Puchi

    Time goes so fast, semester one is about to finish. This semester has experienced many challenges. The biggest challenge is shifting from classroom to online. It’s a new way of learning, we didn’t adapt it well at first. The internet will be broken sometimes and students always have technical issues. We wasted some time on the connection. The quality of teaching is definitely not as good as the classroom. I was impressed by an idea from Andy. He said one of the most important functions in university is communication. But now students are lack of communication with other students and teachers. So I think I’ve been through a quite strange semester. However, everything has two sides. We saved a lot of time on the way to school or go home. We can just open the computer and attend the class. And I think this teaching model is suitable for international students like me. They might feel uncomfortable speaking in front of a lot of people. Then online learning is benefits to us. We can send the message to the chatbox.

    Besides, online lecture is also good for us. We can watch many times if we didn’t understand the meaning. We got more time to understand. Speak of lecture, Andy talked about some significant design history which is worthy to mention. I may only understand a little bit, but this general introduction gives me a concept. I can research more based on my interests. 

    As for two projects, we explore materials and media. Have experiences about how to develop a project. How to communicate your ideas.

What’s next for design?

In week11’s lecture, tutor discuss about the possibility of design for now and future. I was impressed by the video Andy showing us in the beginning of the lecture—The EyeWriter. It is a low-cost eyetracking systemIt’s. The EyeWriter system uses inexpensive cameras and open-source computer vision software to track the wearer's eye movements. So people can use their eyes to draw and write. 

This leads me to think what design is becoming and will be in the future. Designers have more medias to communicate, not only touching pad, keyboard, or mouse. The development of technology booms the possibility and ability. We do have more and more designs are based on artificial intelligence technology.

Collage exercise 

In week7′s lecture. Andy introduced a design school Bauhaus which is a highly influential school of design founded in Germany. The Bauhaus style later became one of the most influential currents in modern design, Modernist architecture and art, design, and architectural education.

We mentioned some noteworthy designers and designs.

Andy illustrated a chess set packaging design by Joost Schmidt. The Chess set are highly abstracted. There are no traditional shapes of the horse’s head or a castle. They’re cubes and platonic shapes. The pieces can completely fit into the small box. Nothing is wasted here. And the minimalism highly influenced the modern furniture. In modern furniture design,  they try to save space and reducing to essential.

Then we talked about an interesting chair design which collected in Vitra design museum. The chair presents a few simple lines visually. Marcel didn’t just design the chair but also design the negative space. The empty space around it. 

I did some research about the Vitra design museum. The appearance of the museum is a minimalism and simplicity style. It’s obviously a 3 dimensional architecture but also can illustrate by lines and shapes simply.

I went to the webside of the museum and I found an interesting exhibition which called “Chair Times”. It’s a collection of chairs from 1800 to today. I saw a zig zag chair which is very impresive. The chair designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1934. It is a minimalistic design without legs, made by 4 flat wooden tiles that are merged in a Z-shape. I was amazed by how designer cutting down the space, simplify the structure of the chair. 

As for the assessment3, I’m going to interview emoji. And I want to imitate a chat room with emoji. Like me and emoji chatting online. I made some dialog boxes to ask questions and answering it. How I present it is crucial. The color and letter-form will represent the character’s personality. 

I just use a normal letter-form to represent me. And use white background and black letters. As long as it’s easy to read. Like I'm just a member of the public. Don’t need to have a lot of personality. 

As for emojis. I chose a more vivid and lively font. Not too disciplined, but also not difficult to read. I think If emojis have a voice, it must be cute and lively because emojis have so many different expressions and images. In addition, I created a gradient background. I was inspired by instagram’s chatting interfere. The color of the dialog box will change as the box rises. I think that interface design was so cool and also matches my theme. But due to technical issues, I don’t know how to make it. So I just designed a gradient color as background.

Besides when emoji is talking, it will use some emojis to represent some of the words because it’s the way how emojis communicate to us. 

I also found some chatting sound effect to make the animation vividly.

I send one part of my animation to my tutor as for feedback. He said the speed is a little fast for some of the texts,like there isn’t time to read before it moves to the next frame. And he also suggests me using a vertical format instead of horizontal that will embrace the chat vibe. The feedback was very helpful. Sometimes we can’t tell what can be improve because we stare at the same thing too long. And I’m familar with the text so I think it’s the reason I made the speed too fast. Asking another people’s opinion is important because others can think of something you may not realise. So I improve and refine my project.

As for the interview project, I decided to interview emoji. I did some research of it. I never thought about where does emoji come from since I search the history of it. 

It all started with emoticons — facial expressions made out of punctuation — which made their first appearance in an issue of an 1881 magazine.

