Assignment 2: Making Images Talk

Exercise:

• Select an object or activity or location (telephone, running, bus stop, car, cooking etc). Try not to select an existing subject (eg. Toilet or well known sports symbols)
• Create a representative image of the object (you may choose either iconic or indexic representation)
• Distill the image through process of abstraction. (atleast 5 levels of abstraction from realistic to abstract) Indicate at what point in the abstraction process the object looses its specific identity and communicates generic meaning. Select that image and develop it into a symbol.
• Print level of abstraction on A3 size paper and final symbol on A4 paper
  

This assignment is a rather hard one for me, since almost every common thing that I can think of while brainstorming already has some kind of symbol existing... I even try to 'hunt' for any possible item during my journey home from school... Vehicles, cats, trees, lampposts, rubbish dump, bus-stop stand, fire extinguisher, shirt, the list goes forever...

In the end, I decided to just use my guitar at home, since that's something I like and the shape of the guitar should make it an easily-identified symbol...

So I took a photo of my guitar and import it to Freehand...

And after tracing the shape & every possible details of the guitar out, I started taking out parts of it to make it simpler, until it finally left with just the outline shape...

As a result, I picked the 2nd last design as the representation of my guitar since I felt that the last one already lost its specificity..

During my presentation during the tutorial, the comments were generally ok... I also realised that I can actually have one more last abstraction design by taking away the circle inside, that'll make it even more generic... I may edit my final image alittle based on the feedbacks I got in class...

But I have learnt something in the process of doing this assignment. (other than being more observant to my environment.. lol...) Indeed, the creation of a symbol is much easier & smoother if we start from an image, and systematically removing the details until it becomes too abstract... And it's interesting to see that a simple shape can actually represent many things, depending on the context where you are looking... And personally, I am quite amazed that I can actually draw such a proper-looking guitar myself... =p