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.   

Words & Images

Image from IMBD

Words are an essential part for humans to convey a message a person is trying to reach out to people. Yet, not everybody can be a sponge and instantly get what that certain individual is trying to tell them. Take for instance a Photoshop or illustrator book in which a person is trying to acknowledge how to use that program. The lucky ones can instantly get what the author is trying to tell the audience just by words alone. But many of us like myself; need more that just simple words, we need visuals to help us grasp a better understanding of what is going on. It is with the combination of both words and images that brings the best of both words in terms of communication.

      Paris, je t'aime is a 2006 French film which depicts eighteen short stories which relate to the common theme of love. The design of the film pays tribute to one of the most romantic cities on earth Paris. The nice thing about the design of the film is because the whole movie is based on eighteen short films the viewer is able to see the great scenery of Paris and all its architectural marvels. Yet, in form of communication in the use of languages, the film composed of both English and French. During the French part of the film there are English subtitles which thus communicate to the audience of what the actors/actress are saying in the film, but more importantly I believe is that if the film did not combine both dialects then it loses the originality in which the film presents.

                When studying the cover/ poster of the movie, how the layout is arranged is interesting. Although some people seem to think that the image is always the most important aspect of design (although true in some cases) the type of text/ arrangement is important as well. The image of Eiffel Tower is the most iconic image of Paris with the heart tells the audience what this film might be about.  The text is arranged in a slanted way to maybe point out that things do not always have to be straight or perfect for things to work or hints that some type of chaos or distortion in also implied in the film. It is these small arrangement of words and images which makes this design  work really well.

 

Interaction of Form and Design in Objectified

 image from flickr.com

Design is an on-going process in which designers come up with ideas, form, concepts which tries to appeal to the consumers and most of the time improves the lives of everyday people. In the documentary Objectified, director Gary Hustwit introduces the audience to the world of design and shows how people encounter some  basic items people use in their day-to-day lives: the list includes vacuums, chairs, toothpick, toothbrushes, and even the famous Apple Macbooks. Throughout the film the design process can be readily seen like that of design thinking which follows six steps of field research, understanding problem, idea, prototype, feedback, and repeat. One item which they did focus that did follow this step in detail was that of the peeler. One of the designers spoke about a friend who was having difficulty with arthritis in their hands in regards to the pain in using that metal handle peeler. Here the design looked at field research, understood the problem and thought of an idea of using a rubber handle which helped arthritis victims relieve the pain. It is these ideas/itemas which sometimes make the best designs. Davin Stowell one of the designers featured in the film stated that “What we’re really always looking for whenever we design are ways we can improve the way people do things or improve their daily life, without them really even knowing, ever thinking about it.”

The most important problem or lesson for designers is a scene in the film which showed thousands of unused products being trashed and disposed of leaving a huge ecological footprint on earth. That the main problem isn’t coming up with great new designs, but how to make designs in which is environmentally sound. Karim Rashid a designer could have not said it any better than stating “If the average shelf life of a high-tech object is less than eleven months, why on Earth does anything have to be built to be permanent? It should be all 100% disposable. You know, I think my laptop should be made of cardboard, or my mobile phone could be a piece of cardboard, or it could just be made out of something like sugarcane or bioplastic( www.objectifiedfilm.com).”

Analyzing a product

image from www.jacoporosati.com

Ever since Henry Ford’s invention of the conveyer belt, the production of a product would never be the same. Now these everyday products could be mass produced in minutes, packaged, and sent to a consumer on the other side of the world in a matter of days. In this blog entry we will at an everyday product with is widely used in the computer world to store data and that product is the USB.
Now of course not all USB’s are the same ranging from many sizes, shapes, and materials, but Marvin the Pirate by Jacopo Rosati is one of the many designs which sticks out. The form of the object is that of a cartoon pirate which at first glance appears to be a figure of a toy. It is not until you pull on its head that the true function of the product becomes clear in the usage of the product to be used as a USB memory stick.
Just by looking at the design, a person can find many distinctive qualities about it. The designer uses three basic colors which constitute the piece by using black, white and only one of the three primary colors red. There are a lot of curvilinear lines going on throughout the product and only having one rectilinear line towards the bottom on the piece (excluding the metal piece of the USB which connects to the computer). The primary purpose the rectilinear line is so the item could stand on its own, giving it an additional function in regards of a display piece in a room. The haptic part of the piece appears to be smooth to the touch having no rough or jagged edges.

