Week 13 Application Exercise

Why is the Representation example representational and how does that operate for the viewer?

The Example in Dondis' book, on page 70-71, is considered to be representational for the reason that is consists of much detail, letting me understand what kind of birds they are. This knowledge obtained can reveal location, culture, and other geographical information.

In what way is the Abstraction example abstract, from what does the abstraction derive, what does it communicate to the viewer and how?

This example is clearly showing "selective use of the critical parts of the form." The happy face has become an iconic symbol for the 21st century. It denotes happiness, an expression of emotion without any visual contact.

Here is a picture that is representational of a smile and/or teeth. It is considered representational is for the reason that it consists of much detail. We know these to be teeth due to our culture coming to an agreement upon what this should be called. This image is showing large amounts of detail and has varying levels of categorization. 

 This is an example of abstract level of visual information. picture is extremely generalized and is universally understood. If you go to the other end of the world they anyone will recognize this image as a happy face. This is also broken down to to basic shapes. Its entirety consists of three circles and two lines. Another indicator for this abstract image is that it conveys emotion. One of the main things that causes this is caused by the immensely saturated yellow.

By definition A symbol is a "picture, written word...that denotes something resemblance." This symbol,in particular, happens to be referring to a business. The tooth symbol is nearly broken down to its mot simplest form. It only consists of a pair of curved lines. The tooth shaped lines indicate dentist. 

Week 12 Visual Techniques

Week 12 Blog Exercise / Visual Techniques








Visual Techniques:
instability
asymmetrical
irregularity
spontaneity
distortion
repetition
activeness
complexity

















Visual Techniques:
Symmetry
consistently
repetition
complexity
balanced






























Here are works of art from my two favorite artists. The top work is done by Alex Pardee and the bottom work is created by Shepard Fairey. These works of art contrast each other in many ways. One way is that the work above is asymmetrical and uses instability to capture emotion. Where as the work done by Shepard Fairey below it has balanced and symmetrical characteristics. These town pieces, though seeming to be completely contrasting, have a few visual techniques in common. Both of these works focus heavily on detail and complexity. These two works also share the visual technique of repetition. Pardee displays this in his destructive worms, where as Fairey continually repeats his patterns and icons through his work

Week 10 implied Motion

Here is a picture illustrated by, the mathematical genius, M.C. Escher. He is using a technique of implied lines by having individuals actively walking through the triangular formed composition. The triangle signifies diagonal action lines through the heart of the illustration. If you take a closer look you might notice that the triangle is never ending. Escher draws our eye through a labyrinth style maze of never-ending loops.

Here is a design projects assigned to me at Fullerton Junior college. In hopes to convey continuity, my thumb print design displays implied motion. The consistent lines draw your eye smoothly through the illustration. Starting with the dark focal spot in the upper left my eye follows the large loop in the upper right corner and quickly down to the center of the page. My eye makes a couple of loops then navigates back to the top of the page.

Dimension/Depth/Space week 9

Here is an Art Deco style of graphic design that is exemplifies depth, scale and space. The first thing that I noticed was scale. If you take a look at the actual size of the characters they are different sizes. The one that is larger give the effect of being closer. The one that farther back appears to be further back in the page. There is also on that sits in between them. There are other elements that represent depth. Overlapping is being used in this design piece. It starts with the rays of light that appear to be in the back of this design. By placing buildings and people in front of these rays gives the feeling of depth. Another characteristic that shows this idea of depth/space is the hue and color. As the rays get closer to the building the hue begins to demising. Also if you loot at the first, and larger, character silhouette it is darker that the ones that are in smaller scale to the left of it. This design is also using one point linear perspective which is also creating dimension and depth.

