CDF Project 2
Introduction: This project is an exploration of how objects in space can be defined depending on its placement. It is a way to understand the Gestalt principles as a whole composition and how these designs can be visually communicated by the viewers.
Sketches: These are an outline of thumbnails defining a pair of words. I only used black squares to visualize each word and created 5 thumbnails for each word for a total of 30. It helped me practice layout and composition for each image as I visualized how these words could effectively be seen.
Digital Sketches: I chose a sketch for each word pair that I felt were most effective and digitized them.
These three compositions are defining:
- A pair of words: Playful and Serious
- A pair of words: Dangerous and Safe
- A reversible composition between the figure and background.
1:1 Feedback with Anna: Anna and I were able to point out which compositions were effective and how these can be improved. I added color to one of the compositions, playful:serious, recombined different thumbnails of dangerous:safe, and inserted my reversible figure/ground composition.
Final Compositions: After discussing which compositions were effective and how I was able to improve these thumbnails into final images, I created the following. The final format is 11” x 17” horizontal pages. The first two pages has pairs of compositions, while the last page has a single composition.
These final compositions define:
- A pair of words: Playful and Serious using black and another color — orange. The background is white and square sizes may vary.
- A pair of words: Dangerous and Safe using only black squares on a white background in different sizes and orientation.
- A reversible composition between the figure and background. This illustrates the figure/ground relationship between the black and white shades.
Reflection: Throughout this project, I learned that the placement, orientation, and intent is important when creating such simple compositions. Even just by using 2 colors, black and white, I was able to think about different possible compositions that could be effective when defining a word. It isn’t always about the amount of colors or defining specific scenes/objects/people to explain the complexity of language but just visualizing simple things, such as squares, circles, triangles, and elaborating them. I realized that this was a good starting step to creating larger visual communications for more complex designs in the future.