A Banned Shoe

 Image from www.athleticpropulsionlabs.com

Its official, baseball season has officially ended with the Giants winning the World Series, but after that is said and done, basketball is just around the corner. In the latest news, the NBA (National Basketball Association), ban’s its first shoe based on “unfair advantage.” The shoe created by Athletic Propulsion Labs is said to increase “a player's vertical leap" The league's ban on Athletic Propulsion Labs' (APL) Concept 1 confirms the company's claims that the shoe, with it's Load ‘N Launch TM Technology, performs as advertised (slumz.boxden.com). As many people know APL is not a well known basketball shoe company when compared to large companies such as Under Armor, Adidas, or even the largest giant of them all Nike. Yet, what this shoe provides is that extra boost in performance which well other shoe lines try and advertise to make an athlete perform better. Take for instance the many commercials of Michael Jordan playing against other opponents and dunking on them claiming that part of the reason for such great skill can be contributed to the design of the shoe, ending the commercial with “Just Do it”.  Of course if big name brands Nike or Adidas say their shoe will make you perform better, why can’t it be used in the NBA if other products are suppose to have design technologies which try to beat their opponents. Although banning a shoe from a sport is wrong, the company APL can gain something positive in this, that maybe the technology does work maybe too well causing the everyday Joe who can’t dunk with regular shoes finally perform like the pros.

Although the shoe is said to perform well, at roughly $300 for these pair of shoes. Aesthetically, to basketball shoe enthusiasts and athletes, this particular shoe is very appealing to add to any collection! The shoe comes in two colors black/green and white/green. The Green’s color being a neon type color pops up at the viewer which then becomes lively. The material looks light because of the carbon fiber look it contains which is relates to being light weight and fast.

Design As a Conversation

Image from swsaonline.com 

In our everyday world we can see design almost everywhere, but usually the most powerful ones are those that do not rely on excessive amount of words to convey a message, but ones that are straight to the point and at many times are iconic. Take one of the most famous architects Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe could not have said it any simpler than saying these three words that "less is more."

In order to understand how design is used as a conversation we need to first understand what conversation means. In context a conversation is usually a message or ideas from one source which communicates towards multiple individuals through the act of speech. Typically good conversations are getting your ideas from point (a) to point (b) without having any confusion in between which at many times acquits to the awkward silence and that "what are you talking about look" on a person's face. 

In terms of design, the designer puts out a concept or message to communicate to the audience what he/she is trying to portray. Take for instance a commonly seen object such as the restroom sign. The intent of the object is to direct the audience to the correct restroom area by using a sign with a figure of a man within a triangle which is meant for men and a figure of a person with a dress enclosed in a circle to represent female.

Yet, not all conversations end up with one simple solution or answer that a person obtains from a piece. Sometimes in order to create a deeper conversation there are no right and wrong answers, but instead open interpretation. Take Marina Abramovic 1974 work entitled Rhythm 0, in which Abramovic placed 72 items that the audience could use and perform any acts at their wish with theobjects while standing still. Some of these items ranged from objects which cause pleasure, while others were used to inflict pain such as a gun. For example at one point in the performance a person took the gun and placed it at her head. The act of putting her at gun point was one of the many responses as well as the act of another person taking the gun and throwing out the window. The point of this performance was a conversation between theartist and audience in showing what humans would and would not do given the situation. 

image from premierartscene.com

Compare and Contrast

Image from my.opera.com

Image from my.opera.com

Sight is probably the most important function in terms of our five senses we as humans are gifted with, especially towards designers. It is from sight that we can take a whole image and it down to its basic conceptual elements which an image presents such was shape, line weights, color, size and even texture. This then translates n our minds the cognitive distinctions and similarities an object or piece has.  Two pieces of art work I would like to compare and contrast are those from two famous pieces belonging to Edvard Munch “The Scream” and Vincent van Gough’s “Starry Night”.

