WEEK 14

This poster is from the Family Dog Studios from back in the 50's and 60's. I've always had this passion for psychedelic art and I would really like to make some of my own in the future. This poster has a melting quality that I really like. The words blend together as if they are all melting down the page. The colors fade from red, to blue, to green from bottom to top creating a nice flow of color. The contrast of light to dark creates its own feeling/mood of the overall picture. 

Here again is another poster back from the 60's when psychedelic posters were much more popular. Again we can see how all the words melt together and flow in form sort of creating an overall picture with the words them self. Most of the time these were used for music festivals or concerts, which is really want I would love to do. I love music and attending music festivals so it would be my dream job to be able to create poster and flyers such as these for big music festivals all over the world.  

CONTRAST

I found this picture on the internet to be very well designed and shows a great example of positive and negative contrast. There are 4 nice squares, all the same size right by each other, showing a nice, level, contrast to each other. The black and white of each picture really brings out the contrast affect. Each square has its own pattern and either a black or white background. I thought it was very interesting and a nice play on contrast. There is no confusion here for the viewer, everything is nice and symmetric. 

I found this picture to me a lot more confusing and a failed example of contrast. As beautiful as it is, there are a lot of colors and direction, no set patterns, more ambiguous. I fail to see where the contrast comes into play here. With so many colors and no pattern, I can't see it. In the first picture, we have a nice light to dark contrats, here there are a lot of colors, a lot of dark and a lot of light all mixed together. 

Week 12 Exercise

I found this picture on the internet doing a google search under motion graphics. It really caught my eye out of all the rest because it really gives a great sense of motion. We can see a person standing still with his hands open, pretending to either throw our catch the pieces of paper. They seem to be floating above his hands and cannot tell if they are falling into his hands or away. It really gives a great perspective of motion in a still image way. When we look at the picture our brain immediately thinks that the pieces of paper are moving in some direction, but no matter how long we look at it, they never move, creating an amazing visual affect. 

This picture is relevant both to San Francisco and to our major, hence why I chose it. This I found under motion photography which mainly uses the blur affect to show an exaggerated motion affect increasing speed when in reality, it is all going the same speed. This picture shows the famous cable car zooming down the tracks downtown, but I know from experience that these cars do not zoom at all. Actually quite the opposite. They are very slow and stop at every other block and could take a while to get to where you need to go. I think the juxtaposition between the slow moving vehicle and the fast moving background really shows the effects of motion. 

Week 11 Exercise

http://www.youthedesigner.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/3d-graphic-design-10.jpg

This is an image of a 3D graphic design. I thought this picture portrayed a very good example of depth and perception, with the lines shooting out from each side growing in size to make it seem like the word color is farther back than it actually is. Also, behind the word color, we see small words, showing perspective and playing a huge role in overall size. We can’t have large without small. By scaling the images behind the word, it has a pop out feel and makes it look like it is bigger in size. The juxtaposition of the big words against the small words makes for a very interesting photo. We can also see some circles which help to show scale since there a some bigger ones and smaller ones. It creates a nice scale all in one photo to really show perspective. Even though this is a 2D image, it has been created to look 3D using elements such as scale, dimension, and size, all the key elements in creating perspective and depth. 

Tone and Color

http://www.ripcurl.com/content/images/40091354fed658f7029cb6d0332bbdf5.gif

Here is a poster of the Rip Curl Pro Search which is going on right now here in San Francisco at Ocean Beach, which I have been to the past two days and am having the best time of my life. I love this poster and can’t get enough of it. The colors are so perfect for the Sunset district, but I’ll start with tone. Tone is a way in which to convey dimension, as Dondis says. It helps us perceive depth and movement. This is clearly evident in the poster above as we can see a wave just beginning to break and the white water flowing behind it, spraying the ocean. It’s a perfect perfect peak breaking left and right, which usually never happens in SF. We also have a good horizon line as the ocean continues on and the street comes closer to us, as if were are standing on sunset street. Tone, Dondis says, is basically light, “through it, and only through it, we see,” and as you can see, in the distance it is lighter and closer to us, it is darker, maybe signifying that the sun is shining onto the ocean. 

