Advice for design students - David Airey

David Airey has been blogging for 4 years. He is a design author and a brand identity designer. I happened to found this page which is quite useful to us design students. Here's the link

ITAP Week 3 - Ways Of Research

Tone of Voice & Visual Hierarchy


Typefaces are important in enhancing visual communication. It gives audience better understanding in the message given out. Typefaces have tone of voice, the fonts and the way it is written helps to enhance to meaning of the letter. For example    ANGRY! Sad Happy. The tone of voice in the letter includes: font, colour and size. During research, we have to clearly know how can we express the words by using the tone of voice.


As we can see the image below aims for men audiences. The tone of voice in this magazine cover shows the masculinity. The word "cool" and the black theme color is more attractive to male audiences.

The image shown below has a tone of voice that quickly shows the targeted audiences are teenage girls. Pink and girly fonts with a teenage girl as image. A magazine cover as shown tells audiences really quickly that this is a teenage girl's magazine. Which targeted audiences will easily be attracted.

This is a sign to warn. the color combination of yellow and black. The tone of voice in here is the alerting color, which allows audience to notice the signage. Not only the bold yellow fonts is clear enough and strong enough to warn the audience.

The most important of tone of voice is to giving audiences the right impression on what the message is all about.








Visual hierarchy allows you to lead the audiences to read the way you want them to. Controlling the flow of audiences' reading. The first impression for the audiences is so important that it is the only few seconds to grab one's attention. To not letting the audience to stray away, a visual hierarchy must be in used. This is to make sure you lead the audience to the right way you want them to see it. There are many ways to create visual hierarchy, such as, colors, spaces, typography, images and layout. 

The first thing an audience see this poster should be the red wordings on top of the white letters. The motive is to let the audience straightaway read the word "Bad typography is everywhere" which it enhances the meaning that you can see it everywhere and obviously. While "Good typography is invisible" is the second thing audiences should be reading, as this is to show it IS invisible and hiding somewhere not always seen. Underneath the main letters that is shown the letters are written in a smaller font, to create contrast between the main letterings and the minor letterings.

Here's a rough example:

These 3 black balls are the main subject and what I want the audience to see is, from Ball 1 to Ball 2 and then to Ball 3. So, I used lines, dots, circles and space to do the leading.

The patterns made to lead to Ball 2 is bolder. This is to draw audience's attention and to be brought to some where else. The lines from Ball 2 is actually "shot" back to Ball 1. To bring the audience back to Ball 3 I will have to make another flow to lead to Ball 3. What I demonstrated was a flow, shows that the way i place my objects affects how an audience see things. That is way visual hierarchy is so important.

bibliography:

http://designshack.co.uk?articles/graphics/how-to-use-visual-hierarchy-in-web-design

ITAP Week 2 - Illustration

Research & Audience


Research is an investigation, study, explore, delving in deeper into the subject. Its understanding the subject in full and deeper meaning. Allows one to be able to use the subject to form another thing. It enables you to interpret and it is also debatable. There are two types of research, Primary Research and Secondary Research.

-Primary Research-

Doing researches without an existing data or information is known as Primary Research. The researcher takes control in the research method. Primary research enables the researcher to do research freely. The advantage of primary research is that the information collected is genuinely owned by the researcher. Unfortunately, by the time the research is complete it might be out of date. To focus on the research, the researcher may have to be employed so they could have a bigger budget in their research, and also employed researchers are full-time researchers which enables them to focus fully on carrying out the research.

-Secondary Research-

Secondary research concludes the summary, synthesis of existing research data is then collected from various source, such as books and the most popular ones nowadays are search engines. The search engines has increased the chances of carrying out secondary research and its convenient for researchers to conduct a research since its free and could be found almost anywhere.

Visual research however, is about collection, study, observation and exploring. Research is necessary for visuals to know how to communicate visually with audiences. Study and investigate how is that using images and other visuals to give out a message to audiences. Visual research is also learning how to develop a language through drawing, collecting and documentary. Through research it contributes a deeper understanding of subject. To understand the way a subject forms and the history of it enables the researcher to re-use the method.

