Assignment 5: My notion of Colourful Asia
Thursday, March 19, 2009
9:07 PM
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Final-est
My notion of colourful Asia! :) Language = a dominant feature of culture.
language in asia is indeed colourful as there are just soooooooo many different types. i'm Asian, yet i only understand the english and chinese version of the word. haha. so here's my postcard. loads of stuff going on under the huge 'ASIA', just like how it actually is in the continent. we are way too diverse to be classified and recognized as 1.
Back of the postcard
Initially wanted to play around with the placing of the stamp but I remember that my little job at Singpost made me realise that it's important to stick to the convention of stamp at top right side cuz that's how the machines 'scan' and 'chop' it. anything that isn't like that gets hand-chopped, which is a tedious process! so yeah. enough rambling on that. i decided to maximise the space on the card by having the address lines vertical - reason being, since it's gonna be always manually read, it's easy for postmen/women to just flip it around! so yeah. with that, there'll be more space to write loads and loads about ASIA! 47 countries leh.
Final Prototype - or so i thought
Thumbnails!
Comment 1: can consider pink as final
ME: Though a lot of people have said that the pink one looks good, i've decided to stick to the red one. Didn't wanna let appeal undermine meaning. And also give the wrong impression that Asia = feminine. Also, RED was chosen to symbolise ORIENTAL because I did a bit of research and found that RED was a very very common colour in flags of Asian countries.
Comment 2: determine focus of ASIA or the little words inside. cuz if focus is on ASIA, can change the words inside to red
ME: I took this into consideration and decided that the words INSIDE the big ASIA should be the focus instead, hence, my final-est of this assignment has the red words instead of the intial black ones. What's more important to me is for each country to be recognize for it's unique flavour. Not to be vaguely grouped together as 1 Asia.
Comment 3: COLOURFUL not really colourful. can consider changing the fonts / colours, or the word as a whole.
ME: I decided to retain the word colourful as it is not meant to be LITERAL. I thought of replacing it was the word 'diverse' but it just didn't click. maybe it's cuz the assignment states 'your notion of colourful asia' haha.
p.s. I TOTALLY ENJOYED THIS ASSIGNMENT! cracked my brains over what to do, but once i did it, it went so smoothly! and i love love love colour charts. i get an unexplainable high looking at blocks of colours placed side by side. haha.
my design is pretty simple - made up of words and shapes. so didn't take that much time to do it up. BUTTTT the conceptualizing stage was sooooooooooo tough lah! i thought of using food, people, flags and all that. but i couldn't see myself using those stuff to represent Asia. it seemed either too tough or too wrong. like it wasn't representative nor interesting enough. i'm glad i finally thought it using language. and that my computer supported most of the fonts haha. i totally made use of google translate for this assignment. thank God for all those man!
Assignment 4: Save, prevent, kill
Thursday, March 12, 2009
6:49 PM
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Final Poster
I realised that having the words 'mirror' (almost) the words at the bottom helped this poster achieve an equilibrum through symmetry. I didn't notice initially that my poster felt very top heavy. Now it seems much more.. balanced. Haha. I liked the condoms a lot. Coloured them pink and burned the sides a little to give it more depth. and the stickmen really look like they're inside! oh oh and i love my tag lines too. attention grabbing, big and bold - and they have a catchy ring to it as well. if put at orchard underpass escalators, very hard to miss. hahah. people might not have time to read the copy, but at least they get to read the 'save yourself, not on condoms' part!
Old prototype. :)
Got some problem tracing the sketch.. looks so deformed. :(
COMMENTS FROM CLASS:
-move 'save yourself' down to balance out the top and bottom
-make the condoms translucent, ie. blur the people inside
-maybe bg can be pink as well
-can remove the spots and move main pic to the right so that there's space for a proper caption
ME: took all of the above into consideration and came up with a second one above!
Brainstorming Process: I thought I was totally dry on ideas. I was, just that I just had a sudden burst of inspiration.
Was trying to think of ideas that were uncommon, but that wasn't a good idea because I'm not that creative.
Prevention of STD transmission is a commonly used topic. I saw that quite a lot of people have done that. Topics that initially came to my mind were 'save the trees' which is the ultimate lah. Not confident that i could do it in a brilliantly creative way so I tried thinking of other ideas. Another major one that came to my mind was "Stop hair abuse" - quite a unique topic but damn difficult to portray. I thought of all the captions, slogans, and words already. But couldn't decide on the images or cartoons or photographs. So, i decided to just stick to STD prevention. Namely, condom use.
Tried to give it a 'love' feeling. Hate those explicit ads that use fear tactics to make people use condoms. Decided that love is a beautiful thing. Sex is actually something beautiful. But as with love, it is unpredictable. Especially if someone has multiple partners. So that being the basis of my poster, I decided to portray a light-hearted mood, but with a slight precautionary feeling to it.
Class Exercise 2
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
12:34 AM
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Cluttered & Lively.
Cluttered - a messy network of circles squeezed within a small radius causing some to pop out.
Lively - a free, fly away-able kind of landscape.
Assignment 3: U C What I C
Thursday, March 5, 2009
8:00 AM
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my story - image heavy!
SPOILER ALERT!!!!
Girl A and her boyfriend spend time together in the afternoon. Boyfriend is seen in the next photo with another girl in the evening. Then Girl A appears and the couple is caught in the act. Girl A slaps
boyfriend and the last scene ends with 2 boyfriends in the photo. The boyfriends are in fact a pair of twins and she has mistakenly accused him of having an affair.
***
CONCEPTUALIZING
was told that having a story with a twist was much easier because a story without one would seem very flat. and nobody goes 'oh...' at the end.
another tough assignment cuz i couldn't think of a proper storyline. till i was lying in bed one day and i saw my sesame street toys hanging on the wall. i always found it weird that i had 2 Ernies. haha. so there! that's when i thought of it. to have the Ernies as a pair of twins and have some misunderstanding happen!
Process
since i was using these, i had the advantage of arranging everything - the setting (house), furniture, where they stood etc.
but i didn't have the benefit of having EXPRESSIONS - which constituted a big part of photographs - especially photographs that told a story.
to overcome that, i made use of the angle perspectives: high camera and low camera angles to create vulnerable and threatening effects respectively. i made use of colour also to make the feelings more conspicuous. hope that worked out right!