Week 8 Tone and Color

TONE

     Tone in this design is just another Visual language element, like movement and texture. In this example it is using tone and color, which are considered to be relatively the same thing, to convey a message. The colors being used in this graphic are quite saturated. They are sending out this message of high energy and activity. His choice of color and tone are contrasting to the background color of black which is creating this push and pull relation between the figure in the foreground and the background. If you look at the black and white picture below the colored picture you will see how much the tone/color in the lines stick out from the background. Tone also deals with the content around the actual lines. The black background, if it were to be changed to grey would create a complete different feel. The tone of the background is also what makes this design so dramatic. It would not convey the same message if it were be a blue background or a green background. the contrast between the lines and the colored lines are also conveying this dramatic feeling. The colors being green and red are honing in on our medium and long cones. As a side note, these saturated colors of lines in the picture look much different when seen through the eyes of different animals. The designer of this chose to use analogous colors from the color wheel. 

Week 7 Design

In this picture the design is using the basic element of shape. The circles are performing a couple of jobs. One job that these circles are doing is they are creating unity. Since they are all the same size my mind is grouping them together, leaving me with a subconscious thought about how they are all related. This is an example of germany Gestalt theory of grouping. The culmination of all the little circles is mapping out the shape of a larger square when looked at as a whole. The circles are also creating balance. 

The basic element that is being used in this picture  is motion.  It is also using the basic elements of line and shape that help convey this sense of motion. The use of repetitive lines going over and through the black silhouettes  shapes perceive it as moving. 

The design element being used in this pictures is line.  This picture is showing nothing but line. The job of the line is to move your eye around the paper. There is no tone and or value in this picture leaving it flat and with a lack of depth. 

Week 6 Syntactical Guidelines

Here is an artist that I have been following for about 5-6 years. He goes by the name of Shepard Fairey, but his companies, and more widely known name, Obey. He uses some  Syntactical guidelines as he constructed this design. The first thing that I noticed was how balanced this design is. This design is quite structured and symmetrical. His design is leveled and gives an overall sense of calmness.  He uses an all black background creating this positive and negative space relationship. The black area being the negative space and the beige being the foreground. He also developed this pattern like quality by repetition. His patterns are forcing our eyes to group each "ring" as an individual piece.

Here is my example of poor design. The text reads "foundation", which is a slight contradiction to what the graphics are telling me in this design. First off, the definition of foundation is as follows: "the natural or prepared ground or base on which some structure rests." Besides being unsymetrical, this design is highly sharpened as the black tree, and the focal point of my eye, is weighted heavily in the lower right hand corner. None of these things make me feel like a foundation is being, or going to be, built. There is an active diagonal direction created by the black tree to the right. This is creating stress in the design. THe design is weighted heavy towards the bottom of the page creating this unbalance composition. Unfortunately, none of these things make me feel like a foundation is being, or going to be, achieved. 

Week 5 Syntax of VIsual Literacy

Download and post that photo on your blog and underneath post a the first paragraph of text as follows: Write a list of one-word or short-phrased responses you have to it in terms of its literal, representational content as well as its underlying compositional structure and include a list of any symbols (language or other symbols) that can be seen in the image. After this analysis, write a paragraph that completely reports (verbally) what the photograph reports (visually) and which could be used as a REPLACEMENT for it (as if you were describing it to someone who was visually impaired).

Sad, concerned, down, line, unemployed, heads down, frown, depressed, frustration, rain, umbrella, time, depth, long.

Some of the symbols that I notice are as follows:

1) Suit case- This was the first things I noticed in the picture. It represents moving. She is walking with her head slightly down,  almost depressed. Maybe she is walking to the end of the line to join the rest of this group.

2)Umbrellas- It is implying that it is a rainy day, at least a cold one at that. Just the fact that everyone is bundled in clothes and holding umbrellas implies that the weather is not ideal for standing around. Leaving me to believe that they HAVE to be there.

3) Left-over's- What looks to be left-overs that this man is holding, he stands with this deep and discouraged look on his face. His left-over food is representational of saving money or a lack there of.

Starting from the right, we are looking at around 40-50 standing in line, butting up against the backside of some large financial building in, what looks to be, a large city. There are very few facial expressions, but from what is visible, the overall mood is distraught. In the left third of the page, a Caucasian man looking at the ground with an obvious frown. Many of the individuals are wearing coats and holding umbrellas. The people in line are structurally forming an implied diagonal line that has them vanishing away in linear perspective with the rest of the towering financial building to the left and right ow them. To the right of the photograph, A lady, with one hand in her pocket, walks down the sidewalk with her head looking down towards the ground. As if she is joining the end of the line on this cold, windy Chicago style, day.

