Assignment 1: My, Myself and I

Me, Myself and I. The first ever assignment of NM2208, requiring us to manipulate objects to change the typography of our names so as to represent a particular personality, habit, quirk or trait. The assignment sounds deceptively simple, but when it came down to actually doing it, it turned out to be much harder than expected. The first thing that needed to be done was to jot down a list of words and short phrases that people tended to associate me with.

The results came in: Sleepy and videogame lover.

I’m not sure if that’s a good sign.

In any case, I drew 2 quick sketches based on the word ‘Sleepy’.

The first is simply a sketch of my bed, which is practically my own little kingdom. I love my bed as much as a man can love an inanimate object without being sent to seek psychological help. However, I quickly realized that this probably wasn’t a sketch I could utilize, as there really wasn’t much in terms of objects for me to manipulate.

The second one is a sketch of the letters of my first name (A, L, V, I, N) sleeping in class, something that I’m (shamefully) famous for. And yes, the letter N is missing, because I didn’t plan this sketch properly and ran out of space. A perfect example of a poor design layout – good thing this is just a preliminary sketch and good thing this is the first assignment, eh? I quite liked this sketch, but decided to play around with other sketches to see what I could come up with.

And so the third sketch came into existence:

This sketch was done based on the fact that I was (and still am) an avid gamer. The letters in my name for this sketch are made using Tetris blocks, a sword, a torch, a boomerang and a snake – various objects that can be found in games. I was quite attached to this idea, but friends claimed that it wasn’t obvious that this sketch was meant to reflect my enjoyment for videogames, so this sketch was ultimately abandoned.

The 4^th and final sketch came from a personal observation that I was a person who often got lost in his own thoughts and tended to analyze certain things too deeply (“think too much”, as some of my friends would say). Hence the sketch – a literal representation of “reflection”.

We were then to choose one out of the 4 sketches to further develop into 2 roughs – I ended up choosing the reflections idea as I felt like it was the closest in representation of my true character. I refined the idea behind the design a bit, and finally came up with the 2 roughs as shown below, one in white and the other in black.

The black version of the design ended up appealing to me far more than the white version (no form of racism intended here), and that was ultimately the design that I chose to develop into the final prototype. I began playing around with the opacity of the reflected “Alvin”, trying to get it to most closely emulate an actual reflection as possible. However, here was where I stumbled into what would become the most trying question for this assignment.

Basically, I had 2 choices:

1.       I could keep the opacity of the reflection really low, such that it looked realistic, but at the expense of visibility for viewers looking at the design for the first time.

2.     

  Or I could increase the opacity of the reflection, such that it looked far more artificial, but greatly improving visibility.

This was a dilemma that I found intimidating – in either situation, it seemed that I would be undermining the very principles of visual communication. It was clear that I needed to find a balance between the 2, but as people always say, talk is cheap.

Finally, after versions upon versions of the same design, I ended up with this:

It seemed like a fairly reasonable balance between realism and visibility for audiences.

The refined story behind this design – I am a person who tends to put up false fronts and masks in front of other people, so as to hide my true feelings . As a result, the actual name itself is flipped, indicating the Alvin persona I display to the world isn’t an accurate depiction of my true character, and its scratchiness/sketchiness is indicative of how incomplete and inadequate this false persona actually is. My true persona in this case is the reflection in the surface. However, its fading opacity shows that the more I hide behind this false persona, the closer I come to losing my true self.

Some final thoughts on this assignment - I chose to go with black and white so as to keep things elegantly simple. Also, some may say that this design may not fulfill the requirements of the assignment, namely, object manipulation. However, in this case, the object in question is the name itself, representative of the side that is being shown to the world around me. 

This assignment got me used to making full use of my Wacom tablet to draw. Initially, using the tablet felt strange and unwieldy, but repeated usage and an undying determination finally allowed me to reach a level of competency such that it almost felt like the tablet had become a part of my body.