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Project 1
A hybrid of the Qatari and Romanian culture. I took the famous mythological creature from Romania, combining it with the local Qatari people. I decided to create basic 3D character figures with the local clothes adding a Dracula twist. The male and female figures are wearing the Thobe and Abaya with a mask that disguises them as Qatari’s when inside that mask lies a Dracula. I designed this template using illustrator, printed it out and made these little figures. It was quite tough figuring the template out especially the gatrah and the back of the head as i had to make them from scratch as i couldn’t find a similar back of the head i wanted as they all seemed to have hair… and the gatrah had to be made from 100% scratch… but when i got it done i was quite proud of myself for succeeding in the end.
Project 2
My social impact begun in the idea of domestic abuse. At first it was the idea of having a reverse clothing but i developed it through to make an accessory that made sound. It was quite hard making the accessory itself as it took a lot of time but as i got used to it while making the chocker, the bracelet was a piece of cake. I chose a purple theme as purple was the color representing domestic abuse. I decided to go for a very simple design for the package as if i went more complex it would be hard to make it a link with an indirection with domestic abuse.
My final reflection on Type 1
I have come a long way from the beginning of the semester, more knowledge on type and a few months older but thats not important right now. My first thoughts on what type class could be was wayyyyy out there like what was i even thinking. I mean towards the end it did get to what i was thinking what type class could possibly be. Type is now something that will forever be stuck in my head. I see how much i come along this semester whenever i see type in my everyday life. It almost irritates me how much i notice, how ugly some can be but they still seem to be present everyday. Oh how i wish i could ignore the little things.
Through type i had my ups and downs. At the beginning with the 50/50 project, i had no idea what i was doing, what did it mean to look type as a form? I CAN READ IT! asjdjssdjakd. But through that i was able to learn that type can be a form, it doesn’t have to be a literature essay type of type but we can look at it just like we see shapes. How we can create such unusual/interesting forms just using letters of the alphabet, some interesting shapes we won’t be able to create otherwise. It was hard to look at type as forms because we grew up looking at them as letters but now i can kind of see them as shapes but its still an on going process i guess.
The word project… hm… was very much stress in a nutshell. It was an experience that taught me that type wasn’t always on computer and it was something that could be done by hand too. Mastering ice wasn’t an easy job and to be honest I’m still not a master of ice but it was an experience that i probably would never forget. This project taught me how to find and look for the little detail of typefaces that distinguishes each one from another, and what we could consider when choosing a typeface. It also taught me the importance of kerning in a word. How important it is for the readability of the word and how such small kerns could make a difference on the overall visual of a word.
The sentence, paragraph and final project was very simple, tedious, yet quite hard. This was where i started to understand how type lays on a page and how the littlest, tiniest things could change so much. Before this, i would’ve never known that just changing the alignment or size, color, font, rag could make a “there is something wrong about it” to “YESSSSS”. I also am now aware of the difference of type on screen and on print. It was interesting to see how it may look “perfect” on screen but look not so great on print. I should make sure to print to see how it would look if it the final product would be printed (sorry to trees). I also learnt to understand the cases in which font size, typeface would be most suitable for certain situations. What i love about type is that little things make the biggest difference. Some may think nothing has changed but from type i learnt that that little altering makes a world of a difference. It was interesting how type on a blank page could activate the whole space making it look like a compete piece. The more i experimented, got feedback the more i was able to understand what “good” type was. Of course i still have a lot to learn but through this class i was getting better and better and the more i strive to learn.
Type shall forever be o-live!
