Design Boards

Evaluative Summary

Overall COP3 has been both exciting and stressful. I've enjoyed it more than previous years because I enjoyed the subject I was researching- I've realised how important this is for me to be invested in what I making. I'm also happier with my final outcomes- even if everything didn't go completely to plan. I've pushed myself outside my comfort zone by attempting to make GIFs, and actually, they're not as bad as I was expecting! I do wish I'd had more time to do another two but too much went wrong with the others and trying to get my book printed properly. My time management was slightly better this time round, still could be improved though (to leave more time for fixing mistakes). Something always seems to go wrong around hand-ins but it's not the end of the world! I've learnt a lot about semiotics and simplicity and discovered new processes I can use in my future practice. I also feel as though some of the symbols I've created have been some of my strongest work to date. 

Reflective Summary 4 - Essay

The essay, due to choosing a topic I was genuinely interested in, wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. I think the level of research I carried out enabled me to make an informed approach to it which made it less difficult to tackle. I did struggle to start it. For me, working systematically when writing is essential, I have to start at the beginning and go on from there. I found that the most difficult line was the first one, but once I got past that, it seemed a little more achievable.

I find it really useful to make a solid plan. The more I plan, the easier it is for me to keep a flow of writing. On my blog I have made a post for each text I read, I then went back into it again to highlight key quotes and points that could be useful for the essay (the green highlights of these posts do not need to be read, they are purely for my own benefit). I then filtered through this once again and created a document of quotes and references I could use. These were colour-coded in terms of author, which turned out to be super helpful. I also added to my Bibliography as I went along, which I’m proud of as this is usually something I forgot to do and panic about last-minute (this left room to panic about other things).

My first essay draft wasn’t a full one. I did as much as I could, and the feedback received was really useful and helped when writing the rest of the essay. It need to be restructured, and I realised at that point that there were three main points I was discussing within the essay- reduction, organisation and metaphor and this allowed to me to clearly outline each one and make better connections between them.  When it came to my next draft, I was slightly more confident about it. I still have a habit of panicking about things like this because I doubt myself a lot, but I have tried my best to write something clear, concise and analytical.  

I found the practical section much easier to write about as I was talking about my own work and all of the ideas that went into making each one. As they are extremely simple, its probable that some element that I have thought about and put effort into will be overlooked, but I hope that the images demonstrate the ideas and theories discussed in the essay well as the whole project has been huge a learning experience. The central processes outlines will always be in the back of my mind when creating reductive shaped-based design. 

Reflective Summary 3 - Practical Outcomes

So after having created the 8 images, I needed to apply these to certain other formats to suggest how they could be displayed and distributed. I decided to go with a poster, publication and postcards.

I thought the poster would have been fairly easy to put together, but it turns out, due to page sizes not being bang on centimetres and having a somewhat weird amount to place on a poster (something I didn’t realise before) this took a lot longer than I expected it to. Due to their being 8, rather than say 9 symbols (where 3 by 3 works nicely) I had to work out a way to display 8 without ruining the effect of them being simple. I didn’t want to over-complicate the layout, especially because part of my research suggests that complicated layout implies the feeling of being lost, and for this reason, simplicity implies the feeling of being found. I asked a lot of people’s opinions while at Uni to see which they preferred, and unfortunately it was very 50/50 across two of them- which seems to happen to me a lot. I suppose this is probably a good thing, it could mean that I sometimes have more than one good idea. I eventually went with the one I preferred and I’m happy with my choice.

Both the poster and postcards were printed on matte paper in the digital print room and look really good. I’m very happy with them. However, something I’m not so happy with- the publication. As mentioned in my ‘Printing Issues’ post, I struggled to get a good print of my book. This technically wasn’t my fault, it was due to the printers, but it’s still really disappointing to have worked hard on something and not be able to see it at its best. I tried multiple time in multiple places to get it printed (digital print, various mac suites) but for some reason the colours were printing different to each other or with streaks, probably because there is a lot of block colour. I have provided an issuu document of what it should look like, so maybe look at that instead.

I also created some GIFs in order to push the images further and communicate how so much can be done with something so simple. Although I encountered a lot of problems when doing these- causing a lot of stress and frustration- I’m happy I did them, as it is a skill I needed to remember how to do in case I need it for the future. I have written a post about the struggles I faced in a blog post titled ‘GIF Struggles’. 

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. 

