Color's Ability to Transform

Color has important role in the design world being able to change a once boring object into something lively or even fun and at many times influences our decisions making. Although there are a vast array of theories on what color can represent or even mean for Joseph Albers, color is simply not just a simple definition or one short cut answer to a question, but rather what people gain from those experiences. That through a person’s experience with color, it can have different meanings depending on certain situations, thus leaving the idea of what color really means being subjective. One example in which color has a big influence on in terms of design can be seen in advertisement through film.

In an old Gatorade commercial released a few years back, shows a strong use of color and how it plays an important role in the design. The ad displays four iconic stars in sports: Manning, Wade, Jeter, Sharapova. Throughout the ad the designer purposely used a monochromatic feel only highlighting certain colors which can provide mean reasoning behind it. For example, leaving the field green, the football brown, or the basketball orange is shown. The use of black and white can be used in a number of different to describe many things such as time. Many times people relate the past with the use of black and white because typically people remember the events but not remember the exact color of lets say a coke can lying on the coffee table.  Also the use of black and white with color highlights can give the audience a subjective opinion of what colors maybe be there having them connect the dots with only one color shown.

Dangerous Designs

Image from topspeed.com

America has always been fascinated with the automobile. Not only does it bring us from point A to point B, the car becomes an image of who we are or even try to be. Take for instance, a person cruise down Beverley Hills with a environmentally eco friendly Toyota Pruis. The first impression a person might get is that a person either might be stingy with their money to try and save as much money as possible or they are just very concerned with global warming. Now take a person driving a Dodge Cabriolet which is probably 3-5 times the price of a hybrid vehicle and one can look at its sleek design, its fast 600 horse power V-10 engine, and the prestige/image it brings to a person. Of course although with all the positives with the aesthetics and power of the car, the practicality of the car and its effects on the earth is indeed dangerous. In a 2009 online article from businessinsider.com, the site listed the 10 worst cars on the planet ranking the Dodge Cabriolet as the number one worst car from that list. The reason is due to its fuel consumption of averaging a messily 13.4 miles per gallon and a CO2 emission of 488 g/km. This doesn’t seem as bad as a person may think until a comparison is taken place. The Prius although listed at the buttom 10 in best cars for the planet saves almost 5 times more gas averaging 57 mpg and carbon emission of 104 g/km.

image from  green-blog.org


Another dangerous design that most people look to as being solely positive is its speed and unless you are Jason Bourne running from the bad guys, that much speed is useless in real life and reckless at that. As a person increases speed or increase a car’s mph when driving the percentage of a fatality increases dramatically.

Utopia

Image from wordpress.com

Often a Utopia can be associated with being the perfect place by fulfilling some of the aspects of moral. social, and political aspects in our lives. Yet, it is almost impossible to achieve the perfect place. Cities for centuries have tried to achieve such a goal but have failed in many different ways. Although some have made great strides in achieving this dream, there is still a long ways to go to be even close to tackle all three principles completely. One place which made such attempts is the city of Vancouver located up north in Canada has adopted a design which for years seemed to go against the utopian life of the suburbs, but in today’s reality a sort of Utopian life style actually lies within the city, one such design which promotes a utopian life style in Urban Density.


One important aspect to urban density is the impact it has on transportation and the significance of getting to the places where we're needed. Throughout American history there has been a huge admiration between the people of the United States and its fascination with the automobile. There have been movies, car shows, and even magazine articles advertising the automobile attaching with it a sense of elevated status or even power to the individual owning such an item. Take for instance Hollywood stars and their appearance in an exotic car to an award ceremony. Status and wealth aside, there is a large correlation between automobiles and the amount of greenhouse gasses and pollutants in which automobiles produce. Approximately 23 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted in the U.S. in 2007 were from cars, trucks, and buses, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Abraham). The U.S. is known to be the largest automobile polluter in the world because of how it is designed with urban sprawling in mind and encouraging our dependence on the automobile. Yet, the city of Vancouver has sought a why in which can decrease its dependence of the car and has seen a way to solve transportation issues by simply making amenities such as schools, work, food, and living spaces closer together.

Abraham, J. (2009, May 18). Reducing greenhouse gases from cars and commercial vehicles. Retrieved from http://www.southwestclimatechange.org/solutions/reducing-emissions/transportation-emissions

Will I Am-Check it out

video from Youtube.com

Last week in Professor Housefield’s class, he presented the video Check it Out by Will I am featuring Nicki Minaj, which related to last week’s blog of words and images. I wanted to write about this because the video had such a strong relation to the topic at hand. In the music video it starts off with which looks like a Korean TV show. On one side there is the Korean audience, wearing all black attire and dressing and acting the same. For instance there is a scene where all the girls at the same time change the position of their legs. On the other side of the show is Nikki Manaj and Will I Am. Their attire seems to be totally different having bright colors which move forward toward the audience and a look that is out of this world. In a way the video is show casing two different worlds or countries having different perspectives in their beliefs, ethics, and style.

Throughout the video the artists use phrases such as “check it out” which is then followed by large Korean words which represent those words. In this sense the audience who may not be able to understand them by listening to the music can relate to the text presented on the screen. This then creates a form of universalism in the text unifying the message to the audience. It is because of text with picture humans can relate words like “cat” to the image of a cat or the word “eyes” to the eye.

