Week 5 Blog Exercise

Successul Example

       This was a successful poster design “The National Ballet of Canada”. The asymmetrical balance of the composition created a motion impact which appealing the eyes of viewers. The vertical aligning typeface on the left side of the layout cooperating with image of a ballet dancer composted of an elegant form, which created asymmetrical balance and sharpened the design.

Fail Example

     
This was fail design web page where viewers would be confused by the random and imbalanced placement of design elements. The title of the website, the photo of product and text were placing without syntactical guideline. Those components together produced an uneven edge on the centre of the web page. The menu bar was placed vertically on the far left side of the page causing losing connection with other content of the website.  Consequently, the design of this web page was fail to deliver message to their targeted audience.

Blog Exercise: Visual vs Symbolic Language

        Representational content: Unhappy person, Stock board (not obvious), urban landscape; Symbols: Text (horizontal); Underlying compositional structure: arrow-pointing upward, Red, white, text scale.
       The photo displays a man sitting in front of the stock board with his back turning to viewers and his hand holding his head (seemed covering his eyes). The man seems unhappy. The scene of the man, the background of the Stock bard and the urban landscape are associated with economic issue, which resulted in the sadness of the man. When viewers move their eyes from left to right, they see the white text “UNEMPLOYMENT RATE” and the red arrow pointing upward to the text “RATE” which size is larger than other text. These elements added together emphasize the size of the “RATE” is large. The red on the arrow implicates alert and its upward direction helps guiding viewers eyes to the white text “UMEMPLOMENT RATE”. In addition, the red arrow pointing upward suggests unemployment rate rising. The English text can be replace with another text of language such as Chinese.

meaning 2: Interactions Between the 3 levels

The poster for “Earth Day” demonstrates three levels of visual including representation, abstraction, and symbolism.
The representational level is a picture of a tree leave spanning through the two dimension of the poster. The tree leave represents the environment that we have been living.  It appeals viewers to pay attention to environmental issues.
Related to other two levels, the representational level of the design serves to deliver to message of the basic concept that is the environmental issue.
The abstractive level is an illustration abstracting from a representational human face for expression. The representational human face was distilled into a drawing of a contour of a human face and two eyes. The eyes cause impact to viewers and appeal for the concern of the environmental issues. This level helps to develop the basic concept expressed by the representational level.
The symbol level displays some text information and a symbol of the earth abstracted from the representational globe. The symbol delivers a message to viewers that express the issues about earth. Associating with other levels, the symbol level is help to convey a message that is calling on peoples worldwide to take responsibility to environmental protection. In general, three levels of visual tie together to construct the whole design.

Meaning 1 - Blog Exercise

Representation
This representational example is a picture of a statue of an Arabian, which was made of Legos.  The statue is represental becasuce audiences can recognize it from the detail of its appearance and ethnic dress. It is the direct depict of a real person.  The target audiences of this statue are children so that establish a statue a by copying it from real life is good for educating Children. Also, the color of the the statue is attractive in three primary color for children. Furthermore, material which is lego for establishing this statue is expressive and appropriated to attract children.

Abstraction
This image is abstracting in the way of function. The abstraction derives from the concept of “BIG.” Audiences can visually perceive the “big” of the shop through the word of “BIG” which scale is larger than other objects on the top of the gate. So the sign creates straight relationship to our visual perception. The image delivers a message that the shop provides a huge amount of products for customers. In addition, the impact that the image created is helpful to attract customers to the shop.

Symbolism
This example is a wood sign for children’s riding at LEGOLAND of California. The sign is associated with animals which patterns of skins show on the sign. The essential features of these animals are the color and pattern of their skin so that it is not necessary to add other parts of the animals on the sign. For example, white strips on black background of a letter “A” denote a zebra. As the result, this symbol is helping children connection the sign to animals.