The comparison

Each image although different, have many similarities which are interesting to point out. For starters, each have a fluid brush stroke style which gives that distorted look to it and motion seems to be prevalent in each piece. Also when analyzing the two, it seems that the main focus seems to be the environment/background instead of the foreground. Although it is easier to read from “Starry Night” due to its title and the focal point being the wind, Munch’s piece seems to be a lot harder at first because people tend to focus on the person first, when in reality the lines/ focal point points out to the background. I remember  in a past Art history class I took at a community college one of the lecturers talked about Munch’s piece stating that it really the person screaming or is it really the natural environment (the sky) screaming at the person; hence the individual covering their ears.

The Contrast

Differences are distinguish in paintings and are easily more identifiable than that of the similarities. Other than one having no entourage in them and the use of cool and warm coolers being more prevalent in comparison, when looking closely at the style there is indeed a big difference. For instance, the brush strokes are more smear like in Munch’s piece where as Van Gogh has more of a pattern to his texture, using a repetitive type motion.

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Designer Main Stream

 image taken from guyhepner.com

During last week lecture and quiz, one of the artist/designers that stood out to me the most was Takashi Murakami.  Due to his cartoonish style that he uses which are similar to that of Japanese anime but also using a vast array of flashy, bright colors and use of repetition. Looking at his piece “Killer Pink” which portrays the use of smiling flowers varying and colors/size, the image bothered me for a while because I knew I saw this type of design style in somewhere in our everyday life and that it became iconic in my mind. It wasn’t until I got home to my apartment that I went to my CD collection and picked out my Kanye West Graduation album that the album art cover and the” Killer Pink” style were similar. After researching I was indeed correct in my theory that Murakami did in fact design the album cover.

In looking and reading some of his works I have to say I am pretty impressed at what he has done so far in his career. Just like the story of “Stone Soup” as to the basis of how designers normally work together to create something great, Murakami can be seen in relation to this because of how he worked with such designers to transformer their designs a step further. take for instance Kaye West's iconic bear symbol which are incorporated in some of his music video, Murakami used his design approach in creating the bear which you see in the album "graduation". In addition, he has done many collaborations with popular clothing brands such as Marc Jacob and Louis Vuitton. Below are some of his famous works in which has influenced main stream pop cutlure.

Image taken from deviantart.com

LDA 21 Poster Design

Last Week or so, in my landscape architecture graphics class, our instructor Steve Mcniel gave the class a project in which we were to create some sort of landscape architecture firm and make a sort of logo/billboard that represented the company and what it stood for. The intent of my make believe firm named “Connect Designs” was a company that focused on lessening the ecological footprint on the environment. Thus, Connect Design idea  was to establish the forward-thinking concept of sustainability in our landscape planning and business.

Remember the saying a picture can tell one thousand words? Well I wanted something that did just that, while creating something simple, yet clean. There were several conceptual concepts that I had to go through, but I finally decided on that was closest to my expectations. Of course just like many designers/artist, I found inspiration of this logo from without from three iconic of the new Golden State Warriors logo, clothing brand LRG and the Ying and Yang symbol. The idea of my logo was having nature/environment on one side, and the urban city environment (where people live) on the other creating that Ying and Yang type feel to it since people sometimes associate urban development as being opposites to the environment. Which then brings me to the color scheme of violet and yellow which in basic color theory is you guessed it opposites, although opposites these two colors work very well together in my opinion. In the middle of the logo is an image of a parent and a child holding hands which is symbolic because what the firm is trying to do is to bring two both worlds into one . Finally, the whole arrow loop thing has two meanings, which is one to symbolize the first letter of the firm Connect and secondly to resemble a closed loop and containing.

The whole image was then done on a 18x 24 inch poster board to be presented in our class. I’m not sure if this works well, so any critique both negative and positive are more than welcome.