Assignment 6: Gestalt Principles - Design Analysis

Exercise:

• group project (group of 2)
• select one good and one bad (in your opinion) design (e.g. poster, magazine advertisement or information brochure)
• analyse both designs and build a case to support your opinion.
• analysis should be based on visual principles (visual forms, visual harmony, colour and gestalt principles)
• Submission: 6 minutes presentation in class

This assignment should be considered the easiest among all our assignments for this module, as we do not need to come out with any new designs but just to find existing designs and comment about it based on the visual principles that we learnt. Perhaps the only challengin part is finding the bad design, since if the design is really bad in the 1st place, it shouldn't be published at all! Lol...

So, I teamed up with my partner Natasha for this assignment. I volunteered to look for the good design while she handled the bad one. We agreed to look for movie posters for both so that it's easier to compare the difference.

It wasn't long when I decided to use one of the movie posters of my all-time favourite movie - Lord of the Rings! It's the poster for the 2nd part of the trilogy: The Two Tower.

http://www.impawards.com/2002/lord_of_the_rings_the_two_towers_ver5.html

Basically, there are 3 main principles that the poster used in the design.

Figure & Ground

• There is a clear contrast between the foreground image and background image. (The man in the most front layer, the 2 ladies behind him, and the background image at the furthest.)

Similar Colour Scheme

• The whole poster used the greyish blue as the main color scheme, hence every element on the poster seems to be part of it, and not seperate items placed together.
• The bright golden yellow color used for the movie title appeared very outstanding as a result of such clear contrast compared with the whole poster.

Symmetry

• Personally, I feel that the main reason why I like this poster and find it good is its usage of symmetry.
• Clearly, we can see 3 layers of symmetry in the poster.
• Firstly, is the man at the centre holding the sword, dividing himself to 2 equal parts which form the symmetry.
• Secondly, is the 2 other ladies which are placed at the same height and depth on both the left & right of the man.
• Lastly, is the background structure of the pillar design, which is symmetrical.
• It's also interesting that the 3 characters in the poster actually tells the viewer a rough story of them, i.e. a typical love triangle between a man and two women.

As for the bad design, we chose the below one. (I should not comment much on it)

http://www.impawards.com/1998/night_at_the_roxbury.html

Can you identify what's bad in this poster? =p

One thing I learnt from this exercise and the visual principles is that it's important to understand that each of the principles are not mutually exclusive, meaning they are all inter-related. One cannot just simply focus his design on one principle without considering the other. And something about movie poster in particular, the design must enable the view to have a rough feel of what the movie is about.

Assignment 5: Love - Inspirational Poster

Exercise:

1. Pick your favorite quote related to the theme (love, romance, tenderness, etc)
2. Design a inspirational poster (sponsored by cupid greeting card Pte ltd)
3. Poster should convey the theme primarily through colours with minimal use of photographs and other visual elements.
4. Take Colour print out. Size of Artwork: A4 or smaller.

This assignment is quite easy to think in terms of ideas to represent love. And it just took me a few seconds to decide to use God's love for all men through His son Jesus, since that's the greatest love anyone can ever receive. I guess the challenging part is finding the correct colours and design to represent this theme of love.

As usual, I wanted my design to be always clean & simple. So I tried using simple shapes and colors to symbolise the theme. Two main shapes need to be present are a cross and a heart.


So below is the one I came out with:

(Front Cover)

(Inside)

I chose the color sky blue as the background color for the cover because it represents heaven & divinity, which give people a peaceful feel to the card. And for the heart, needless to say, the color pink is used, since it's the universal representation of love. Lastly, the white cross symbolise purity and truth, and the Christianity belief of Jesus crucifixion on the cross.

The feedback I got during the tutorial is that the position of the cross makes the whole design unbalanced & distracting. But my initial intention of puting at such position is to create a dual effect, one being the symbol of cross, second to imitate the look of a gift with wrapping ribbons if view from far. I will see if I can solve this issue again...

This exercise makes me understand the importance of catchy color combination in a greeting card, especially for smaller ones. Since people won't notice the texts unless they took a closer look at it, the general color tone and mood must to set right so that people will roughly know if that's the kind of card they are looking for. And to stand out from the other cards of same theme is indeed challenging.

Now i have a better sense of the meaning & representation of colors. =)

Assignment 4: Save this/that - Poster Design

Exercise:

1. Pick a topic related to the theme (e.g.. save trees, stop coral destruction, stop pollution, save singlish, etc.)
2. Write a copy (text which goes on poster) of not more than 150 words
3. Design the poster such that it coveys the meaning through layout (placement of visual elements and their interaction- photos, text, graphics elements etc)
4. Take Colour print out. Size of Artwork: A3.

For this exercise, I thought of doing on the topic of "Stop Piracy". Due to the difficulties in making real photos & effect for the poster design, I settled with just using simple drawing to create another kind of 'signboard' style of poster.

(Due to the issue of piracy, I yet to have the Adobe Photoshop software in my laptop, so can only use FreeHand & Fireworks... or using the computers in school...)

Lastly, encourage everyone to support Original! (Or at least, prevent piracy if it's within your control... Though it's really tempting, but that's the right thing to do...)