NM2208

Overall Module

2007-11-22T09:16:00.001-08:00

It has been a very enriching module and I definitely did not regret taking this module. Learnt a lot of things from this module, things that I already knew were being enforced, things that I thought I knew were being questioned and ultimately answered during the lectures and critique sessions.

This module shouldn’t change any of it’s syllabus as I think that it’s very good now already, having a combination of lectures plus a substantial amount of hands-on, giving some people the chance to do things that they never thought they would (eg. the story book).

In all, I had a lot of fun taking this module and I would like to thank Julian for the time spent on us for this module and I’m definitely grateful.

Thank you :)

Assignment 8

2007-11-22T05:00:00.000-08:00

this is the final and most grueling assignment of all. although it's a lot of work to get this book out, Raynor , Winnie and myself had a lot of fun making the book and we hope that you'll also have a lot of fun reading our book.

this book is targeted at children ages from 3 - 6. in this book, we put our focus on the importance of finding oneself and hopefully the children will get it when they read it.

scans of the book below:

front and back cover

Inside cover and page for name

Page 1 - 2

Page 3 - 4

Page 5 - 6

Page 7 - 8

Page 9 - 10

Page 11 - 12

Page 13 - 14

Page 15 -16

Page 17 - 18

Page 19 - 20

Page 20 - 21

Learning Journal:

A very good experience on producing a book. We’ve learnt a lot from the initial process of brainstorming for ideas and the final production of the book. We’ve learnt different tools that can help us out with creating layout, pictures and grids for a pictorial good. Definitely a wonderful experience.

Assignment 7

2007-11-22T04:55:00.000-08:00

this week's assignment's on website critique.
below are the slides that i prepared for the session.

Learning Journal:

A website can be a very powerful tool for either personal or business use and the rise or downfall depends entirely on the design and layout of the site. A website can have the most important information that one can obtain, but if the person can’t even find it, it is ultimately useless. The very basic of website design comes down to the layout of the site, navigation and presentation. As long as this 3 basic rules are followed, a website should be fine.

Assignment 6

2007-11-20T03:38:00.000-08:00

this week's assignment was on Gestalt Principles.
slides for the assignment below:

Learning Journal:

Gestalt Principles does not only apply to mainly posters, it can also be used for other medias like websites and magazines. It might not be necessary to apply all of the principles but as long as 3 or more are applied to a certain media, the direction of the media should be correct.

Assignment 5

2007-11-20T02:00:00.000-08:00

this assignment required us to design a notebook cover.
the 2 themes that i chose were "love" and "freedom of speech".
scans of the sketches below:

decided to pick the design, "Love is only a heartbeat away" because i wanted to keep things simple, as i always believe that less is more sometimes. colors are definitely going to be minimal - red and black.

decided to keep the background as it is so as to keep the contrast of the picture.
final product for this assignment:

Learning Journal:

Different colors can be used to convey different messages. It is important to have the right colors for the right theme/topic, if not the whole image will just seem wrong or out of sorts. For example, if a movie is set in winter, it will be quite off to have the poster beaming in red and shouting out to people. Color is a very important tool in design.

Assignment 4

2007-11-19T03:28:00.000-08:00

came up with a few ideas on what i wanted to do:

save the trees
save the environment
kill pests
save the ozone
save ink

decided to choose 2 of them and work on sketches:

2 chosen themes were "Save The Environment" and "Save Ink".

for "Save the Environment", the idea is that the atmosphere is polluted and the plants and animals were dying. problem with this poster will probably because it will be cluttered up with quite a bit of things and it's hard to find the focal point of the poster.

"Save Ink" is a bit of a cheeky idea that i had to attract people's attention. my initial idea was to attract people's attention by leaving a big white space with only a small, but visible logo, so much that it'll arouse people's attention and look at it.

since there's going to be very little printing, i decided to just go with "Save Ink", because it literally saves ink.

here's the final product:

Learning Journal:

Making a good poster doesn’t mean that we have to put in a lot of colors, details or flashy pictures to attract attention. It’s important to know what kind of attention we are looking for and how do we go about controlling them. For my poster, i learnt that less is more, saving ink might not be such a practical thing to have, but the point of my poster was to arouse the curiosity of people and it achieved it’s purpose.

Assignment 3

2007-11-19T01:27:00.000-08:00

Classroom Exercise:

a guys stops and turns around while walking down a flight of stairs
focus is on what made him stop
is he talking to someone or he saw something?

Storyboard for assignment 3 as follows:

Picture 1:

main character walks home alone at night

Picture 2:

turns back as he enters the building
looked like he heard something

Picture 3:

shadow appears behind him

Picture 4:

main character shows a panicky face

Picture 5:

main character hastens footsteps

Picture 6:

stranger follows behind

Picture 7:

reaches out for door

Picture 8:

stranger takes out something out of pocket and reaches out at main character

Picture 9:

terrified face

Picture 10:

stranger returns him his wallet

Photo Essay:

Learning Journal:

Pictures when taken and framed properly can tell a million stories. Even when there is a lack of words in the photos, the story can still be told and understood.

Assignment 2

2007-11-18T21:47:00.000-08:00

Classroom Exercise:

Iconic symbol is a butterfly and an indexic symbol of it is a cocoon.

idea generation for this assignment was pretty straight forward for me, strip everything down and make sure people still can tell what the thing is.

i sort of did it in a reverse engineering way. i picked an object and decided what was the focus point of the phone then did the iconic version of it.

ideas generation sketch:

after getting the abstract symbol, i slowly stripped down an original phone:

initial design of the symbol was this:

after the critique session, a lot of people commented that this looked more like a telephone booth sign than a telephone. and there was a very good comment that the antenna symbol on our phones is more distinct.

so after changing it, the final symbol looks like this:

Learning Journal:

This assignment has thought me that through identifying traits of an object that catches a person’s attention, the object will still be recognized even when most of it’s details have been removed and made into a symbol. A good symbol with the right traits can be identified and remembered easily.

Assignment 1

2007-11-18T21:22:00.001-08:00

did these sketches during class, thought they were not really nice except for the iPod one, which i thought can be further developed.

initial idea for the iPod was to make my name into the song name, but there were people who mentioned that my name would be too small and lose focus in the picture. So, i came up with this idea

using the headphones to form my name.

i kind of hated my "and i hate swimming sketches", so i decided to do something else that i like. was surfing around online and this hit me:

i remembered that for a period of time, i was obsessed by ads like this, wondering for the longest time how they did it in the video and all. it was easy to come up with a concept for this:

all i needed to do was to get my friend to pose for me, take a photo, extract the body shape and then throw in a "signboard" with my name on it.

and the end product for the 2 is:

Learning Journal:

Through this assignment, i learnt how to use the various techniques to collect data and conceptualize on the ideas that are generated. The need to generate a lot of ideas for a single solution is also very important as the first ideas that are generated might not be the best solution.