Second attempt to put the poster together
These were my second attempt, with a better understanding of alignment. Understanding this, it was much easier to work around on the composition of the six elements. They looked much more thought out than the first experiments i did. The top right sentence was working quite well with the break up of the paragraph as well as the ghost box. The box made the paragraph as if it was floating in the water. I had struggles creating the ghost box since my photo was RBG and apparently my indesign setting was on CMYK so it kept making the photo go a grey-ish tone but i was able to figure it out online! (thanks google). However i wasn’t satisfied with the sentence composition on these and i didn’t like the sentence with the ghost box. It made it look too isolated from the image and since the sentence was quite short and in a bigger font it looked quite boxy and out of place. Playing with the square inspired by Majid Abbasi, from the suggestion from class it looked much more interesting and in harmony than when i placed them in the corners. It almost activated the y axis on the page. Personally i think it worked best when it was at the bottom than the top because of the paragraph composition.
Third attempt
With knowing what i wanted for everything else, i started to play around with the sentence. For most part i changed such little like having the same sentence structure, just changing the axis alignment. I made a lot of little changes and here are a few top picks
From these i chose the two on the right because the top left looked like the sentence was too crammed together and the bottom left was arabic, left justified which could be a problem for arabic readers. I had a hard time choosing between the two on the right because they had their goods and bads.
I liked the top right because i felt like the sentence flowed with the background, it looked like the setence was a part of the back, floating together and it activated the whole poster. However it kind of looked like a diagonal composition which could be too boring and it felt like i was trying to fill up the whole poster.
i liked the bottom right because the sentence made the whole thing unite(?) together everything was floating around “euphoric” it almost had a cycle that the other elements lead the eye to the word again. Though it may look a little clustered there was something about it that didnt make it look too clustered? There was enough breathing space around all the elements and the “empty” spaces didnt look very empty because the eye was focused to the middle. However that could be a bad thing because the eye wasnt moving around the whole poster as much and i felt like was that okay? and was my cluster thought wrong? was it clustered?
In the end i took a risk and chose the bottom right because, though it may not activate the full page, making the eye move around. I felt like to me at-least it looked visually more interesting than the other one and my reason why i liked it seemed stronger for this one than the other. I don’t know if i made the right choice but i believe i did and if i didn’t… i hope my reason was negotiate-able(?) lol
For the final critique all i got was “done” but in my head, i was still debating whether if this was better or the other. But i decided to stay strong with my previous choice.
Final reflection
because i had experience playing with sentence and paragraph from the previous projects, the process was much smoother hence why i don’t have as much process. But playing with type on a blank page and on an image was a different experience. I had to think about how i might break up the sentence and paragraph according to what i had on the image. Because i had so much space to play around with it was quite hard, i had no limitation of space, i could really use it however i wanted to. Some might be jealous but this was personally hard for me too because there were millions of different solutions. So the tedious work started again where i made millions of experiments playing with the whole space, changing little details that to me, mattered a lot, surprisingly. Working on this made me realize how much moving the same sentence in a few centimeters could change the overall visual appearance.
Research
In the last critique Tariq Abbasi was mentioned so i decided to search for some of his type for reference.
This was what was mentioned in the critique to see how he aligned his sponsor squares to make it a part of his poster. This simple act made the poster look much more put together. Instead of putting in the corner, he put it like a part of his poster. This was definitely something to take in for the designing of my poster.
This was another i found that did the same, aligning the sponsor squares to the side at the edge of the arabic words which looked pretty interesting.
This poster interested me as he used the shadow to align his text. It was also interesting to see how he played with his paragraph, similar to what we have done in the previous project.
Though this breaks many rules we have learnt like having text horizontally, not having enough breathing space on the top. But there was something about this that i liked. Though it cut off text to the edge, it looked pretty cool. Im not sure why that was but could it be cause of the interesting composition of the text? How it isn’t in a straight line but plays with the position of the words. Though the leading seem too close, i feel like it works because there are nothing that interferes with the readability of the word with his thoughts on making sure not to put the *dots* to interfere with the other letters.