Reflective Summary 1 - Research & Theory

When thinking about what I wanted to look into for COP3, I thought back on modules I’ve enjoyed during my time at Uni so far. In First Year we did a task where we had to take an object, draw it in a very representative form and then begin to reduce it down to the simplest we could get it.  Something clicked that day and I realised how much I love reductive, shape-based imagery. I started this module by taking out a few books from the library on symbols and semiotics. Semiotics is a topic I feel as though I should have already looked at throughout my practice at some point as I often work in shape now. I’d never actually got around to it until COP3.  I feel as though this is definitely the right thing for me to be exploring.

Initially, I was thinking about the process of simplification and whether the meaning that an image conveys is affected when the visual perception of it has been simplified. Furthermore, I wanted to explore where the limit was. At what point does this sign no longer represent what it initially did? When has the process been pushed too far? I thought for the practical element I could do something similar to the aforementioned task, repeatedly draw something to find the answers to these questions. After having a group tutorial, I realised this idea probably wasn’t very original.

I looked at artist Warja Lavater’s books- which tell stories in simple shapes- and talked about how it’s interesting that you perceive certain things about the character (dot) due to the placement of it amongst the other elements within the scene. This sparked more ideas on what I could look at and I eventually came to the idea of creating a book of symbols that represent something complex in a simple form. I then carried out lots of research into visualisation, simplicity, complexity etc. but the most useful book I came across was John Maeda’s ‘Laws of Simplicity.’ (2006). In this book he talks about the many laws of simplicity and how to achieve it within design and it daily life.

I felt a lot better about writing the essay this year. Admittedly in the past I haven’t taken out many books or read through them properly, but this year due to it being a topic I was interested in, I read a lot and I read through thoroughly to better understand the text and be able to use quotes more effectively within my essay.  

Final GIFs

Final Postcards

Final Poster

Final Book

Printing Issues!

It's all gone wrong. I went down to the print room on Friday to print my final book and unfortunately there is an off-colour band at the top of each page. It's not super noticeable on some but others are quite visible. I also printed two copies and both are the same. James gave me another print slot today to try and sort it. We went through and picked out a few of the worst pages to test, he was very helpful and kept changing the colour settings and cleaning/ checking the printer each time as we're both unsure as to why it was happening. We got to a point where the pages we adjusted looked a lot better and the strip of off-colour wasn't as noticeable. The digital print room was closing so we quickly printed the whole book with those settings and I paid and left. Unfortunately, some of the other pages now have a strange rainbow tint across them, which looks worse than before. I tried printing the InDesign document in a couple of the mac suits as the paper is still okay quality and I wasn't happy with any of the professionally printed copies. However, when I tried to print in the mac suites, some of the colours that are supposed to match are completely off- possible because James adjusted some image colour modes.? I'm not sure. I've tried multiple times to print and spent a lot of money, but nothing seems to be working. It's upsetting and frustrating because I spent so long on the illustrations and creating patterns for end pages etc. and it hasn't printed at all how I wanted it to. There's not much I can do now I suppose, maybe I'll hand in one of the first off-colour print outs. Schmurr. 

Poster Layout

I did some different layouts for poster designs. It was actually more difficult than I was expecting because of the amount symbols and the dimensions of the page. I was stuck between poster design 4 & 6 within the issuu document. I asked lots of people and some were unsure about the space where my name is in design 4 and some thought it was nicer because it was more even. I personally prefer the one with the space. You almost imagine a box to be there. I'm happy with the poster design overall. 

Proof Read & Final Crit

Today was the final crit! It was great to see all the work people have been doing and how diverse the essay questions are across the course. Unfortunately not all my gifs are completely finished so I didn't put these out, but it was good to get some feedback on everything else.

Apparently my essay didn't need that much tweaking! It's a relief. Sophia mentioned a couple of points that could be explained clearer but apart from that there wasn't much to adjust. 

All the comments were really nice and this makes me feel a bit better! They mentioned that my essay and practical work link very well which is good to know. They also said moving image/ gifs will be a great edition and that make I could continue something along the same lines as this project for 603. Good suggestion! I might do that.

Title Ideas

I had a go at designing some potential titles. I looked at the idea of 'translation' but decided it would make things a little more complicated/ busy than they need to be. So I am just going to use text to keep with the theme of simplicity.

GIF Struggles

I have been struggling so much with making gifs. Even though I have made them as simple as possible, for some reason most of them haven't gone completely to plan. I would write a separate post about each process and every little thing that went wrong but it would be an essay! I don't have time to write another essay on top of my dissertation so I am going to outline some of the problems I encountered. I created most of the gifs on Photoshop. 

