Project Two: Form & Composition
Print / Illustration
2018 Personal Project
About the Project
This is the second project for Communication Design class at CMU. This project explores how sizes, spaces, and organizations of simple black squares can convey meanings like order, tension, congestion, playfulness, and comfort. The whole process starts with sketching thumbnails on paper to brainstorm ideas, draw digital versions of best ideas on Adobe Illustrator and finally, print out the physical copies of each word on cardstock.
Project Process
Sketching Thumbnails
Order
As a computer engineer, I think computers follow strict orders and everything in the computer is in binary. Thus, I want to deliver the binary idea through squares to show the order.
However, as I tried several different combinations of binary squares, my instructor told me to try an increasing order of only one box of each size. Thus, my first digital sketches mostly contain squares that go from small to large. Some of them even have its space increasing as squares get larger.
However, with the first digital draft, I found that if I use ideas like increasing sized squares in an order, it is too explicit to express the idea of order. Thus, I went back to my original sketches and picked the first version of order I drew.
I like this version the best because it does not include super explicit ordering, but you can tell order from this square queue easily. The order of alternating a big square and a small square is one way of seeing the order. The order of lining them up is another way. I like those subtle orders inside this design. Nevertheless, the incomplete big squares on both sides give readers a suggestion on this ling of ordered squares might be really long and definitely beyond the frame of this picture.
Tension
The idea of the first one comes from a water spider laying on the water surface. The water tension makes sure the water spider to stay.
The idea of the second one comes from a stretched out string.
The idea of the third one comes from a stressful CMU student putting its head down on its laptop.
The idea of the fourth one comes from a chain of squares that is being stretched out.
The final one has its idea of two small squares getting through the difficult maze, which creates a lot of tension as it is hard to get through.
I tried to extend the idea of the stretched string by manipulating the middle smallest squares. However, as I changed more, I found it is more “playfulness” than “tension”. Thus, I transformed this idea to be part of my playfulness later.
The final version of the tension does not directly come from any original thoughts. When rethinking the concept of tension, I thought about the moment when I just entered CMU. As an international student who came to the United States for the first time, I felt I was not one of the people here. I felt me myself not blending in the culture while everyone else seemed to know how everything functioned. Thus, I used the idea of binary order (that I did not apply to order) to represent people around me, and a tilted center square being me to represent the tension between me and my surroundings.
Congestion
I got the idea of many mini, small and large boxes from google images search on congested road. Essentially, the mini squares represent human beings crossing the road. The small squares represent cars and the large squares represent large cars and trucks. It does look congested as the traffic gets really bad but it at the same time looks disgusting for I have severe trypophobia.
The other feedback for my first sketching pieces is the composition of a large square stuck by the other large squares is interesting, however not obvious. I was suggested by our instructor to move the top square down a bit to show that it gets actually stuck by other squares.
At the same time, I combined the idea of overlapping to show how limited the spaces are for squares on the canvas. This also makes sure the most spaces are covered by squares, resulting in it being so congested that it is hard to breath.
However, I still feel like these designs are too plain. Thus, I wanted to combine both ideas together so I came up with the second iteration below.
I utilize the idea of the traffic on the road. Let mini squares to be pedestrians, small squares represent cars, and large squares represent construction obstacles or trucks. The mini squares follows a line so that people know where to focus when looking at this congested work. At the end of the line, all the mini squares are stuck because there is no ways to go so they form a small triangle, wanting to push through the bigger squares. This design is much richer and more interesting than the previous two, and expresses the concept of congestion more at the same time.
Playfulness
I think playfulness has to involve squares flying or jumping around, or has big contrast on sizes. After the first critic session with TA, she thinks the middle one looks interesting and different from other students’. Thus, I finalized my playfulness on this idea.
The bottom has some big squares representing a giant playground. The top right giant square is a source of fun or happiness. It delivers small squares down to the playground and they are bouncing around when hitting any playground’s pieces.
The movement of those small squares is tracked by three different curves. As the squares being bounced by the playground twice, they all follow a track back to the source of happiness. The complete movement cycle forms a shape of a triangle, which is a shape that we don’t get to see directly from simple squares.
Like I said in the tension version, as I manipulated my tension a bit more, I found it to be more “playfulness”. Thus, I tried to combine the idea of the new playfulness and my original playground. However, I think without the triangle area on top of the playground, it is less playfulness and less content inside the picture. Thus, for the final version, I added the triangle back to the scene.
After finish the second version, I could see a carnival in this picture. There are large hot air balloon and fireworks in the sky and ferris wheels on the ground. This one might be my most satisfied piece among the five.
Comfort
For comfort, as I looked up what comfort is on google image, I saw pictures of people laying in the coach. Thus, comfort means laying in the coach to me. I tried to draw pictures of coach or people laying on the coach and found it way to hard because it is hard to draw people in details while all we get is squares.
Thus, I thought about the movement of human beings right before they lay down on a coach and imaged a curve.
The feedback I got from my sketches is instead of just a curve in the middle, I could try out shifting the curve, putting it in different part of the canvas, making one side heavier than the other. Thus, I came up with these digital versions that although look similar from a distance, are all different in details.
The feedback I got from my first iteration is that my design is both comfortable and not comfortable. As the curve delivers the idea of comfort, the middle square is way too big then the two around it. Thus, I adjusted the size of the middle square for my final version and tried to rotate it and adjust the smaller squares on the curve to make the whole picture more comfortable for people to see.
