Reflective Summary 2 - Practical Development

I began the practical development based on verbs. When discussing my potential essay topic and line of enquiry in group crits and one-to-one’s, it was suggested that I look at something more complex than just nouns. Verbs communicate an action, so this would be more challenging. I got up a list of verbs from the internet to start me off and the first word I chose was ‘alert’. This proved to be quite difficult as there are already signs that illustrate similar content, this being warning or danger signs. I found it was difficult to not think of the most obvious things- an exclamation mark, a hand, the colour red. But as I couldn’t avoid this and was drawing with immediacy to throw out ideas, the end result ended up not being very exciting even though I tried my best to make it more interesting. I then moved onto the word announce and the same thing happened. I knew from that point that I needed to choose a topic that was more enjoyable and creative, and came across the idea of ‘untranslatable emotions’. These are emotions from other languages that we do not have a word for here. This led on to looking at the slighter broader subject of ‘untranslatable words’, which gave me more words and more choices.

Though my sketchbook may not be the biggest or fullest, the roughing process for each of the potential symbols was repetitive and proved more difficult that it seemed. Each symbol started off as being quite fun. I drew whatever came to mind and this then sparked other ideas. However, once I got to a certain point, it became more and more difficult. Some reached a point where they could be ‘done’ and I was happy with what I’d come up with, and others took more tackling.

It was actually useful to use processes found within my research, for example the use of reduction and organisation suggested in Maeda’s text. But something I usually enjoy and found super helpful in this context was visual metaphor. Combining more images into one allowed the symbol to be less complex and to also be more enjoyable to look at. Some of the research I found suggested that simplicity is ‘boring’, the aim of my practical work was to prove this wrong. 

Making the symbols digitally was a fun process and stages of this can be seen in earlier development points. I am comfortable with using vectors, and though there were a couple issues along the way, nothing major.