The first emoji were created in 1999 by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita. Kurita worked on the development team for “i-mode,” an early mobile internet platform from Japan’s main mobile carrier, DOCOMO. Kurita wanted to design an attractive interface to convey information in a simple, succinct way: for example, an icon to show the weather forecast rather than spelling out “cloudy.” So Kurita sketched a set of 12- by 12-pixel images that could be selected from a keyboard-like grid within the i-mode interface, then sent on mobiles and pages as their own individual characters. Kurita’s original 176 emoji—now part of the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—privileged symbols over faces, because DOCOMO’s goal was to find new ways to express information. There were characters to show the weather (sun, clouds, umbrella, snowman), traffic (car, tram, airplane, ship), technology (landline, cell phone, TV, GameBoy), and all the phases of the moon. But those characters weren’t purely informational: For the first time, emoji offered a way to add emotional subtext to a message. “I understand” might sound cold or passive on its own, but add ❤️ and the message offered a sense of warmth and sympathy. It was the beginning of a new visual language.

(C) NTT DOCOMO, INC.

 In 2009, a pair of Apple engineers, Yasuo Kida and Peter Edberg, joined in and submitted an official proposal to adopt 625 new emoji characters into the Unicode Standard. Unicode accepted that proposal in 2010, in a move that would soon make emoji accessible everywhere. 

Emoji have been available outside of Japan since the mid-2000s through separate apps, which let users copy and paste the icons into text messages and emails. In 2011, Apple added an official emoji keyboard to iOS; Android followed suit two years later. This allowed people to access emoji directly from a keyboard on their phones—the same way you’d switch to a Korean or Japanese keyboard to access those language-specific characters—and popularized emoji with an entirely new audience. 

Practice for interview project

I would like to make a chat room with my subject and I would like to make a vivid animation. However I had no experience with any animation making. Firstly I think After Effects can make this effect. But I never use this softwarr before, I think it’s better to operate on a familiar sotfwarr. I used to use Premiere to make vlog. Although I just had a little experience with this software but it’s better than zero. So I watched a lot of teaching videos (I’m so glad born in this era of information explosion at this stage) and practise with this effect in Premiere. 

Inspiration

 In this workshop, Andy mentioned some designers and topics which let me get the interest to do more research.

We talked about “Appropriation” which means using things that exist. Let me think about can designers using things created by others? For me, I always looking for others designs for inspiration. Sometimes I imitate others style. Sometimes I use pics online to make collage. Is this also Appropriation?

We mentioned Shepard Fairey’s poster design “Hope”.

He was sentenced to two years probation and a $25,000 fine for tampering with evidence in his copyright battle with the Associated Press. Was Shepard Fairey’s use fair? What is the lines between copyright and fair use? Considering that all art/design is somehow derivative do I need to call my lawyer every time I open up Photoshop? The laws are still ambiguous at best.

And we also mentioned Richard Prince who has turned borrowing online images into high art – and hard cash. He did an exhibition consisted of a series of works that Prince made that are screenshots of random instagram users. Changing the comments a little bit and print it fairly large then sell them in high price.

And I searched more about a small art movement in New York (1970) known as appropriation art. It deals with the concept of taking an image or an object with little alternation to the image or object and simply changing the context and that change of context is the artwork. It challenges how we are used to seeing something in a new context and has been done for a long time. One of the most controversial was Marcel Duchamp. He went to a hardware store and was doing a series of what he called ready-mades.

This is what typically referred to appropriation art.

I can’t helping thinking that are these still art? Are these designs valuable? Is that mean if I give it a new meaning or defination that can become mine design?

In the week 10′s workshop, we did a collage practice. We used magazines, newspapers or any printed products to make a positive words or phrase in a group. We decided to make the word “Howdy!”. I’m gonna make the first two letters “H” and “O”.

Here is our group’s work.

And I also play around with paper to make these two letters which are “D” and “E”.

Week 7 Workshop Activity1

In this workshop activity we use squares and triangles to make letter-forms.

In this activity we are looking for letter-forms in the build environment.

Here are what I found.

A ‘D’

A ‘L’

A ‘U’

A ‘O’

The triangle and the tennis courts combine an ‘A’.

A ‘d’

A ‘V’

I think it’s an interesting activity. I never thought there’re so many letter-forms in the built environment and around me.  And I rotated pics to get more letters.

In week 4′s lecture, Andy talk about letter. And the blackletter’s history was interested to me. I learnt that in 14th, this letterform was used in all the books. And it was used in a lot of brands’s logo. Moreover, Disney use blackletter as the logo. 

I did some research which says this style of typeface is recognizable by its dramatic  thin and thick strokes, and in some fonts, the elaborate swirls on the serifs. Blackletters are difficult to read as body text and Roman and Italic faces were easier to print with movable type. For these reasons, in the 1500’s, blackletter became less popular for printing in many countries except Germany and the German speaking countries.

‘I’m not a designer, I’m a...’

“Hello, my question is...”

Here are three works I did for assessment 1. I was thinking if design is the thing what human really need. Such as the situation right now --- coronavirus. Seems as science and medicine is more useful. However design may not help the situation. So I come up with the question ‘Is design needed’. I use food to represent letters because that’s what human can’t live without with. For the pic1#, I found almost everything in my home and discover what letter can they be. As for pic2#, I use black rice and white rice. I use black rice as background and use white rice to make the shape of letters.

Assessment 1 in progress

Week3 Workshop

On week3′s class we play with mud to write a from of to draw something. We write our name three times in different limit time. First time we have enough time so I can make sure lines are straight and most of the things are perfect. For the second and third time we can’t make it perfectly because we did it in rush. The edges became rough.