Assignment 2: Needful Things

this assignment required us to take an object and to distill it into a representative symbol, and further on into an abstract symbol. so basically i had to find something and take away it's distinctive feature to make it a general symbol.

it was difficult trying to find something which could be distilled enough into a general object which can be easily recognizable by many. for example it's difficult to attempt to distill an mp3 player cos you can't use an ipod as the example; cos the mp3 is a brandless object and using an ipod would give an apple branding to it. so i concluded that the object must be generic in the first place to make it easier on myself for the assignment.

i thought of many things, from drink cans to fans to shoes to laptops and even my dog! but i was pretty much stumped. thankfully i had a sudden bout of inspiration!

so i decided to use a lightbulb.

as you can see from my abstractions i kept the main generic feature of the light bulb throughout which was the transparent glass. i scaled down and simplified the filament and changed the screw cap so that it wasn't a... screw cap. here's a larger zoom picture of my generic lightbulb.

well i hope you guys can understand my distillation process for my lightbulbs. my initial fears were that the class could not comprehend my process or that i had made an error in the distillation process, thankfully there were no such issues.

Assignment 1: Prototypes

these are the two completed prototypes which i had presented in the second tutorial. it was my first time working with macromedia freehand and photoshop. quite an experience. could be better though. heh.

i thought that my soccer design was good enough without colour, however i got quite a few comments that maybe a little bit of colour could make it nicer. Jingheng even pointed out that my centre soccer player only had one sock on. my bad.

didnt get much comments for the f1 design, aside from the spacing distance between the car and the person.

as such i made a few changes to the designs. i added some colour to the player's jerseys and used a green background. i even changed the font and gave my players some branding on their jerseys! somehow the colour turned out darker when i uploaded it onto the blog. its not that dark i assure you.

i also added a road for the car, and decided to use my text as part of it too.

yup, thats that for the first assignment. won't be making much changes to it already. however i'm still deciding as to what type of paper should i use to print out these designs for the portfolio. thinking of glossy paper... suggestions?

Assignment 1: Sketches and Roughs

our very first asignment required us to incorporate two things that we loved/hated into our names. with the sentence, "hi! my name is .... and i love/hate ..."
i decided to choose soccer and formula 1 racing to show my love for these sports.

i've been playing soccer ever since i was young and it is really a shared passion among the guys. for those who play footie you know that you can easily put your day's worries behind you whenever you enter the field. i could spend all day talking about soccer but lets move on to F1.

formula 1 on the other hand is an acquired taste. few people find much joy in just watching a bunch of cars circling a racing track for countless rounds. i guess what attracts me to formula 1 racing is the thrill and speed of the cars. it takes much precision in negotiating a curve or overtaking an opponent.

alright enough about that.

for this assignment, we have to come out with 4 sketches for each like/dislike, and 2 roughs which are developments from the sketches. i attempted to use football players to form alphaberts of my name (Tim) through various poses. though my third sketch was just my name in a boot which i thought didn't really follow the crux of the assignment.

i decided to use work on the first sketch as i thought it was one of the nicer ones. it seemed more natural too, like a single fixed frame during a game.

i encountered difficulties working on the sketches for formula 1 though. all I could think about were cars cars and more cars! finally got some inspiration after surfing the f1 website.

asking ard people mainly felt that the first sketch was the better of the lot (or for many the lesser of the evils). so ya i decided to work on the main elements that appear in a typical formula 1 race.

right, so these are what i had presented during the first tutorial. it was really challenging trying to conceptualize what i liked into my name. my lack of visual creativity didn't help much too! i'll be posting up my prototypes for the selected sketches shortly though, do find some time to give your comments!