50/50, word, sentence and paragraph
Finally moving on from everything we have learnt this semester, we were left with one final poster. Though i had a better understanding of composition (definitely better than what i started with) putting text into this image was difficult. As my poster didn’t have any objects in the “backyard” there was so much possibilities yet somewhat limited. Because there were so much space, i wasn’t sure where i should place all the things. Though i had some idea of how i could start, i just had a brain fart moment. Also trying to choose/make a sentence and paragraph that works with the space around the word. i didn’t know where i should align these to… do i make a modular grid? or do i just play with organic grid but if so where do i play within?
There were some where i just brought in my sentence and paragraph and others where i manipulated what i had to fit into the space.
Feedback/considerations:
1. Type size is too big. OF COURSE how could i have forgot?! This was something that was out of my mind because i was really concentrating on how i might place the components i forgot about the size of text. On computer it looked fine and when it was printed on A3 it looked fine until when i thought about it in A1 size where these would be HUMUNGOUS. Also making the text smaller would give me more space to play around with the composition!
2. The composition looked better when the sentence and paragraphs were broken up. I have to say i agree with this too because i feel like breaking them up activated the space more than having the large chunks of words. It fit well with the background too as it made the text look like it was swaying around with the water. I was quite lucky in a sense that i had so much empty space where i could play with the text but at the same time i felt like i was quite limited in finding different axis to align my text because i had no “backyard” objects. Also try putting a ghost box perhaps?
3. Play with the position of the square and name rather them putting them in the corner. Honestly i have to admit that i didn’t know where i should’ve have positioned the square and it looked best when it was somewhere in the corner or to the sides. But listening to the professors talking about thinking to align them to the axis of the letters on the word, it gave me ideas on where i would position them and allowed me to understand how i could add it in as a part of the poster without it being a last second add in.
THE FINAL 🙂
Apart from the smoke incident i was glad we were done and over it. Since at the beginning i was giving out the Japanese names and when i was done, the smoke alarm went off, i wasn’t able to see the people interact with out installation so i hope id be able to see it from the video that was taken (thank god!). Listening to the class who kind of understood what our purpose was, to make people lose their identity in an unknown world, surprised me and was satisfied that they were able to understand what we had hope them to. From the critique saying that it would have been better if we stayed in the limit of the set because this was at a huge scale, i somewhat agreed with. If i knew and had super powers to read the future, i would’ve made this a much more simpler. To have a realistic expectation. To be honest this was something that i had in the back of my head the whole time and that we had less team work, it was probably better off making a smaller scale and deconstructing a section of the movie, really limiting ourselves. I guess our group had a big expectation within ourselves which brought greed to do make such big variety of things (speaking of greed reminds me of the no face scene lol) which in the end wasn’t very necessary. I also think that the problem was that i was the only one who watched the movie, no one really chose to watch it so i was trying to explain to them that what we do was suppose to have some kind of relation to the movie. They had a lot of ideas of losing identity and wanted to add much more but i had to continuously had to make a link to the movie which some didn’t work out. Which i think why the problem with the horse occurred is because the lack of understanding why the horse was there in the first place, linking it to the movie hence ending up kind of isolated, un-understandable.
Analysis of the activities and their link with losing identity
Finalizing
I think this was the hardest part of group work. It was the big reveal. We started with a plan and this was where the plan started to tweak. It’s a little different than what we started with but we tried to stay in the end to work an alternative out for the part that failed to happen. Our biggest problem would have to be having realistic expectations. Thats something we should really consider in the future. We had to meet up until the last minute to figure out solutions.
I started to break as time came closer to the deadline. Everything that was stacking up in myself started to break as soon as i saw my friends trying to cheer me up. I think i started to break apart because i was so disappointed and frustrated by the group and to my self… I couldn’t understand what was going on. I think it was merely the part that i thought i put so much effort and tried my best to finish, get the group together to work but that wasn’t happening. Nothing was going as planned. They didn’t work though i asked and i realized it wasn’t something i could force someone to do. It was so stressful till the end. While waiting for the whole group to meet up, i was just fed up. As soon as the last member arrived, they started to their work at the last minute, nothing i really like to take the risk for. As much as i had a part of me that wanted them to do all the work themselves, because through the process of this group work i knew that i needed to help to get the work finished on efficiently and of course because i was a part of this group i needed to help.
