Class Exercise #2

The second class exercise was about using basic shapes to create abstract or semi-abstract images to represent a word. For this exercise, we were made to pair up and create a pair of images, and I teamed up with Xin Le. We came up with the following:

Order:

Our rationale is that order is best represented by having a fixed pattern.

Distress:

We decided that isolation and creating the image of a gaping chasm was one way of depicting distress.

Assignment 4: Save, Prevent, Kill...

Save, prevent, kill... I’ll freely admit, I got hooked on the word “kill” for a while, wondering just what sort of poster I could come up with. That probably wouldn’t have gotten me very far in terms of this assignment and my portfolio though, so I started trying to put together another idea. In the end, I came up with a poster that tackles a very real problem in Singapore that anyone who takes public transportation has probably experienced at least once at some point in his or her life.

Impatient MRT commuters.

Honestly, it wouldn’t kill people to just wait 10 seconds so people inside the MRT can alight. But no, as soon as the doors slide open, a veritable wave of humans comes surging into the train, and on occasion, if you’re unlucky, you get swept right back into the train with them, and you end up missing your stop.

And sometimes, missing that stop means being late for school or work.

“I couldn’t get out of the MRT!” doesn’t sound like an eligible reason, does it?

And so, I decided that perhaps a poster might help in tackling this issue. Taking into account the fact that this poster would be put up at bus stops or in notice boards along busy streets, and that people would only be able to glance at the poster for a scant few seconds, I decided to go with big visuals and as little text as possible, so as to drive the message home in the shortest time possible.

I started with this sketch:

And ultimately converted it into this:

Initially, it looked more like the blue guy (victim) was standing at the MRT doorway trying to stop people from getting in (“You shall not pass!” – Gandalf) Friends from my tutorial and my tutor said it was because the initial design only had people swarming into the MRT from the outside, and there was nobody behind him. I then added some people standing behind him to create the look that he was surrounded, and it quite effectively dispelled the image that the victim was a gatekeeper of sorts.

Doing this assignment made me realize a few things. The first is the margin. It is always advised that visual elements be kept a distance away from the edges of the canvas, to prevent the audience from getting the feeling that the visual elements are falling off the page. However, there are occasions in which having certain visual elements stretch all the way to the edge can be advantageous. By having an uniform colour stretch across the entire canvas and then having an odd colour splashed across the middle, it draws more attention to the odd colour, which is the ultimate objective of posters – getting the audience’s attention fixed on the message.

Not only that, by having an equal spread to the edge of both sides of the canvas, it can generate a “large” effect – audiences will draw the conclusion that this picture is something that stretches beyond the boundaries of what the poster can physically capture, and that can be turned to a designer’s advantage as well.

Something else that I came to notice while doing this assignment was how the little details often make something illogical miraculously make a great deal of sense. Take the poster above for example – the initial design did not have the East-West Line green bar above the door. Instead, it was simply a man standing between 2 white rectangles holding off a horde of people. Most of my friends could not draw the link between the poster’s design and the message I wanted to bring across, and it confused me for a moment. But I realized that this was because I being the designer, know perfectly well what I’m trying to say with my poster. However, the audience does not know what a designer wants to say exactly. The designer must always take this into account – “will the audience know what is it that I want to say? Do I need to add anything else for this to make sense?