The style of the music video reminds me a lot like how the Black Eye Peas videos are shown in its weird yet, artistic way, with the text bringing a more lively and cartoonish look to it.

Ergonomics-XBOX 360 Controller

images from ign.com

In design there is more than just the aesthetics of an object, but rather the functional part in many designs that make or break a product. It is through the study of ergonomics that designs can differ from one another largely as some may consider the quality and quantity of an object. Although many consumers consider ergonomics having to deal with the comfort of a design, this is only part of a portion of what ergonomics really is. The word ergonomics is derived from two Greek words which are ergon meaning work and nomos meaning, together these words mean “ the science of work and a person’s relationship to that work” (about.com).  The study of Ergonomics can be sub-divided into 5 parts which are:  safety, comfort, ease of use, performance (productivity), and aesthetics. It is through these 5 parts that one can assets the true value of a product which in this case is analyzing the X-box 360 controller.

The first topic within the study of ergonomics is safety. Safety is probably the most important part in terms of profitability of a product. If an object is not safe, then the manufacturer or design is responsible or liable for any dangers the product may cause the consumer to file a law-suite.   Likely through R&D (research and development) such a thing can be easily prevented. In the terms safety of the X-box controller I would rate it pretty high. First off, the usage of a wireless display prevents the occasional   tripping over the wire which occurred a lot in older systems. Another feature is its smooth design which does not have any sharp edges which might cut a person.

Comfort is another portion of ergonomics. Out of the three main system consoles (Xbox, Playstation 3, and the Nintendo Wii) the Xbox is hands down the most comfortable controller on the market. The reasoning behind it that the controller seems to follow the contours of the hands quiet well and seems to fit in almost perfect harmony in its angles and geometric design. Unlike the Nintendo Wii controller when played like the traditional style, handling the Xbox controller does not make my hands hurt in a matter of minutes.

The ease of use is simple in that the design layout is derived almost  from its predecessors having the directional buttons on the left side of the controller with the buttons on the right consisting of four buttons arranged in a cross shape. On the center of the controller is the typical select and start button with a large silver/green X button. The nice thing about this is if u hold it down for 1-2 seconds the system/controller will turn on and will light a quarter of the X, indicating which player you are.

Performance is the only part which I would have to talk negatively about. The controller due to being wireless needs batteries and it seems that the controller drains the life of the battery relatively fast compared to other ones. Also at times the controller seems to disconnect for some odd reason even though there is plenty of battery life.

Finally the aesthetics of the controller is quite pleasing. The design followers a curvilinear design rather than that of a rectilinear design which can represent movement and liveliness, while a rectilinear shape can be considered to be more subtle. The material compromised of a plastic material painted in a matte finish.

Overall, even though I am not a big fan of Microsoft , in terms of ergonomics on the Xbox it gets a high review in terms of the though process in the design even though it may have some minor flaws to it.  In a way it would be hard to top a design that fulfills almost all five of the sub-categories very well  and seems almost impossible to beat, but as history has shown by learning from past mistakes and past achievements, design can only get better.

The Evolution of video games (FPS)

Image from Digibarn.com

Image from zeusbox.com

Since the well anticipated game Call of Duty Black-Ops is releasing tomorrow at midnight, it seems to be a perfect opportunity to look at this game and how design has changed in terms of first person shooter games or FPS for short. First person shooters, is basically seeing a sort of item on the screen, in this case a weapon through first perspective.  Think about experiencing an event through one’s eyes, that a person can see their hands, legs etc, but because it is first perspective they wouldn’t see their face at all. What this gives the player or audience is an experience of being in the game rather than a player controlling a character, which is a large portion of why it became a big hit.

The first real FPS game was done in 1974 entitled Maze War which was done in black and white. The object of the game was that placers were placed in a maze. A person was able to move front, back, left, and right which is typical of many FPS games. The opponent was since as an eyeball and a person would win if they shot that person and would lose if you got shot.

Now more than 35 years later this once state of the art game at its time has evolved into more realistic games. Now players unlike before can move 360 degrees rather than only 90 degrees. Also more noticeably is the graphics and color displays in which games from before used the typical grey scale now may have over a thousand different color pigments within the game.

Words and Image Comics

 

Image from amazon.com

 Design is meant to appeal to their audience which combines both words and images to get a message across to the audience. One type of design that links to this entirely is that of comics. Comics are meant to be simplistic in that it uses panels  which depict a different scene in each  and the character design is basically stripped down the basic elements, lacking that f detail.

Last Tuesday, a special treat was in store for Professor Housefields class in which a guest lecturer by the name of Brian Fies can by to speak. Brian Fies is a graphic novelist or in other terms a comic book author, who wrote two novels one entitles Mom’s Cancer which depicts his real life story of his mother’s fight against lung cancer and the problems both physical/emotionally in which his mother and his family had to deal with and the second book, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? , which is more of a fictional based story between the 1930’s-1970’s of technology. During the lecture Fies pointed out several ways in which comics convey a conversation and expresses some important information within a few panels. Take for instance the scene of his mom aging. In one panel it shows a cartoon image of his mother, and through five-seven drawing panels shows his mother before cancer with that of having hair to several years later with his mother already facing the problem of cancer. It is through comics that so much information is told within a few seconds which would not have been effective if the media was not designed as a comic.