Assignment 7

And for the grand finale, Assignment 7, the Storybook

Theme: God created fly and forgot why (Group project)

§Design and prepare a story book for children (Ages 6 to 9)

§Number of pages - around 12

§Do not use more than 900 words for copy (story)

§Pay attention to layout and information flow

§Use appropriate type and colours

§Prepare design document

§Book Size: 7 X 8.5 inches

§Pay attention to consistence

Medium: Print

Important:

–Again pay attention to layout and information flow, and consistence

§Objectives

–Proper usage of type and content organization

–Developing skills in defining visual treatment specs

–Understanding the process and importance of creating design document

Well, the Theme is just a suggestion and not a definite one. and thus for our groups, here is what we come up with.

First, a short summary of the story:
4 Gods come together to create the world, namely the God of Earth, God of Life, God of Sea and God of time. After the creation of the world, the God of time got greedy and wanted the whole world to herself. Thus using trickery, she successfully made the other 3 Gods leave. However, the world soon deteriorate to a very unbecoming state. She apologized to the other 3 Gods and ask them to return. They did and the world become a better place.

Morale of the story? Time may be against us but the world still can be fixed. The future is in your hands and it is never too late to change.


Well, a story for 6-9 year olds. I am quite excited actually, being able to actually be the author and illustrator of a book! However, 6-9 is a tricky age group to tackle. On one end of the spectrum, 6 yrs old are usually reading books with big letters and really simple story. However, by 9 the kids would have matured enough to actually stop reading picture books (though most still does i think) and read books by Enid Blyton or even books like Goosebumps. Thus it is rather hard to settle down on how difficult the language can be, the concepts and the font size.

And so, Alden came up with the story immediately(actually according to him, he came up with it during his NS time) and both me and Jasmine agreed that it is a good story to followup on. Next up, Jasmine did the drawing and coloring. While i am in charge of touching up and basically photoshopping the whole thing.

Thus coming up, the raw prototype......






Now, the feedback we got from Siti is the block of words will be very hard to digest visually. It is very difficult to read as they are all in one chunk. Thus she suggest to us to break it into more bite sized chunks so they can be more easy on the eye. Besides that, the feedback we got is that the drawing style is very fresh and unique. Obviously we are very happy upon hearing that but credit must go to Jasmine for her wonderful drawings!

Finally, i have no idea there is so much work that goes into make a simple illustrated story book. Everything down to the smallest detail like whether the page numbering should be to the left or right or middle makes a huge different to the overall feel of the book.

Assignment 6

Well, assignment 6, Design analysis...

And so, here are the posters...

Well i think most would agree this is a bad poster(though not the worst poster around, but bad nonetheless) There is no continuity at all. The most attention grabbing part of the poster is the picture at the center and if you follow the two person's gaze, your eye will fall right off the poster. There is also imbalance of visual content, making the poster very bottom heavy, which, together with the no continuity part, will lead the viewer's eyes right off the poster. In addition, the picture in the center seemed to have no link with background of black and white. The whole poster looked like it is done in 5 minutes.

Well, enough about the bad poster, here is the good poster.



As the slides have already said, there is very good contrast between the figure and ground. Our eyes are immediately drawn to the figure, that is batman. Then there is good continuity as we follow Batman's gaze down onto the name of the movie, which again contrast nicely with the background and thus very clearly legible. The color scheme of the poster is mainly warm and dark tones, which portray the general mood of the movie, which is more of dark and solemn.


After this tutorial, i learn quite a few about good and bad posters. and thus i head back and tweaked my Poster (Assignment 4) a little.

Assignment 3

Assignment 3: UC what IC?

Description:

nU C what I C: Visual story

nVisual narrative – Telling a story with just 10 pictures.

n

Suggested Procedure:

nBuy, Beg, or borrow a camera or steal it, but don’t quote me on this…J Even 8$ disposable camera would do.

nLoad it with a colour negative roll/Memory Flashcard.

nWrite/Select a short story

nTry to communicate the story using no more than 10 visuals (no text) – I meant it NO words.

nCreate a storyboard of your idea/s in your sketchbook

nTranslate you storyboard into pictures using your camera

nGet it processed and printed (size 6x4 inches). Mount them neatly on A5 size paper.

Objectives:

nUnderstanding and overcoming constrains/ problems of representation

nUsing various representation techniques to communicate your ideas effectively

Important: Story should...

Aristotle’s Poetic

nHave a plot

nA beginning (hooking the audience)

nMiddle (drama, building tempo)

nAn ending (with a twist – requirement for this assignment)

- | -

First i shall showcase my failed and discarded idea.

Draft part 1

Draft part 2

The story

I dont blame you if you look at the above, wide mouth, stoned, stunned, whatever. Because none of the people that i showed it to can get the story. Zero, zit, nada, non existent. The tutorial class is absolutely stumped as to what the heck am i trying to tell through the pictures. They were at a lost as to what i can do to improve it. Thus i decided to redo the whole thing. I think i was trying to squeeze too much information into a mere 10 frames. Too ambitious. 10 frames were way shorter than i expected. I should have attempted something simple yet effective. Which hands me the lesson of : it is easy to overload on information, however to get the message across, to be a good designer, one should know what to show, what not to show and how much to show. Also, a simple but precise message is a powerful and effective one.