There was a lot of problems until the end… There were so many things that were added. The position of the things changed, the horse was laying down(?) when we planned the horse was suppose to be at the beginning like the movie, and turned into a horse as he ate, not dead(?) with unknown green slime all over the place. I had no comment to say when the professors asked what it was.. because to be honest i had no clue myself… It would’ve been nice to tell me what was going on and talked about the reason for it. And a member of the group was so stubborn and that wasn’t something i enjoyed having the presence of. Like the incident of the smoke machine. I definitely told them that it was a risk and especially because i heard that the fire alarm went off when tried. Apparently they mentioned that if they asked the facilities there could be a way we could use it but i don’t think that happened. I tried to persuade them that it wasn’t something we should risk especially the fact that it wasn’t the most important factor of the final installation was more of a additional factor that wasn’t necessary but i guess my voice wasn’t strong enough.
I feel like as a group, it was something i was expecting because there was always problems that were similar whenever i worked in groups. As much as i was expecting, the more i started to fall. I wouldn’t be able to say we were a “good” group. Something far from that. Because there was a lot of mis communication, a lot of stubbornness, lack of teamwork… Bt this time… I’m just glad we are done without any blood splatters (lol). I was glad we at least had something done in the end…
Heres a full process video that was done by Mariam:
Making the installation
We tried to meet up together to set up the installation, making the pathway, installing all the little activities, decorating the space. Though we tried work together, there were times when a member of the group was present but didn’t help to build this together. It was quite frustrating as a member of the same group that one wouldn’t help out when others were trying their best to figure it out. I tried to ask for help but they would come for a few minute then would disappear when we really needed help. This process continued and by this time i gave up. If she wanted to come help that would be nice but when she disappeared, there was nothing i could do about it because i kept mentioning it but if the individual chose to ignore, there was nothing else but figuring it out with the others and trying our best to make it work. I was thankful that there was someone there that stayed out and helped out the whole time. It helped out a bunch and it was more efficient to work with others than with myself as long as we communicate to each other on what we thought so and not. Giving better solution to one.
As a whole group… we kind of failed… it was only two of us left to finish off the decoration, doing our part of the work while we patiently wait for the others to do at least their individual work. It was very disappointing when an individual would say they would do something or bring in something and wouldn’t. That left the other members more work they had to fill up from one individual failing to do. Because we were a group if one failed to do it, someone had to fill up the space. This left more load to do, going to get the supplies and making the installation for the other. If they mentioned they wouldn’t do it from the start (at least) we could have made a better plan. From this group work something i would really take into any other future group work is that what i say i would do, i should keep, no matter what. Because if i fail to do so, the other members have extra work to do because of an individual being selfish.
At the end i was kind of done. I tried my best to do what i could do and hoping that others would do their part of the work too. Really this “hope” wasn’t working. I really didn’t want this to happen as a group but really only 2 members of the group ended up doing most of the work. Though the others helped, it was a fraction of what we planned. Still communication was a problem? After having to have a serious talk of working together as in the end it was a group work, we were able to get all of us to work on the finishing touches which i think that was at least an accomplishment because now, we can really say we worked as a group in the end. At least we got all of us to work on something in the end whether that was big or small.
Another thing that i learnt working in a group was that big dreams (ideas) that you say shouldn’t be said if you weren’t going to help to pursue it in the end. Though there were many ideas we had for the installation, we failed to put some because the creator of the idea wasn’t present and to fulfill this, we needed all of us together to work on it to get the big picture. It was a shame that it couldn’t be done because there wasn’t enough group work time where we were all there and working. There was a day where some of us met in the morning, working until the evening and i had to leave for a appointment but we couldn’t meet up together in the end. There was a part of me that felt bad for not being there but to be fair i was there for around 6 hours yet we still failed to meet all together.
Gajin Chung 