*: Tutorial 3 - Assignment 2 - Pictogram (Places in Singapore)

For this assignment, it took me a while to do some research online for Singapore's places of interest. I ran into such iconic places as Henderson Bridge, The Fountain of Wealth (Suntec City), Vivo City, St. Andrew's Cathedral, etc. After

surfing the Internet and found several landmarks in Singapore, it struck me that the other classmates might have found these as well, thus making such places less original if many minds intersect at the same idea. I then went through a bunch of photos that I took in Singapore during the last one year...and here it is...the ADM building. I thought that not many of my peers would choose ADM and yup, I am right, I am the only person choosing it. Nobody had the same idea as mine even though I asked what their possible options were. :)

ADM stands for School of Art, Design & Media. Last semester I went to Nanyang Technological University to attend the Finale for Project V (a singin

g contest) organized by Vietnamese Students. ADM has always been referred to as having a strange and breathtaking architectural design, and I have had a chance to behold this

modern-style architecture with my own eyes, so I decided to take photos of it.

I started doing my work at 11pm and finished at 4.30am the day before the tutorial (risky!). Below are the abstract process from frame 1 to frame 6:

1. I began by live-traced the building (1) and (2) was what I got after erasing some undesired elements like the ground and some trees.

2. From (2) I simplified the building by using pen tools in Illustrator and hand-traced it into (3), which I kept the essential elements like the staircase, the glass and the grass on the slope. I thicken the outline strokes of ADM by changing the stroke thickness to 4. while keeping the thinner strokes at 0.25 thickness.

3. Then I further simplified (3) by taking out the grass and the staircase, but I kept the lines since they represent ADM's glass which enables (4) to still give a feeling of a building.

4. Frame (5) is more abstract and less noticeable as a building since there were comments saying that it resemble the slope at children playground.

5. Frame (6) is the most abstract since I converted the building's outlines into very simple curves that form a heart shape.

6. I chose the (4) as my pictogram. I also received positive comments about choosing (4) as the pictogram because my peers said that it was wise to choose (4) as (4) still resembles a building whereas (5) and (6) do not in terms of recognizability. Other than that, there was not much comment about my work. Below is my chosen pictogram:

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Feedback from class:

- Abstraction 3 looks nice, and abstraction 4 which I chose as my final pictogram is a good choice since it is not too simple that people cannot recognize it's a building, and not too complicated like abstraction 3.

- Abstraction 6 is much too simplified, so people cannot recognize it's ADM building, and it looks so similar to Wall Ice-cream Logo.

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Feedback from lecturer (Dr. Julian):

- In abstraction 4, the number of glass windows in the building can be cut off more, and I should add the staircase as well since people will find it easier to refer the pictogram to the real building.

- Abstraction 6 doesn't look like a building.

This is my final version of the abstraction process, I keep the staircase for every phase of abstraction.