Audiences are important to an illustrator, obviously its because an illustrator illustrates for audiences to view and then decodes the message sent. Understanding and knowledge of an audience can enhance and focus the communication. To be able to focus and target certain audiences, researches are necessary to do so, the illustrator will have to understand the needs of the audiences and the way audiences thinks. It is not about following blindly what a client wants, but a guide to what you can do. 

Example:

    Two engaged couples came in and ask you to make them a wedding invitation card. Couple A along with their 50 years old Chinese parents. You can tell they are very traditional Chinese parents, by just looking how they dress and speak. Couple B came along with their parents, and by their looks you can tell they are 21st century modern parents. The question is which invitation card will you choose for them.

Once you have know the audience's needs, you are able to make decision according to their taste. It is important for an illustrator to know its audience well, so they wouldn't make simple mistakes like giving a white invitation card to Couple A since their parents are very traditional Chinese, which white is prohibited for Chinese during happy occasions.





Bibliography:
http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Primary_research
http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Secondary_research
http://www.brighton.ac.uk/visuallearning/
http://www.sprinderlink.com/content/x63334678315557t/

ITAP week 1 - Connectivity

Can recontextualised ideas be contemporary & Relationships developed from existing forms of historical culture.

Cultural context within your chosen medium is to recontexualise a certain culture eg. In 1866 the L'Origine du Monde's, was painted by Gustave Courbet which is also known as Origin of The World. A close-up view of the genitals and abdomen of a naked woman, lying on a bed with legs spread. The framing of the nude body, with head, arms and lower legs outside of view, emphasizes the eroticism of the work. At the same time its showing us and reminding us, this is where it all started.

Later in 1989, an artist named Orlan painted something similar to the Origin of The World which is known as Origin of War. Using the previous painting the artist recontextualised the original painting and came up with a brand new painting. In this painting, the concepts are total different and opposite. It shows a big contrast in 2 different paintings. One, saying about creation of the world; the other saying about the corruption of the world.

In these two paintings we can see how people are different can come up with different ideas. David Malki a Comic Strip Doctor posted this in his website "I’m hardly the first to be dissatisfied with the quality of the comics I read, and so it should be no surprise to anyone that there are many, many people who do the same thing I do: re-write the comics to make them funnier." [WONDERMARK] . Frankly, recontextualising is another way of improving it and vice versa.



Notions of originality, whenever I am trying to do something new I always wonder is this original? I don't want to be plagiarising. I'll ask myself again, is there anything that is so original other than God's creation? Everything has to exist before you can further develop it. Did Thomas Edison really invented the light bulb? The answer is no,In reality, light bulbs used as electric lights existed 50 years prior to Thomas Edison's 1879 patent date in the U.S. Joseph Swan, a British inventor, obtained the first patent for the same light bulb in Britain one year prior to Edison's patent date. [That explains it!] Now, did the light bulb just popped out from Joseph Swan's head? If there is no light, would someone think of inventing a light bulb? This could be part of recontextualising. Forming something from an existing matter.

An Italian poet, Petrarch, once said "He who imitates must have a care that what he writes be similar, not identical . . . and that the similarity should not be of the kind that obtains between a portrait and a sitter, where the artist earns the more praise the greater the likeness, but rather of the kind that obtains between a son and his father . . . we (too) should take care that when one thing is like, many should be unlike,and that what is like should be hidden so as to be grasped only by the mind's silent enquiry, intelligible rather than describable. We should therefore make use of another man's inner quality and tone, but avoid his words. For the one kind of similarity is hidden and the other protrudes; the one creates poets, the other apes."


You could have been copying unintentionally but its still breaking the law. That is why, we need a record on how we do things and end up producing the final piece. It is judged by seeing the sequence on how you worked. This is to make sure the effort given by the artist is not abused.



Bibliography:
http://wondermark.com/the-comic-strip-doctor-recontextualization/
http://www.coolquiz.com/trivia/explain/docs/edison.asp
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/alfrey.html