Week4 Images in Action

I found this exercise to be quite interesting. It was strange for me to reflect on how I think, such an unnatural act. There is what I came up with; my mind had the tendency to search for patterns. How I broke it down was at #1 I started off with the most vertical color. From there I searched for other umbrellas that also had a red top. Once I identified them, in a turned to #2. This is where I looked for the colors positioned vertically in the top left umbrella. I went and matched all, any others, with the same colors in the same place. If there was a match I went to #3. From here I looked for the colors facing horizontally, in the inner portion, of the umbrella. When reading about the "perceptual speed" I found that I took the long route to finding which were the same. I think my mind tended to do this also for the reason that the symmetrical shapes/patterns and it using multiple feature channels, made it difficult for my eye to recognize the common/like umbrellas.

Here is the one that I am going to try to attempt to describe and show what she was thinking. Let me say though, she did start off looking at it in the same manner that I was. It was not working for her and she changer up her strategy because it was taking her to long to identify the matching umbrella. Her whole strategy was based on stepping back and looking at pattern as a whole. in illustration #1 she was just looking at the inner umbrella design and matching up what the design did, for her eye, with all of the other inner umbrella areas. From there illustration #2 is showing that she stepped back even farther and looked at the whole umbrella, as opposed to the inner part. That did not work for her, so She stepped even farther back and looked at all of the designs from a further distance and attempted to locate the common umbrellas from there. She ended up finding the patterns before I did. She was looking for "desired patterns' in the umbrella and trying to match them with others.

Here is exercise #2. Well the way that my mind looked at this was I sectioned off this picture by color. I forgot about the fact that it was a cat and focused on only color. I started off with #1, mainly because it contained more surface area. From there I counted out how many different triangles were had that specific color. I quickly went to color #2 and repeated this momentary rule for myself.  My eyes were using a "color" feature channel to help organize, in my mind,   what I was looking, in order to efficiently count these triangles. I was also using shape, and size's feature channels to help identify how my triangles there were. I find it interesting that my mind is constantly classifying things/objects. 

Here is my attempt to visually show you how my friend approached this challenge. She explained it to me that she started from the top and started scanning downward and counting every triangle that intersects with her visual pathway downward. She started at #1 and made her eyes scan down to number 12. I had a hard time identifying what or how this related to the reading. She was using her visual memory as she scanned down the page vigorously.  It states in our reading that the more "accurately you perceive the design" the better off you will be with remembering it. I believe this helped her as she scanned through. As she finished we found that she was off by 1 triangle.  Due to my longer, more accurate approach, I finished right after her but got the right amount of triangles.  This got me thinking to the correlation between speed vs accuracy. There has to be a link.

Feature Channels

Well, it is quite obvious which feature hierarchy is being used here. One of the most "powerful, which is the use of color. I feel that this is a great example due to the fact that right as the picture appeared on the screen bottom up processing kicked in and had my mind subconsciously was thinking Red is to the right. This info, quickly, transmits to your primary visual cortex What is that. It was an instantaneous movement of my eye directly to discolored apple. I started thinking about how this would look like with different hierarchical feature channels would make this look. Maybe if they were all green, but one was squared off and unoriginal; or something that uses more than one feature channel at a time, For instance, the  combonation of color and shape. 

Week 2 Visual Queries

Zachary Welburn

Lets talk about short fixations. When my eye loos at this color wheel it is drawn all over the place. Many diagonal lines which sways my eye across the page. One thing that this picture might be lacking, that has a lot to do with Top-down visual processing and is quite an important attribute, is goal directed movments. There is no forseen goal in this pciture, therefore my eye is not looking ahead for maximum efficiency.  As my eye saccades throguht the page there are a couple fixation points in which my eyes pause to focus on. These points are where the miniature color wheels overlap with transparency through the larger color wheel. I find my eyes Hovering over areas of text creating scan paths. The last think that I would like to not about this illustration is constant relinking of colors that are complimentary of each other on the color wheel.