Today we learned about the concept of color. Dr.Julian mentioned color wheel and how different color schemes can be employed to make a design look good through the use of color wheel. Various color schemes were introduced, namely: complements, split-complements, triads and analogous. However, from the color wheel I find that apart from those introduced in lecture, there are more combinations of colors that make up some other color schemes, like tetrads and monochromatic.

Other topics mentioned include color contrast, color harmony and color psychology. It is interesting that certain meanings are attached to certain colors and different cultures have different views on colors, it therefore is essential that a designer consider these aspects when creating a work of art.

Assignment 5's requirement is to design a poster promoting Active Ageing. My target audience is the Senior Citizens of Singapore, mostly aged above 65.

My idea is to grab their attention with a striking graphic element, so I decided to go for a single big photograph of an old person's face. However, it has to have something to do with the concept of promoting active ageing, so I thought of incorporating the "active" elements into the face itself, and that is when the idea of creating a mosaic image came to my mind. The problem is "How to do this?" I then went online to search for mosaic image creating software, and luckily the software is an open source, so my problem was solved! Then I started to look for photographs that are relevant to "being active", "young", "playing sport", "happy", . . . and tons of others that invoke a positive attitude towards how to live life. I found around 1500 images of these kinds and it took me 3 days to do so. Then I created the old lady's face using these photos. Since the software matches the constituent images' color with the face's color, so it didn't use up 1500 photographs. Below is my first draft:

I chose brown and green as the 2 key colors for the design since brown represents old and green represent young & active, so both colors are relevant to the concept of living a young and active life. I left no space between every word for the title since the colors already did a good job of separating them, and I think there's no issue of readability here. The title I choose for the poster is make"Active"partofyou, the rationale for this choice is that "make it part of you" is the method I use for creating the face (make each photograph part of the face).

The poster must have a goal, so I choose Council for Third Age as the organizer of the event the poster introduces. I also included the supporters for the event such as IDA, POSB, etc. The goal of the poster is to attract the senior citizens to join Active Ageing Festival 2009.

As for the event timeline, I decided to arrange the dates and time just like the calendar look. I did some research on Active Ageing Festival and found out that the Festival does not take place in one day but rather throughout some months, so I decided to capture 4 weeks of the year (the last 2 weeks from October and the last 2 weeks from November), and time is indicated just below the date itself. I highlight the dates on which the event take place by increasing their size and keeping the opacity at 100% (whereas the others are in small size and much lower opacity).

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Feedback from tutor:

- Ms. Siti said that I have to use photographs that I took myself. (the lady's face is taken from the Internet)

- I can try to separate the dates, time, venue from the remaining elements by putting them into a box.

- I should lower the text and title further down because there is still too much white space in between

Below is my second draft:

I added the orange and green rainbow/ribbon to make the poster more colorful, and this time I changed to the face of an old man, who is my grandfather.

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Feedback from lecturer and tutor:

- Ms. Siti told me to improve that by replacing the stars with something more relevant to the poster concept, such as sportsman's stick figures and the like.

- Dr. Julian suggested me to increase the size of the face and remove the rainbow.

Taking all suggestions into consideration, this is my FINAL POSTER:

Today Dr.Julian talked about several principles of interaction, including topics of "unity and contrast, harmony, and control of attention". I would like to reflect my understanding of the lecture briefly below.

Unity is important in a design since it conveys the consistency of the design. Unity can be achieved through similarity in rhythm, shape, value, color, etc. A design that has a theme color is a better one than a colorful but unconnected piece.

Contrast is another aspect to consider in a design. Contrast can help draw audience's attention to a focal point in a design. Contrast can be in terms of composition, value, size, shape, etc. For instance, if a movie poster has a white background and an object in a contrasting color placed in that white background, that object will become a focal point of the poster, which likely to draw the viewer's first attention prior to seeing the text and other elements.

The next element is Harmony in design, the most noticeable component of which is visual balance, referring to the degree of equilibrium in a composition, determined by the arrangement of elements in relation to each other in the frame.

The last element is the control of attention, which refers to the arrangement of items in a frame to lead the eye through a certain sequence of viewing, and to keep audience's attention within the frame.

