Make up your mind! For this exercise, we were exploring how graphic symbols represent and communicate complex ideas while maintaining a minimalistic look. The idea that I decided to communicate through symbols is deciding to pass a person on the right side or the left side. I chose to represent this idea based on personal experience as I have collided with many people on the streets because of this indecisiveness. In addition, the final product of this exercise presents itself as a gif. Creating a gif requires framing out and introducing the idea in a physical form and then creating the necessary products for the animation.
I begin this exercise by creating four frames. At the time, I only wanted to represent this idea in four frames as I felt that it should be kept simple.
I chose yellow and black as the main color scheme because it has a sense of caution and also emphasizes the sign‘s warnings and instructions. Yellow is also a natural color to spot at night and prominent during the day. I kept the figures as simple geometric shapes ranging from circles to rounded rectangles. To depict movement, I drew lines on different areas that require the action of the character.
These two frames showcase the development of this idea. I expanded my four frame limit to simply animating the entire scene, which includes the figure trying to make a decision on whether it should walk left or right. Here, I used text to help express the figure’s decision-making process.
In the next few steps of this exercise, the frames became more chaotic to emulate the anxiety of a person when he or she is trying to make a decision. I played with illustrating the arrows and directing each of them around the figure. Moreover, I included question marks for further emphasis on the situation. Because of this, I created more frames depending on how I want the arrows to fill up space. In the animated gif, It begins with one indicator, and it slowly increases and adding the question marks.
In my final frames, I created a collision scene to communicate that indecisiveness can lead to other people not understanding which direction you want to take; therefore, causing an accidental yet awkward moment in the middle of the street or path. Just like the other scenes, the crash “icon” increases in size, which ends the gif with a black screen.
The images above are the final gif after all of my process work in creating it. Overall I am happy with how the gif turned out, and I believe it communicates my idea clearly while still maintaining a minimalistic appeal in terms of subjects and color. One thing that I want to improve in the future is the smoothness in the frame transition, as some switches appear to be choppy. What I learned in the exercise is how to simplify an idea by developing a stable foundation, which was the four frames.
