Assignment 2: Abstraction

The Abstraction assignment was about creating a pictogram/sign which can be placed around NUS. When this assignment was flashed during the lecture, many random events flashed through my head, like creating signs during Arts Orientation Camp telling Engin seniors not to crash the camp, a sign for Rag & Flag featuring the respective schools "stabbing" each other but I finally settled on a more practical one.

In the Arts society rooms, I noticed that some students like to place 6 chairs together to form a bed to sleep on, which was rather irritating since you only need 3 to sleep comfortably. This resulted a lack of chairs for people like me to sit/sleep on. Therefore, I got one of my friend who always uses 6 chairs to pose for me for a photo as shown below. And hence, the abstraction process.

From the abstraction process, I picked the 3rd abstraction to develop into a prototype.

The universal sign of the red circle with the slash was used to show that sleeping on 6 chairs is not allowed. To further emphasize that the 6 chairs were redundant, I shrank the stickman to and allowed some parts of the chair to extend out of the red circle.

This assignment taught me the importance of graphic representation, as different people might interpret the same graphic differently, especially since words cannot be used in this assignment. The abstraction process allowed me to better identify what is really crucial in an item, which distinguishes it from other items. An example would be a human, where the facial parts are not needed to be there for the audience to know that they are looking at an illustration of a person. Even though the illustration has to be highly simplified, its distinct feature must still be present for people to know what is being represented. Chairs without legs would not look like chairs at all and may be mistaken to be just a plank or floor especially since my illustration involves a person lying down. However, in the event where the person is to be in a sitting position with just a rectangular plank placed on the bottom, it may still look like a chair. Hence, context is also crucial when identifying distinct features of an item.

Assignment #1 : Me, Myself and I

For the first assignment, I was asked to design our name such that it fits me. It seems rather easy at first but when I actually sat down to think about it, I realised how difficult it is to describe myself through the manipulation of the letters in my name. I decided to jot down some words and things which best describe me in terms of my character and likings. Out of that looonng list, I picked 4 of these things to do thumbnails on which are feather, water (alcohol), camera and butterfly as shown below:

Thumbnails

I thought that feathers were able to depict the soft-hearted, indecisive and flexible side of me as feathers are easily "swayed" by the wind.

Being very easy-going and random, I thought that water, or alcohol in this case, would be able to describe me. Why alcohol? Because recently I fell in love with Vodka and Bols.

And of course my favourite camera, my beloved Canon 450D to be exact. Not only is photography something which I really like but it also helps to being out certain characteristics of me in terms of me being someone who is very sentimental and at times highly nostalgic.

Lastly, the butterfly. As I am someone who cannot stand monotony in life and always in need of freedom, I thought that the butterfly would be able to represent me. Butterfly also represents transformation which I think I have experienced in many points in my life in terms of my character, where I have become a better person.

From the 4 sets of thumbnails, I developed 4 sketches. I decided to use my online alias "Cel" to introduce myself firstly because its one of my better known alias and also my favourite.

#1 feathers

For the feather sketch, as feathers are very flexible, I was able to tilt and bend them to form the letters of "CEL" respectively.

#2 alcohol

As liquid can flow easily, I thought that it would be good to allow the alcohol to flow out from the glass to form my name. This is due to my clumsy nature which I illustrated with the toppled over glass.

#3 camera

Initially, I wanted to use cameras to form all three letters of my name but then I thought, why restrict myself to just the camera alone? Camera accessories like the strap and tripod can be used as well.

#4 butterfly

Designs on the butterfly wing was used to incorporate my name in it. However, the effect did not seem as nice as I hoped that it would be.

From the 4 skectches, I had to choose one of it to developed into 2 roughs. I ended up picking the butterfly sketch partly because I thought that it best describe me. Another reason why I chose it was because me being really anal retentive (O.o), wanted to see how I can further improve on that design which I felt was missing something.

#1

The first rough adopted the original idea of incorporating my name into the design on the butterfly's wing but I designed the shape of the wing to better fit the letters. I also added the trail of sparkles and lights to show "flight" to elaborate on freedom.

#2

For the second rough, I took on a different approach by using butterflies to spell out the letters of my name. This was done by adding plants, like vines and flowers, and altering the shape of butterflies slightly. I quite like the effect as the butterflies remained recognisable and at the same time was able to contort into the letters C-E-L.

Final?

So.. during the C&C session in tutorial, the class gave me more ideas to play around with. They mentioned that butterflies alone do not represent transformation as well as caterpillar, cocoon and butterfly together would. In addition, by placing the letters diagonally, it can signify transformation more effectively.
During the second session of C&C, I realised that my design could not be read easily. Hence, I had to curve the "C" more and alter some of the vines on the "e" to make them more readable.

Through this assignment, as I had to sit down and really think about how to express myself in a visual form, I found out more about myself. In addition, as this is the first time I am working with Illustrator, I got to get more used to some of the functions especially the brush tool. In the beginning, I couldn't get used to the "auto-format" feature of the brush tool where it would automatically change the points of the line drawn so as to make it smoother. However, after much practice, it actually became very useful. In addition, through the design process, I found out that brainstorming through words and then developing them into thumbnails works better for me. Therefore, I would adopt these development process in my future works.