and refining them, there was another additional project to create a figure-ground drawing, which included even more constrictions through only squares. The final deliverable, influenced by the Gestalt principles, contained only two-word pairs and one figure-ground thumbnail created in illustrator and then printed.
8/5— Sketches and Rough Drafts
I recently found out that I have already taken an iteration of this class before, however, my main issue with my past designs was my reliance on the excessive use of squares and ampersands and therefor my art was artistic rather than a design. I am creating a new rule for myself that I can only use loosely 10 squares maximum so I will be able to accomplish a more polished look and challenege myself more
I started my sketches with noisy and quiet where my main focus was on scale and cropping. Due to my self placed regulation, noisy was the most difficult, I didn’t want to overwhelm the audience by doing something so obvious as copying and pasting squares and ampersands all over the canvas. To accomplish the idea of noisy I focused on the sharper aspects of the squares and emphasized them while simultaneously bigger and have them cropped off the sides. Filling the whole space with positive space making the thumnail look crowded. Quiet was just the opposite of what I just did, focusing on the organic forms of the ampersand and zooming all the way out with the scale and cropping.
Anxious and Calm were very similar to noisy and quiet but now there is a much more negative connection with anxious and positive one with calm. focusing on what I did before, I just added more tension in the anxious thumnails and focused on asymetry and slightly inncorrect patterns. With calm there was much more of a focus on harmony and balance.
Playful and serious were words that I have used before and therefore decided not to use them again. However, in my thumbnails its very similar to before but this time there was more of a focus on patterns and creating an irregularity but this time making it more harmonious and have a more whimsical floating feeling to the objects (where as before I apply the objects like they have gravity to them). Serious was also just the flipped feeling of playful. This time I focused on the bottom of the thumbnail being filled, constant patterns, and geometrical shapes.
These were some of my first attempts to digitize the thumbnails (also looking back I took “refined sketches” for digitizing the thumbnails). (In all my drawing I put the more successful image out of the two on the left). Quiet was very difficult to differentiate from calm and these definatly need more working over, However I do like both of the sketches and the direction they are going in. Noisy on the left feels like a figure ground but also breaks my own personal rule of how many squares I want to use. I will be experimenting to see if I can limit the squares to be more effectve and not confused with figure ground. Also the drawing on the right just looks lazy and confusing due to the lack of hierarchy so this will be iterated on as well.
I really enjoy the left image of calm it feels correct and harmonious however I would like to get feedback on if other people think there is too much negative space and is too close to “quiet.” The right one of calm to me is mediocre but feels boring and uninspired. The left one of anxious also feels very correct to me, it creates enought tension but I almost wonder how I can push the feeling of anxiousness even further before color is added. The left anxious is an interesting play on the left of calm but still not a huge fan and lacks tension due to the symmetry.
09/05— Digitized and Figure Ground
In calm and anxious pairing, I focus on making the idea of things fitting within their space, weather its calm and it fits perfectly or anxious where is just ever so slightly off. Quiet and Noisy I now focused on the negative vs possitive space, noisy had a lot of possitive space and quiet was flipped. I’m more attached to calm and anxiety and feel like those are heading in the right direction, and quiet is really tripping me up. To create a finished and polished but also small imagry is difficult to balance.
Because the figure ground sketches wont really be accurate or look quite perfect when imported into illustrator, I just doodled little patterned that might be placed well into the software, focusing on how the negative space looks rather than focusing on the squares.
09/07 — Refining and Color
The figure ground was fairly easy to accomplish (I used pattern so it is technically under the 10 square limit I placed for myself). I like the one that looks like a lightling bolt I feel its very simplistic and gets the point accorss well. Same goes for the braid looking shapes, I feel like I interchange them pretty well. The other figure ground drawings just feel like a pattern that doesn’t have much finesse.
Quiet and noisy continue to be a little bit of a pain, nothing seems quite right despite going back to the drawing board a couple times. So I decided to create a bigger art board and focus on how color might make certain colors more harmonious. I was also told that anxious and calm don’t have enough ampersands, which really sucked but I really enjoy calm now, I feel like it conveys the message even better than it did with the geometrical shapes. Anxious is still not perfected from my point of view but I still think it’s very close.
I started to add the colors and make slight iterations and ask around what people felt about the colors and the images. Most people got calm and anxious but stuggled more with quiet and loud. I think the yellow looks good on all of the compositions except for quiet. So I attempted blue, but anxious didn’t feel anxious, it felt more depressed, and loud felt more metatacive. The purple is a color that is ok but I like the yellow a bit more, however quiet isn’t being conveyed with yellow and is better with purple. I’ll be experimenting with more blueish purples to create a better inbetween.
09/14 — Last Refining
I asked a lot of people in the class as well as friends what their favorites were through a cold read. Almost everyone got anxious and calm both from knowing the prompt and not knowing the specific words. The loud came across as meditative, so I changed the coloring to have a stronger contrast. Quiet was also changed from one color with no black, to have the color in the background, it not only looks similar to anxious but also lowers the contrast making it feel more quiet.
I also did a bit more work on anxious but everyone seemed to still like the original more than the others. Although I agree it matches better with calm, I like the bottom two iteration as well but decided to go with the general consensus. I also really liked the pattern for figure ground but I felt it was a little too easy to just have a pattern plus the tear design flows better with the other designs
09/14 — Final Drawings
These are the final drawings. I believe these are much stronger than last time I did this project and stand by themselves without over complicating or hiding behind tricks I know in illustrator. I had to change the ampersands and introduce them more clearly, which I believe I did successfully, which also made my pieces better (specifically calm). I asked for more cold reads without prompting specific emotions and telling the viewer how they should feel giving me also a stronger read on how my art is presenting itself to the average viewer. The color choice, was also selected after many color iterations and reviews (which I did not do last time either) once again leading to a stronger read of the peice.
Conclusions
Overall, I feel like it was difficult to completely reset my brain into forgetting what other past peers and myseld did in their work. Overcoming past biases was the biggest struggle for me but by doing it again it and focusing on craft and laying down more boundaries and rules, it became a challenge that I couldn’t turn down, and made me want to do better than I did in the past. I feel like I successfully accomplished everything I set out to do without taking the easy road out.