Experiment 1: GESTALT
We were given the assignment to use black squares to illustrate the following words: order, tension, congestion, playfulness, and comfort. Seemed a little bizarre and simple at first but it slapped me in face real quick! Through this project, we learned how even the smallest thing like a small black square can convey so much information and feeling. Definitely a challenging yet insightful experience:)
Our first steps in executing this project was:
- Sketch 5 thumbnails per word playing around mainly with scale, composition, and angles.
When I thought of the word order, my instinct thought lead me to organized and simple visuals. My abstract side wanted to be creative and bold so I sketched some more out of ordinary but I realized that my main objective it to illustrate the words with minimal visuals. I was mostly attracted to the furthest left bottom one.
I had the most challenging time with this one because it felt like it had similar feeling to the order one: simple and organized. If you look at my final iteration, you’ll be able to see that it is completely different to my initial sketches. I focused on trying to create designs that felt grounded and conveyed a sense of safety and security.
I took playfulness quite literally and created scenes and images with different scales of black squares. It was fun creating these images but weren’t really attracted to them because they weren’t challenging and didn’t really contain any evoking thoughts. This one also, the final iterations very different from my initial sketches
For congestion, I played around with lots of repetition and smaller scales of black squares. As you can see, for some of the sketches I used a lot of the small black squares and tried to “blur” out the audience’s view. But the one that I was more drawn to was the right top one, I expressed traffic congestion with that one.
This was my personal favorite because i felt that I knew what I wanted to express so I was able to create many variations of it. My main motive for this word was to deliver a sense of frustration. So I played around with composition and spacing with this one.
2. After creating these thumbnails, we transferred our works onto illustrator and worked on creating digital iterations of our quick sketches. We identified our strongest ideas and kept building our iterations to come up with our most successful ones.
Here are my final iterations:
Order: For my final version, I stuck with my idea of wanting portray an olympic pedestal. I regret including the smaller square because my initial idea was to represent a person standing on the 1st place space but I think it might have confused the audience a little bit and it might have been easier to read this as an olympic pedestal and order without it.
Tension: This is my favorite one of my series because it’s very simple yet convincing. I think this was relates to the main takeaway for this project of how you can convey so much information and feeling with the smallest amount of visuals. I love that this one frustrates as me and that is what I wanted to deliver with the word tension.
Congestion: I think this was one of the more successful ones too, I like this after my tension piece next. In terms of creating this iteration, I found an image of a traffic congestion and recreated the picture with these black squares. I like that I was able to play around with scale and that it actually depicts an image of a traffic congestion.
Playfulness: For this one, I focused on the process of making this one. In my practice, I’ve been learning a lot about the process of design and art so I wanted to apply that here as well. I didn’t give myself any restriction on creating this and allowed myself to play around scale, angle, and composition in whatever way and that resulted in this.
Comfort: I do have to say that this is my least favorite one…Only because I was quite too literal with it. It’s obvious that I wanted to portray a sense of snowing and it piling it up but I’m just regretting a little bit that I didn’t abstract this enough!
Overall, this project was very eye opening and taught me a lot about attention to detail and the importance of how objects in space can convey much meaning through their placements and its relation to other objects in the space. Through many trials and errors, I came up with these 5 final iterations and although I may not be a fond of some of them, I hope you enjoy them!
