Assignment 1: The Beginning

Alritey! Here is the first assignment for this module.

- Select 2 words which best describes your character

- Come up with 8 design concepts based on this example

- Select 2 concepts which you like most

- Produce and present your selected designs on A5 size papers

Pretty interesting I must say. Though it took quite a while to brainstorm some good ideas. I guess it is easier to blog about my whole design process as I am going through it at present time. Though it will be more time-consuming, I reckon it will be a more accurate documentation of my work throughout the module plus I do not have to feverishly recount every detail of what I did at a later time, when I choose to blog.

So, without further adieu, I’ll begin my design process then. :)

I will try my best to follow the Design Process taught in class while creating my designs.

Research: Define and Analyse

Conceptualisation: Ideate and Select

Prototype: Implement and Evaluate

Here is just a quick recount of my first brainstorming session. During the lecture, I thought of a few questions that could help me assess if a word is suitable for designing my name. I thought it was quite important as while doodling my name in various themes and ideas randomly based on things related to me, some tend to look rather odd or cheesy, and others too complex to be understood (or at least by friends nearby).

The questions I posed to myself were more along the lines of:

Do the designs produced from the words match the shape of my name?

Can my designs be feasible enough to be done on Photoshop/Illustrator?

Do my designs send a clear message to viewers?

So the first thing I did was to list down words that describe myself. That did not take long, but what did take a while to do was the research I did on the various words and their general ‘definitions’ or representations. So I started to doodle randomly and simply just trying to produce that spark of creativity.

Then, I came across a tiny problem. Since my name is Siti, I have the ‘luxury’ of two ‘i’s. This can be a problem if I were to manipulate my letters into representions of individual objects, rather than have the letters manipulate themselves into the environment or the ‘overall picture’. It would be awfully boring if I had to use two of the same objects to represent the ‘i’ (you can see this in the cookie example, french one, and star trek). I did intend to put together different objects of the same theme to create my name, but so far it looked messy and clashed badly with the others overall (like the astronomy one). So I decided to stick to theme-like designs.

However, in our first tutorial Dr. Julian explained how certain designs are too malleable, a.k.a the ‘smokey’ effect, where you can craft anyone’s name out of smoke, water, air, stars, etc. So certains themes like running, mazes, (and much later on, the ‘hair’ design), are no longer considered for my final designs.

From then onwards, I changed my perpective on the idea of manipulation and went for the more… ‘overall picture’ look. I decided on the finalists soon enough, and had 4 words to choose from. All 4 of them produce clear messages of what it is I like/dislike/etc. But now I need to know which are feasible and simple enough to be designed the ‘photoshop’ way, and after careful inspection, I decided upon:

My name is Siti, and I care about others.

My name is Siti, and I hate my curly hair.

Allow me to explain my reasons for picking these two sentences. For one, they do represent me. But they also portray something about me that’s different from others and is unique at the same time. Most of my tutorial mates display designs based on what they like or hate and so on. I just thought that displaying a bit about my character could be something refreshing and new. And yes, I really do dislike my curly bangs, although you might often see me twirl my hair in class (mind you, that is to keep them as neat and anti-frizzy as possible).

It wasn’t so easy at first, as I was pretty set on making designs which represent a picture that depicts natural objects in their natural settings.

So I ended up with a picture of 3 people (stick-figures) under an umbrella, and a picture of curly hair being cut. As you can probably guess by now, both the designs are scenario-based and not a mix-and-match of different objects under one theme, like what most of my other classmates did.

For the first concept, I considered using the umbrella to signify the ‘T’ in Siti. Then I created stick-figures to simply represent the ‘S’ and the 2 ‘i’s. Then, I realised (after adding hands to the figures) that I could make the middle stick-figure’s hands stretch out to look like a ‘T’ (or i tried, at least), and wrap them around the other figures to depict the caring-ness, which is what the concept is supposed to be.

As for the second concept, I tried my best to bend and twanggggg the hair to look like my name, but it did not turn out the way I envisioned it. Furthermore, after the tutorial, I had to scrap this idea as moulding the hair is too malleable a design and therefore not recommended by Dr. Julian and Mr. Alfred.

Pretty simple designs, I must admit. I didn’t want to confuse viewers even further with more detail into the design, so I stuck to a B/W simple overall design at the end for presentation during tutorial.

After going through the first tutorial of the semester, the feedback I received from my peers in the class was very useful and I must admit, it sparked new ideas and images in my mind, plus improved on previous ideas as well. As there is still time to change my designs and such, I will not waste anymore time and will improve on my work.