Typography and Visual Design

In this lecture, I learn the basic of typography. Usually when I type, I never really care much about how my texts looked, as long as they are not "weird", I will think they are fine. It was until this lecture, I learned much about typography. There are more to it than meet the eye.

Firstly, Julian talked about the two basic classes of type, namely Serif and San-Serif. He then went on to talk about type terminology. One of them is font. He said that it is not appropriate to use more than two to three fonts in a design as it will cause readability problem. He also mentioned about the size of the font. It is important to choose to the right size as it is going to promote readability to an article or design. I was also taught to bear in mind, when choosing a point size, the appearing height of the font.

After that, Julian went on to talk about layout and grids. He told us about the proper usage of grids and also a few examples of them to allow us to understand better. He also added in a few examples of bad usage of grids to make us see the difference between them.

Near the end of the lecture, he went into details on our project with the theme---God created fly and forgot why. In this project, a group of 3-4 students are supposed to come out with a children story book. The age range will be 6-9. Basically, this is like the final assignment for this module, and we are supposed to make use of what we have learned so far and combine them to make a master piece. It is not long til I got my project mates and started with the drawings, designs, story board etc. The attached will be one of the frames that my group has sketched out and the other one will be the coloured version. It's how it going to look like after tedious hand traced and solid colouring :)

The full version of the book will only be available near the 22nd-23rd of April due to the printing time needed by the printer.

Gestalt Principle

In this lecture, my lecturer, Julian taught us about getalt principle which is very useful for designs. He began with showing as a few pictures and asked us if we could make any sense out of it. Following that, he then explained to us about the difficulties we faced from those pictures and the reason was actually their organisation. It will only be clear to the viewers if the things in the pictures are correctly organised and this is what getalt principle is known as--laws of organisation.

He then went on to talk more about factors in getalt principle. They are figure and ground, proximity, similarity, continuity and closure. Under figure and ground, it is said that the figure is supposed to be smaller and also to have a good contrast with the background.

Whereas for proximity, it is said that things which are closer together will be visualise as if they are in the same group. As for similarity, it says that things which share similar attributes, eg. shape, texture, size, colour will be seen by viewers as belonging together.

A group of figures which is arranged in a way which have direction and seem to continue from each other shows good continuity. This is what the principle of continuity states.

Last but not least, for principle of closure, it helps viewers/readers to see a figure even though some part of the information are missing.

In conclusion, a good use of getalt principle can make a design more organised, unified and also simplified. This allows the readers to understand better. On the other hand, if one apply getalt principle for a design, he can cause the design to be messy, difficult to understand and viewers will not want to take any longer look at it.

At the end of the lecture, there was a classroom exercise. The objective of the exercise was to make us apply getalt principle to 3 images and this posted picture was what I did at that time.

Assignment 6:Design Analysis

The focus on this week lecture and assignment will be on Getalt principle. This principle is based on a few factors to allow designers to come out with a good designed posters or other pictured items. Some of the factors are Figure and Ground, Proximity, Similarity, Continuity and closure.

As for the assigment, it is to be done in a group of two. The objective of this assignment is to pick one good and one bad poster and give reasons why they are good or bad. The use of Gestalt principle is important here as it allows one to tell pretty easily the quality of the poster by simply applying his principle. The above are the 2 posters taken by my partner, David and me.

Personally, I feel that this assignment is very different fromthe assignments I did earlier because for the usual assignments, I am supposed to do use what is being taught during the lecture and make something out of it. Then in the tutorials, my tutorial mates and tutor will then comment on my work. However for this assigment, instead of making something, I and David chose 2 posters and discussed about them. Then in the tutorial, both of us presented the arguments and points for each of the good and bad posters we chose.

After our presentation, our tutorial mates took turn to comment on out points. There were some who agreed with us, but there were also some who think differently from us. They then told us the reasons for their different opinions. For the whole tutorial, students took turn to comment on others' presentation. Miss Swati has also added in quite a few constructive comments in between.

I cannot deny that this tutorial was definitely a fruitful one as I learned and understood more on the designing areas and techniques.

Assignment 5: Greeting Card

It's a greeting card this time. The theme of the greeting card will be love. During this lecture, the lecturer taught about the colours and their uses. Firstly, he talked about the understanding of the colours present in a white light, after that, he went on to talk about the colour basics, for e.g. what is meant by primary and secondary colours. He also mentioned about the 4 colour components namely hue, value, intensity and temperature. As he talked about colour schemes, he explained about different colours used for different kinds of temperature. For example, warm colours are usually orange and yellow and blue being a cool colour.

He also explained to us the importance of using complementary colours so as to attain a better colour harmony. Near the end of the lecture, he went on to talk about the pschology meaning of the colours before giving us the assignment for the week--design and make a love greeting card. This card is to convey the theme through colours with minimal use of photographs and other visual elements. The size of the card is to be A4 or smaller.

The objective of this assignment is basically to develop necessary skill in using the colour palette, understanding the uses of different colours and most importantly to comunicate message through colours. The following will be two copies of my designed greeting card. However, the latter will be my final design as my tutor feels that the former is not really a good one in terms of the colours used.

Assignment 4: Poster Design

In this assigment, I am told to design a poster with a theme related to saving forest, stop pollution etc. In other words, the poster will be designed for a campaign to educate good values. This assignment will make us focus on understanding the importance of basic visual elements and design principles in communicating a message.

It will also further help us develop necessary techniques to communicate the message through form. The poster will be A3 size and no more than 150 words should be used for it. After designing my poster, I received constructive suggestions from my classmates and my tutor, Miss Swati. During the tutorial, she emphasized on the use of A3 paper because she said it is going to make a great difference if one is to print the poster on a smaller piece of paper, e.g. A4. The reason is that it will not be able to bring out the intended message effectively to the readers due to the difference in size.

The posted image will be the poster i designed at that time and I am still in the process of improving it.

U C what I C(Continued)

Assignment 3: U C what I C

Woo~~~ What a nice e-learning week. This is my first time having e-learning for a module. I have to admit it was really a good experience! No doubt, it makes students fresher and talk alot more compared to usual tutorials ^^ Really hope there will be more e-learning weeks in future!

Anyway, the assignment this time will be making a short visual story with just 10 pictures!! The main idea is to allow the viewer to understand what story I am trying to say with only the use of pictures. Therefore it is emphasized by the lecturer that no words are allowed for this assigment. However, during the next tutorial, some clarfications were made with my tutor and she said that words will be allow only under certain circumstances. For e.g. using of words to describe the sound an action is allowed. Most importantly, the story has to have a twist for it.

So basically, I am supposed to write a storyboard of my idea, then translate them into pictures. I am also told to use camera for pictures. Seems like the lecturer does not really want any drawings this time.

The taking of pictures for this assignment created the hardest problem for me because firstly, I do not really have a good camera. Personally, i feel that it's important to use a good camera in order to get nice pictures. Secondly, the lack of photography skill actually made the pictures look worse. Last but not least, haha, it's not easy to get the other characters in the photo to cooperate for the picture shots.

Nevertheless, I feel coming out the with a story and trying to think of twists for it is really fun. I enjoy this part the most as I feel coming out with a good twist is really not easy. This really posed as a challenge for me. Despite the lack of technical skills, I have try to best to fulfil the objective this assigment. :) The story will be posted as the next post. Hope you will like story ^^