Second Assignment - Needful Things

For this assignment, we are supposed to find something around school and then abstract it. It needn't be a sign, but it should be something that we can put around school. During the lecture exercise, I chose the idea of the vending machine. But after toying with the idea, I felt that it was rather difficult to demonstrate the 6 levels of abstraction and still keep it different from the designs commonly seen around.

I then went to the central library and there was when I decided to work on the idea of 'No talking loudly', after enduring endless chatter from other library users. The idea is that the sign can be pasted at the library doors, alternate shelves, at the stairwells and on the door of the media viewing room.

Abstraction Set 1
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After working on the idea in Illustrator, this was what I had. I found that abstracting from the third level to the fourth was rather challenging, because I did not take away alot of details. I was worried that the difference cannot really be seen. Also, I had some trouble for the last level of abstraction, because I don't really know how to use certain tools in Illustrator. I wanted to take away the line at the part where the body joins with the legs, but after numerous attempts, I only managed to distort the shape. In the end, I used a rectangle block to 'erase' the line.

During tutorial presentation, a classmate pointed out that it looked rather strange for the bounding box to be black and the cross to be red. In other words, there was no uniformity. I honestly hadn't noticed that and I feel that it was a really valid point. So for the final in my portfolio, I will change the bounding box colour to red to match the cross. Secondly, another classmate also noted that prohibitary signs usually have a circular bounding box and not a square box. Again, it was something that I had not noticed but it really will make a difference in my design. Lastly, Jing commented that she felt it was rather disturbing to see the red cross cutting over the person's head. We disussed several possible solutions, such as lowering the opacity, moving the people down and moving the cross away. After visualising the outcome, I felt that these solutions were not feasible, because 1) lowering the opacity will lessen the impact of the prohibition, 2) moving the people down will trap alot of white space at the top, and 3) moving the cross away might distort the overall look of the sign.

In the end, after experimenting with various adjustments, this is what I came up with:

Abstraction Set 2
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I didn't change much for the 2nd and 3rd level of the abstraction, except to have the ends of the crosses flat instead of pointed. For the rest, I have changed the bounding shape into a circle and also the colour to red. Regarding the problem of the cross slicing through the heads, I changed the angle of the cross such that the head does not look so sliced. For the last level of abstraction, I also decided to remove the fill of the prohibition sign. I think the final effect looks quite nice, but my final choice for this assignment is the 4th level of abstraction as I feel that it best catches the attention of people, which is the intended purpose of this sign.

For this assignment, it really made me realise that what I encode in my designs is not necessarily what my viewers will decode. The black box VS red circle problem is a very good example of this. Had we not gone through the presentation in class, I would never had noticed that problem. Even though it seems like a subtle change, the effect it has on the overall design is alot.