Firstly, on a slightly humorous note, after creating the gif for 'saudade' - longing for something that might never return. I forgot to loop the gif, so the hand actually doesn't return... . Easily fixed luckily. If this just appears to be a blank square to you, the hand has most likely been and gone already:

For both the 'schadenfreude' and 'hygge' gifs, I needed to make something rotate. Before I remembered that keyframes existed I spent 10 years taking the symbol (schadenfreude), creating a new layer, rotating it a tiny bit and repeating. I ended up with hundreds and hundreds of layers and in the end it didn't work properly. It was a jolty and slower than I wanted so I converted the frame animation to a video animation to see if I could fix it somehow. This is where I realised I could use key frames. It took me about 10 minutes to recreate the gif I spent ages on, but it works now, so that's good! When it came to doing the hygge gif I thought it would work in the same way but this happened:

Not what I wanted. I tried to fix it many ways, including making it frame by frame but it didn't work. I tackled this by attempting to use After Effects. I figured out how to rotate it on there but wasn't sure in what format to save it. Google mentioned that it needed to be put into Photoshop to create a gif so I chose the option that saved each frame as a jpg. and opened them in a stack in Photoshop. I then used the option to make frames from layers at it worked finally. Final gif will be revealed later.

Another one I found difficult was the 'gokotta' gif for the reason that I could move one of the triangles (creating the beak) in a way that didn't remove some of the shape or go up rather than across. I wanted it to pivet at a certain point but couldn't figure out which point worked best. I ended up having to take it back into Illustrator and adjust the shape to give me more to angle:

Though the gif isn't perfect, the action I was looking to achieve has been achieved in the final gif, so all good. 

Even though I didn't have time, I also experiment with different effects on some of them, below is the first gif I created for the pochemuchka symbol. This isn't the one I went with in the end but it's still fun to watch:

The easiest gif to create was actually the gigil one, which I was expecting to be the most difficult. I don't think I want to animate anything ever again. But the ones I have don't look so bad so it was worth it in the end.

Points for Conclusion

• Research into how simplicity can be achieved resulted in finding that there are many process that can be used, specifically reduction, organisation and metaphor.
• These processes allow you to communicate more with less- especially when using visual metaphors- multiple levels of meaning communicated.
• Evidence to suggest that feelings can be imbued within the viewer using these techniques due to the way the brain works. – visually, simple easier to process and remember, complicated implies feeling of being lost etc.
• Sub-question, can images be simple, aesthetically pleasing and communicative? Use of metaphor allows for this and means that this is better remembered.
• Remembrance is key within the realms of visual communication.
• As is comprehensibility. Needs to communicate the right thing for that context and audience, and this must be understood with imperceptible effort- therefore should only communicate what is necessary. – surplus information should be removed
• Case study shows that methods can be applied to other complex things such as narrative. Intention was to create something that could be understood by different cultures and languages. Achieved through reduction to simple shapes alongside key.
• As found in reflective practice, the amount of information included can be reduced when placed alongside text- this does not take away from image, just adds to or fixes meaning.
• All of this information suggests that simplicity can be as communicative as complexity if not more, and ways in which this can be achieved. 

Kaapshljmurslis - Development

Process:

This was the final symbol to create and happened to be the most difficult. I knew the concept of this one was to represent the feeling of being cramped on public transport and that I wanted to use shapes for this. I thought using triangles could make this easier so I tried that first. I made one a circle to create an 'individual' and make them seem more like people.. Overall this didn't look right, and the use of the circle make it more complicated that it already seemed. I changed this to triangles as well and it still didn't work well to communicate the definition, I thought. I tried making all of the shapes bigger and closer together, which ended up taking a longer time than expected but again produced a quite average and busy final result. To tackle this I tried using equilateral triangles but had no joy. Another attempt was made by scanning in one of the roughs that looked okay and going round each shape with the pen tool. This ended up being a waste of time as it looked worst that the first few attempts. I tried changing the colours but it looked overly-complicated and messier. Finally, I tried creating shapes with four or five sides and curved the edged quite a bit which gave the effect that they were once rounder and were now being squashed. This worked a lot better! The red-orange was used to represent 'warmth' and 'intensity' but this was a bit overpowering. I changed all but one to grey and I'm so much happier with it now. This might be one of my favourites. 

