Design Principle: Project 2

11.10.2021 - 31.10.2021 (Week 8 - Week 10)
Britney Chow Pei Jun / 0350043 / BDCM
Design Principles
Lectures and Project 2

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LECTURES 

Introduction

• A designer's role is to solve problems with effective visual communication.
• Ranging from personal goals to community events, and from corporate functions to world changing projects.

Observation

• Be attentive to your surroundings
• Pay attention to the details and to be analytical about them
• Sources of observation can stem from artifacts, daily happenings, physical surroundings, and such. 
• An active act of acquiring information through the senses, of a subject matter in its natural setting.
• Senses are important for us to know, feel, understand, analyze and even plan what we want to do.
• Important to designers as it enables them to see "problems", as well as getting ideas for solutions to these problems. 

1. Know your subject

-Know more if you understand it.

2. Slow down and look outward.

-Mindfulness to focus on your surroundings and pay attention

3. Try something new

-Choose an activity that will engage your senses and heighten your awareness

4. Improve your concentration by cutting out distraction

-Go somewhere you wont be disturb

5. Challenge yourself to a mental workout 

-Smarter, more agile brain will help you to observe with greater insight

6. Test your observation by playing memory game

-List everything in the room you're in and see how many you can list.

7. Record and consider your observations

-Go beyond the things you see

-Note down the smells and sounds you experience

8. Stay inquisitive

-Question and analyze your observation

fig 1.0; High-Fashion is Inspired by Nature; sauce: (https://mymodernmet.com/where-i-see-fashion-inspiration/)

fig 1.2; High-Fashion is Inspired by Nature; sauce: (https://mymodernmet.com/where-i-see-fashion-inspiration/)

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INSTRUCTIONS

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PROJECT 2

Visual Research & Idea Exploration. 

fig 1.3; Night Street Photography; sauce: (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/17310779809680353/)

This is one of the pictures that I have saved. I like streets photography as they always give me a feel of nonchalance, and they don't make me think much of whatever that's bothering nor what's making me happy. I sometimes like the feel of nothing. As sometimes, things like this makes me relax and actually having time to think about things I don't usually think about. 

fig 1.4; Street Illustration; sauce: (https://imgur.com/EhDE8fV?r=)

This is another illustration that I absolutely love! It has the feel of the movie "Your Name" to it and I really like their style. 

fig 1.5; Night Street in Bangkok, Thailand; sauce: (https://drizzleanddip.com/2016/11/15/5-days-in-bangkok/)

I've been to Thailand before and I really really love their night street! From my trip to there, I found out that the night is often more livelier than the day! 

fig 1.6; River Market Illustration; sauce: (https://twitter.com/Camellia_0x0/status/1181916068895318016)

I like this illustration as I can feel the warmth from it. I have been to a river market in Thailand before, however the time wasn't right, so it wasn't as busy. Though, I still feel the liveliness from it because of the beautiful weather and whatnot. And thus, from this, I got a vague idea of what I'm going to do.

fig 1.7; Thailand Photography; 

This is a photo I took during my trip to Thailand, the weather feels nice and the umbrellas makes the whole market feels aesthetically pleasing. And it makes the whole place feels fabulous.

With this, my initial idea is to create a lively place but not to the point it became loud and disturbing. However, after some time of much thinking. I thought about how the whole pandemic had me changing all my plans. At first, traveling to Thailand has become an annual thing as my father really like to travel there. During Chinese New Year of 2020 (before Covid cases gets high), our whole family had planned to celebrate the festival in Thailand. However, due to some stupid reasons, the whole trip was canceled. 

To be honest, during that time, I feel very disappointed. And during that time, no one knows when we could travel there again. Even though if the pandemic is completely over, it will be a bit hard to actually gather everyone and have a trip together. And so, I thought of the first time I've been to Thailand, and thus, I tried to sketch it my idea out. 

fig 1.8; Britney's sketch at sense of place; 

fig 1.9; Thailand photography 2; 

This is also a picture I took, the sky here looked very beautiful and I can't help but took a picture. I remembered going to the convenience store at evening as well, the sky looks just as pretty. 

fig 2.0; Final outcome of Sense of Place; 

This is a street that we have been to a lot of times, in front is a seven-eleven convenience store. This convenience store although to a lot of people may seem like nothing, however to me it's like a start of another journey or something like that. We've been there quite a lot of times, but every time feels like the first time. And this convenience store, is a place where we always go. It really brings back a lot of memories to me.

fig 2.1; Final outcome of Sense of Place in PDF; 

The elements of design use in this piece of work is very obvious. Line is seen to be commonly used throughout the whole design. Next, shape can also be seen in this piece of work. Last but not least, one can also see the creator has also implement design elements such as color and value. 

Some design principles are also used in this piece of work. One of them is contrast, the creator has used complementary colors to differentiate the elements. Next is scale or proportion, this can be see as the creator has chosen the corner of the road instead of drawing out the whole picture. Harmony is used in this design as well, as some parts of the work has used the analogous color scheme. Symbols are also used in this design as well, like the 7-11 logo.

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FEEDBACK

I wasn't able to complete this project during class, and thus I wasn't able to get Dr. Charles opinions on my work. However, he said that for this project, one has analyze the place they are at, their surroundings, space and consider everything that is there, observe closely and think about the perspectives. 

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REFLECTION

To be really honest, I think that sometimes I debate a lot when trying to decide which place to sketch out and whether I could express what I want to. And in the meantime of doing this, I would start to lose confidence in myself as well as I feel that I'm afraid that I couldn't express what I want to very well and in a way, destroy the whole thing, making it look very bad. Shamefully, I'm also very terrible at time managing, and thus, would often spend so so much time on something else instead of what I planned to do. Procrastinating has also became a major problem for me in this project, not to mention the lack of skills when executing my idea for the project.

However, I still enjoyed it when doing this project as I was able to reminiscence the times before the pandemics happened. And I was also able to further understand the techniques, elements and principles. Not to mention, Ms. Jinchi also helped us a lot with the recorded lecture videos.