My favorite part is the color. There are many different shades of red, mixed with yellow, orange, and some white for letters and the wave. Yellow usually signifies warmth, and I believe that is exactly what it is signifying here, the nice warm feeling of the sunset. Red is supposed to be emotional, which is perfect because the emotion at the beach today was amazing and everyone was so happy to see the worlds greatest surfers in our back yards. The color fades from red, to dark yellow, to brighter yellow as it fades away, getting warmer and warmer. This poster makes me feel so warm and in love with San Francisco that I don’t think they could have picked a better color choice. Nothing is to bright here, mainly all the same. Nothing is really saturated to much, just different hues of red and yellow. Red and yellow compliment each other very nicely here and I think who ever designed this poster did a fabulous job. 

Week 9 Blog Exercise

DOT

This is the logo for the company insomniac, who organizes massive music festivals such as Electric Daisy Carnival, Electric Forest, Beyond Wonderland, and many more. They are a very quick growing company and started in 1993. This logo is fairly recent and I’m going to focus on more of the picture near the word, and how it has dots, four of them growing in size. As stated in Dondis chapter 4, the dot is ‘the simplest visual element that can be used with great complexity of intention’ (Dondis 40). It can hold much deeper meaning than what meats the eye. Because of its round shape, it identifies with many things in nature that are also round, since it is the ‘most common formulation’ out of the rest. In this logo, we have four round dots, each a different color, and each a different size, two more elements of visual communication, making it 3 in total. So we have 3 in 1 here, which is great. I think that these dots for this company symbolize music, especially electronic dance music since that is what mainly plays at these festivals. The music builds up to a climax and then drops. I believe the growing of the dots size show that build in music, but without the drop, to keep you rising up. I am not sure about each color, but it could signify that there are many different genres in the EDM (electronic dance music) category and that they all get along. 

MOVEMENT

This is probably the most recognized logo in the surf community. It is for a company called quiksilver. This logo really focuses on another element from Dondis called Movement. Movement is harder to convey in a still photo, but when done correctly can have a great affect on the viewer. This logo really focuses on the ocean, particularly the wave. Because it is a surf company, the obviously wanted a wave as there logo so surfers would be able to differentiate between other companies that might seem similar. The basic layout for the logo above to me looks a lot like the basic outline of a wave, with what maybe looks like a mountain in the middle, maybe because they also sponsor snowboarding. This might be a static image, but it gives a feel of a crashing wave, moving, or even flowing to the right, which goes well with humans because we natural read from left to right. If flipped horizontally, this logo would look very different and might not be as successful. 

LINE

Finally, we have the RVCA logo, which is another surf company that has grown extremely popular in the past 10 years. Their logo focuses mainly on the line aspect from Dondis. The line can be thought of as a bunch of dots extremely close together moving in a certain direction. Here we see nice solid black lines, with very little detail. The logo is using the line as its design, sort of like a building where they are stripped of anything unnecessary and letting the structure be the design. So it is close to architecture in a way making it much more diverse. These lines are very precise and not vague in anyway. They have distinct direction, hence the boldness. Everything is very strict looking and snap to grid like. Lines are really everywhere in nature, they are just hard to see. I really like this logo and I think it does a great job using the line technique and showcases Dondis’s view well. 

Week 8 Blog Exercise

This is my first puzzle that took me a while to complete. My eyes were focused on the circles a lot more than the white area and once I began drawing I would get confused and lost. Paths began to arise as I drew longer lines, but would eventually hit a dead end. I tried looking for alternate patterns, but the only pattern I kept seeing was the overall garden pattern. I almost feel like I began drawing knots throughout the circles. Overall this one was very difficult and my roommate and I to solve without the solution. 

This one was a little more easy and I completed it within reasonable time. This one dealt more with pattern completion and visual memory. I realized that I would forget which lines I had already drawn over and would get myself stuck into a dead end. I didn’t really think about visualizing it before hand like my roommate, I went more with trial and error. I was more focused on each moment and each line instead of the overall pattern completion. 

We both found this one to be very difficult and it took us both awhile to figure out. We could not have done it without the solution. Her process was once again to sit and think about it, visualize it in her mind, and attempt slowly, while I once again jumped right in. After about 10 mins we each gave up and decided it was too difficult. We kept running into other lines and dead ends, both felt like we were drawing a bunch of knots all over the place. 

My roommate Connie found this one much easier for her. She said she just looked at it for a little bit instead of just drawing lines right away like I did. She visualized the pattern and path before she began to draw her lines. Her very first time she got twelve, which was the correct answer on the solution, and I was surprised. I think that visualizing it before hand in your head might help better than just jumping right into it and guessing which way to go. She completed the pattern before I did.