Pochemuchka - Development

Process:

This again was a pretty straightforward to create as I spent time trying to make the question mark look accurate and fit the space within the frame nicely when roughing. It took a few attempts to get the curves of the question mark super smooth and to make sure the thickness was the same all the way round. With a lot of tweaking I think it turned out pretty good. I then created a dot which had the same diameter as the question mark to keep everything consistent. This was place in the centre of the space on the right to create balance. Due to the simple nature of the definition, I could choose pretty much any colour. I wasnted something quite bright and started with a mustard yellow. This then changed to a bright green in the end to make it dissimilar to the colour of the sunrise symbol. 

Reflective Practice - Symbol Analysis

To make it easier to know which examples to talk about in the reflective practice part of my essay, I did a quick analysis of each of the symbols I created. 

Schadenfreude: 

• Very reductive - achieved through use of shape
• Happy/ evil face = 'pleasure from someone's misfortune'
• Upside down sad face = 'pain'/'misfortune' 
• Organised to fit the space better and allow for a simpler aesthetic - not overly complicated 
• Angle of 'eyes'/'mouths' creates the effect of a single line that runs across both sections of the face- reduction 
• Metaphor - two faces in one
• Metaphor - line as facial features 
• Colours - blue = sadness/ red = pleasure + danger

Hygge:

• Everything reduced down to just circles of varying sizes and colours 
• Colour - pink = love
• Metaphor - circles and dots for people - pink strip linking the dots creates the illusion of arms and people hugging or holding hands.
• Colour for small dots helps - peachy colour - learnt associations, associate this colour with skin even if not the colour of own own 
• Plate = metonym - represents all food 

Saudade:

• Extremely reduced - picked out necessary things 
• Use of negative space communicates 'longing'/ 'incompleteness' - something missing 
• Metaphor - rectangle with rounded end creates fingers 
• Colour - subdued, slightly green = renewal - new life without something
• Muted = sadness

Kaapshljmurslis:

• Reduction to just shapes
• Similar and repeated- fit together closely - organisation 
• Highly unmotivated visual metaphor - shapes represent people - assisted by the addition of text 
• Seems complex as there are lots of shapes but this is used purposefully to mimic idea of lots of people being cramped - claustrophobia - complexity and simplicity need each other  
• Colour - grey for most - not individuals in this context, everyone is in the same position- unable to do anything
• Selected one to be the focus and illustrate the individual feeling of uncomfortableness and warmth - red-orange = warmth and intensity  

Pochemuchka:

• Commonly known symbol of question mark used - learnt conventions - familiar to lots of people
• Organised differently - dot not where it usually is, but mind still processes as a question mark 
• Metaphor - face also visible to clearly represent that the word is about a person, not just about questions - just enough information, not too little
• Colour - green = youth/ inexperience 

Litost:

• Simple shapes that fit into each other - reduction and organisation 
• Visual metaphor - tear shape also makes up shape of an eye (= sudden sight) eyelashes pointed to look aggressive = torment 
• Colours - blue = sadness/ depression/ dark grey = serious, self-denial + self-discipline/ white = emptiness

Gigil:

• Reduction - not too many different elements - two different types 
• Metaphor - rectangles with one rounded side to create the appearance of fingers- due to placement around shape inside and flesh colour 
• Shape inside essentially just a squashed square- metonym for all cute things 
• Colour - pale purple - commonly used in children's product advertising- cute 

Gokotta: 

• Reduction - use of simple shapes- basic circle, rectangles and triangles 
• Also seems more reduced due to use of cropping - how much information is necessary
• Contains 3 visual metaphors - all in one - the sun rise, birds (open beak = singing) and a clock = early in the morning 
• Colours - yellow = sun, uplifting, enthusiasm for life/ orange = beak, energy, vitality. 

Gokotta - Development

Process:

To begin with I made a large circle shape. I found this was too high so I moved it down to where it's placed within most of my roughs for this symbol. I was happy with this placement as I felt it reflected the idea of sunrise well. Only the top of the 'sun' was visible. However, when it came to adding the other elements I realised this placement wouldn't work for the visual metaphor I was trying to create. I needed the bottom edge of the frame to be the centre of the circle as I was going to place a black dot and a 'beak' to mimic the center of a clock and the hands. So, I recreated the circle- (the placement looked fine still). I changed the clocks hands from black to orange as it made it more obvious that this was a beak. Finally, I curved all the edges a bit to make it less harsh. Though this was one of the symbols I wasn't sure about when roughing, I now feel like this is one of my favorites. It just shows how much playing and experimenting digitally makes something easier for me to visualise.