Assignment 1 - Me,Myself and I

Assignment 1 - Me,Myself and I


Brief synopsis:


After selecting the 2 designs, we need to develop 2 variations of each selected concept (a total of 4 roughs). After which, prototypes of selected roughs have to be developed.

1st concept - Music
Two variations for my Music concept and the key difference between these two varitions were on the alphabet -s,-p and -i.



Feedback from my tutorial group:

• Alphabet -h should be given more emphasize by not colouring the notes. This will enable the linkage between the notes to be more obvious.
  
• Most of them prefer the 1st design.

2nd concept - Bubbles
Two variations for the bubbles by using different shades of colours. For the 1st design, i have chose a warm colour scheme as it portray my love towards them. As for the 2nd design, as bubbles tend to reflect rainbow like colours under the sun. Hence i came up with this colour scheme.

Feedback from my tutorial group:

• They prefer the 2nd design.

Developing Prototype

After getting the feedback from my tutorial group and peers, i started to work on my prototypes. The softwares that i used were Freehand and photoshop.

Difficulties faced while working on the concept, Music:

• Initially, i thought of scanning my roughs into my computer and trace the outline of the musical notes. The design looks fine on the sketch book but actually the sketches outline were rather inproportional. Especially for the cursive part, this makes the tracing of the design very tough. Therefore, i decided to drop the tracing outline idea and to do everything from scratch.


• By using Freehand pen tool, i worked on the musical notes and save them individually. This is to reduce the hassle for editing when i export over to photoshop. As i am not familiar with Freehand, therefore it took me quite some time to get the desire shapes i had in mind.

• In my sketch, there isnt any shadows, but i felt that it will be too plain. Hence it will be good to add in shadows to make it more 3D.

Difficulties faced while working on the concept, Bubbles:

• Even though, the colour setting, i had set as CMYK but the displayed colour was not of what i want as seen on the first picture.


• Since that was the case, i tried to explore on other feasible way with the current colour. Had added background and it seems more enhanced but I was still not satisfied with the colour combination.

• As the colour scheme does not portray the feel of liking towards bubbles so i thought of injecting more vibrant colours into the design. This leads to my final prototype (with the black background)

Feedback from my tutorial group:

• One of them stated that i have taken into account his suggestion which really enhance the musical note design.
  
• The bubble design is a little too abstract.

After some consideration on the feedback regarding on the bubble design, i decided to edit it.

This time round instead of using vibrant colour, i intend to use bubbles itself to do the work. Been searching online for bubbles tutorials and tried out different forms of bubbles. After a few try, this is the bubble that i have settled with. As i think bubbles portray an innocent feeling to me, so the best way is to make the design simple with a relax feel. My design focus is to convey the characteristics of bubbles which are light and gentle just like bubbles in the water. In addition, instead of using all white for my text, the word "love" is in red. This is to give the whole design a bit of warm as the dominating colour feel cold.


Do give me your comment on this revised version on the bubbles concept. Your comments are greatly appreciated :)

Classroom Activity for Assignment 1

Classroom Activity for Assignment 1: Me, Myself and I

Brief Synopsis on Assignment 1:

For this assignment, we need to convey what we love and/or hate through the design of our name itself.

• Select 2 words which best describes your character
• Plug them in following sentence…
  l(My name is name and I love word1) and/(or)
  l(My name is name and I hate word2

Classroom Activity:

We were asked to brainstorm for sketches on Assignment 1.

• Select two words:
• Concept development: Thumbnail sketches of your concepts (4 concepts for each sentence) in sketch book (8 sketches).
• Present concepts to your friends for discussion and pick 2 (one for each word ) for final development.

Before I start to develop my thumbnail sketches, I think it will be more appropriate to list down the things I like and what are the possible ways to illustrate it.

Above are the things i have listed out and i felt that certain things have more variety of ways to illustrate as compared to the rest. Through elimination, I have selected music and bubbles as the ideas which i will work on for my sketches.

Left hand side column:

This column is used for developing sketches on the idea, music.

1st row:
When i think of music, the first thing which comes onto my mind was musical notes. Hence i have used various notes being incoporated together.

2nd row:
Personally, i am a music lover so my mp3 player is always with me. Without earphone acting as a medium i will not be able to hear my favorite mp3. Moreover, earphone can be flexible and transformed into cursive shapes which suits my name alot.

3rd row:
As inspired by sony advertisement, people can listen to music at any places and situations. Hence i have explore on stick figures listening to mp3 player doing various activities.

4th row:
Of all the four sketches, this will be the least innovative design. This design is just mainly usage of the word "music" to make up my name.

Chosen design:
During the lecture, we were told that it is essential for novice designers to explore on various ideas before we settled on the final design and not to fall in love with early/first concept. However among the four designs, i felt that the first concept using musical notes was a nice idea. My name, Sophia, gives me a classy feeling and i think by using musical notes it will further enhance this classy feeling. In addition to that, using musical notes is a strong way to communicate with the rest of my liking towards music.

Reason for not choosing the rest of the designs:
In my opinion, the majority of people who chose to do music will incorporate earpiece into part of their design. Hence,i prefer to work on some alternatives which will not clash with them. For stick figures listening to music, since the idea i got it from sony advertisement perhaps it is not as innovative and new as compared to the first concept. As for the last sketch, as mentioned earlier on, it is not innovative at all.

Right hand side column:

This column is used to work on the sketches on bubbles.

1st row:
This design is supposed to be my name formed as bubbles in 3D view.

2nd row:
Small individuals bubbles forming up my name

3rd row:
Another form of individuals bubbles forming up my name

4th row:
with many bubbles at the background and hightlighted bubbles at the foreground to form my name.

Chosen design:
I love bubbles as i think it makes me feel relaxed and reminds me of the innocent childhood memories playing with the bubbles. Among the four designs, i felt that 3rd design portrays the most relaxed feeling hence i decided to work on it.

Reason for not choosing the rest of the designs:
For the first design perhaps is due to the harsh line being used, it seems to portray a cold and isolated feelings hence it was eliminated. For 2nd design, it does not portray the characteristic of the bubbles. The last design seems to be complicated for innocent feel.