Oh, in case you dont know, the summary of the story is....
It is the term break. Excited, i played and played. Suddenly it is the last day of break and i had not done any of the homework. Desperate, i tried something i seen in Heroes(the TVs show). And hey pesto, like Hiro Nakamura, i traveled back in time. Armed with the new power, i played again without thinking. Soon it is the end of break again and i tried the same trick. However this time, i concentrate too much and went too far back in time to the jurassic period, oblivious to the impending danger of being eaten by the T Rex.

Yeah, crappy i know. And the length of the summary serves to remind me again that i try to squeeze too much into 10 frames.

- | -

And now, for the story that i will be using

I set out to re-shoot EVERYTHING and here are the drafts and story.

Sketch 1

Sketch 2

The Story

Well, there you go, i hope it is pretty straightforward. At first it seemed ordinary enough, two people playing chess. However at the end it is revealed that i am actually playing chess with my own. If you notice carefully, i kept two things consistent. My hand which is without the gloves and myself only appears at the right side of the frame. My hand which is wearing the gloves only appears at the left side of the frame. This is to set consistency in shots and naturally lead people to perceive as two people playing chess. The foreshadowing part is when the owner of the gloved hand is never shown. At frame, it is revealed that the owner of the gloved hand had a checkmate against me. I was shocked, before smiling to myself as i have been playing chess with myself all along. Showed it to a couple of people and they all agreed that this is much more easier to understand and flows well.



So, as i have said before, through this exercise i have learned that it is very important to be precise and simple so as to be able to communicate effectively.

Assignment 2 : Updates

Well after consultation with Ms Siti, I have changed a little for my final version of the abstraction:

I have always thought that my final two abstractions were a little weird. During the consultation, it proved to be so. The "#" symbol just doesn't fit in. Ms Siti suggested that for my chosen abstraction, i need to rethink of what to put in place of the "#" and to pull away the two straps from the watch face. After some deliberations, i finally settled on the following....

I replaced the "#" with a 2 that looks like what we see on a rather old digital clock, with straight ends and all that. I have also pull apart the two straps from the circle and make the circle smaller. For the final abstraction, i opted to change the two lines i had previously to rectangular blocks. It looks reasonably like a watch if one would follow the progression of abstraction compared to the previous one which looks like the last fishball on a satay stick.

Assignment 5

When i look at the instructions for Assignment 5, my eyes popped out and my mouth opened wide enough to swallow a python.

Why?

Because it requires two things, two things that i am VERY lacking. The two things are COLOR and LOVE.

Why oh why!

Well, i dont really have a choice so i just soldier on and hope to hit upon something. And i werent surprised by myself that i started doing something really cheesy. But first, here are the various sketches..


Well for this one, the heart shape is the key chain and the two keys are the male and female symbols. The concept is something like "You find love when you find the key to each other's heart"



Ok, this is meant to be a very kiddish drawing. It is suppose to look like the drawing of a child with the child holding hands with another child and both looking sunny and happy. The concept is something like "Love, as pure as a child's smile"



Ok this is two elderly couple walking off to a sunrise at a beach, leaving a trial of footprints behind. The concept behind it is "I will walk with you, till you are old, i will always be by your side" Yeah, cheesy line.



Well, this last one, is a leaf(i hope it is obvious enough that it is a leaf), with two water droplets forming a heart shape. The concept is something along the line of "Love, like water, is the source of life"

So, after much thinking, i chose the following two to photoshop on.

Version 1

Version 2

Majority of the class chose version 2 of my card. Personally speaking i like version 1 better. The obvious thing is the color of the footprints are very off! I thought they look alright to me, but well, haha, i am color blind so..... Anyway, i wanted to do a picture of a elderly couple walking along the beach into the sunrise but.... the skill required to design that is beyond me right now so i opted for a simple one. The font used for version 1 is beachtype and try as i might, even with the help of online tutorials, i cant make the written on sand effect, so i just leave it at that. For version two, the class suggested making the words more sparkly and perhaps add a heart (made of stars) at the sky towards the right as it looks rather empty.

And so, armed with new informations and insights, i came up with this for the 2nd round of tutorial critique...

Outside

Inside

After printing the card, i realized that i can see the logo at all and i like the logo very much!! And the skyline is WAY too dark compared to what i see on my computer screen. I have all along used CMYK and yet this happens. Generally the card is surprisingly ok with the class. So it is just down to the making the skyline and the cupid logo brighter so they can be seen. And thus i have this. It took me quite a while to come up with what to include on the inside of the card. I finally decided on this design and the class doesnt really have any comments on it. I think my drawing for the couple on the bench sucked but well, it is the best i can manage give that i cant draw and this is achieved entirely using the draw shape function in photoshop.

So yar, the only changes i have made is to make the skyline and the logo brighter. This teaches me to not to trust computer screen easily when i am printing something concrete like cards or poster. For simple color usage with not much design or gradient or style, the difference may not be too significant(like my poster) but for fine details like the cards i did, it matters very much. So there is my final product, using the colors to create a (hopefully) romantic mood.