Communication Design Fundamentals Project 2
Form and Composition
As a designer, it is important to understand how objects in space look in relation to other objects and to the space that they occupy. Through a given list of word pairs, I will be exploring different ways to express those words so that the audience can easily identify which words were used to inspire the compositions.
Sketching Thumbnails
- For the playful explorations, I thought of composing the squares at interesting angles and some overlapping each other to show flexibility and liveliness.
- For the serious explorations, I arranged the squares in straight lines or grid-style layouts to represent a more tidy, careful feeling.
- For the noisy explorations, I filled the thumbnails up with squares to represent a clamorous, crowded feeling.
- For the quiet explorations, I included a lot of white space in each thumbnail to signal a more peaceful, muted look.
- For the dangerous explorations, I used the black squares to fill up the thumbnail and leave a little white space to generate unpredictable shapes.
- For the safe explorations, I wanted to use the black squares to generate things that come to mind when I think of the word “safe” such as shelter, trees, birds, and water.
Refining Thumbnail Sketches
After sketching out compositions for each word pair, I particularly liked the direction that the playful + serious pair and noisy + quiet pair were heading. Therefore, I decided to use those pairs to do some refining by sketching some more compositions.
Feedback Session 1
During this feedback session, I was able to gain valuable insight into places I could improve for the playful + serious pair and the noisy + quiet pair. Some of the feedback I received was that some of the squares overlapped too much which started to look like rectangles and also to think more about how to fully utilize the white space available. I also received feedback on which thumbnails might be a good direction to head in (the blue circled thumbnails).
Digital Iterations
For the playful options, I thought about arranging the squares in ways that made it look like the squares were flowing or bouncing to exhibit a fun feeling. For the serious options, I arranged the squares with a grid-styled layout and didn't rotate any of the squares because I wanted it to look straight and thoughtful.
For the noisy options, I wanted to crowd the thumbnail with different sizes of squares, leaving a little amount of white space available to exhibit a loud and clattering feeling. For the quiet options, I wanted to leave a lot of white space in specific areas of the thumbnail to exhibit an empty, muted feeling.
I found the figure/ground examples shown in class that showed faces were engaging so that inspired the first figure/ground option. For the second figure/ground relationship, I had a more abstract approach where I thought about what was the most interesting way to arrange the squares so that the thumbnail is 50% black and 50% white.
Feedback Session 2
During the feedback session, I was able to limit down which pair worked best to describe the assigned words and gain insight on how to make the compositions more pleasing through changing the spacing between each square, adding or removing squares in certain spots, and trying a breadth of different square sizes.
Final Solution
Design decisions for the final solution:
- For the playful composition, I added a square in the left bottom corner to make it more obvious the squares might be bouncing/flowing from left to right. I also moved the top right square a little to the left to create an interesting white triangle shape in the corner that might leave the audience more curious about the overall composition.
- For the serious composition, I changed the spacing between each square a bit to give each square more breathing room.
- For the noisy composition, I explored more different sized squares to contrast the quiet composition. I also fixed any of the overlapping squares that looked like rectangles.
- For the quiet composition, I wanted the audience to think of a volume indicator that goes from loud to quiet so I arranged each square with the same amount of space in between from large to small sizes.
- For the figure/ground relationship composition, I decided to go with the first option because of the interesting faces that emerge from the shape arrangement.
Reflection
This project was very helpful to learn more about how spacing, shapes, color, and layout affect the way objects are viewed in space. I really enjoyed exploring ways to visually represent words and also digitizing initial sketches to create the final digital compositions.