For assignment 3, U C What I C, I have to take photographs to tell a story visually. In order to a good work, another classmate must be able to retell the story without prior explanation from me. Below is my story board for the story (the text going with each frame is very neutral, just descriptive of the action itself, no further explanation included):

Below are the photographs I took for this assignment, no explanation will be given until you have finished looking through the photographs and interpreted the story yourself. Explanation will be available at the end of this post. The title I chose for this story is "Oh My God!":

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How is it going, are you able to tell my story? I put the stars above so that you won't look at my explanation when viewing the last photograph. Actually my story has a twist ending. If you were tricked by my story, you should have initially thought that the man was dating that lady since I purposefully shot them from such an angle that makes it look as if they are walking together hand in hand. Then you should have thought that the man was proposing to the lady as he knelt down . . . Surprise !!! He was kneeling down praying to God (Mother Mary), and the lady was surprised because she saw such beautiful roses (not because she was proposed by him). The last scene is the whole view of the scene, they actually didn't know each other and were doing their own things.

The reason I chose "Oh My God!" as the title is because it can apply to both scenarios (what the man and the lady were doing). OMG refers to the fact that he is praying to Mother Mary, and to the fact that the lady is very surprised to see such pretty flowers.

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Feedback from class:

- Jia Sheng wasn't able to tell the twist of the story and he told me that he didn't understand it.

- The rest of the class disagreed with Jia Sheng since they detected the twist and could therefore interpret the story the way I wanted it to.

Today's lecture covered such topics as Perception, Picture Frame, Rule of Thirds and Point of Focus. 

What I find most interesting is the Rule of Third used in Photography. Any frame of a photograph has 4 important points that if the object in focus is placed at one of the points, it will make a nice composition as compared to placing the object in the center of the frame. The below photograph was taken by me at the Swan Lake (Botanic Garden) using the Rule of Third.

After this lecture, I tried applying the Rule of Third into taking photos and find that the artistic effect was more accentuated. What I find interesting is that placing the object in such a position which is not proportionate can actually make the photograph look more artistic.

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.

This is my FINAL CHOSEN PICTOGRAM used for portfolio (abstraction 6):

. . . and it is to be used as a logo in ADM homepage:

This week's lecture covered a number of communication topics:

- 'Shannon-Weaver Communication Model' which places an emphasis on the 6 must-have elements of a communication process: source, encoder, message, channel, decoder and receiver.

- Semiotics: the signifier and the signified.

- Representation: iconic, indexical and symbolic signs.

There is an emphasis on the iconic and indexical types of representation. Students were also given an in-class assignment in which we had to create iconic and indexical signs of one object. The class was divided into groups of 2 students working on the same object. My friend and I chose 'BEAR' as our object.

- Iconic: the real bear is represented by the simplified bear outline; the bear outline is iconic since it resembles the bear's real shape.

- Indexical: the bear's footstep is representative of the bear; the footstep is indexical since it does not look like a bear but is indicative of a bear.

This is my final prototypes for the Christmas idea. As you can see, I added some more elements to make the shoe look a bit more colorful, and I have also made it more rounded to resemble a "d":

Failing to meet the goal of assignment 1, I have abandoned the Logos idea and come up with this new idea of ice-cream:

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Feedback from class:

- For the Christmas idea, I can put these elements in a setting/context so that it can look more realistic, such as hanging them on a Christmas tree.

- The 2 ice-cream on the left and right side don't seem to adhere to the law of gravity. ( :)) )

I think that this is a better idea than Logos idea but still considered rather visually weak, so ... I came up with another idea at the very last moment of the semester (week 13) :P

Instead of drawing, I decided to use Typography to form the birds' shape by putting together some alphabetical letters and stuff like "~!^<>*() . . ." Since I don't like birds, I intentionally put them on a very old and torn paper, and colors look dull too. Eventually I'm going for the Christmas and Birds ideas for my portfolio.

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Feedback from lecturer and tutor:

- This is a much better piece than the ice-cream in terms of communication and also visually strong, but Dr. Julian warned me not to ruin the piece by printing on a bad printer.

- This is a nice work but Ms. Siti advised me to go with the shadow version since my name is clearer (I showed her 2 versions, one with shadows for the birds and the other without).