In John’s world, things seem to be pretty rigid, most people kept to themselves and mostly lived a routine life. There were still festivals and nation wide celebrations, but John was never really sure what they were celebrating.
“Ah,” John sighed as he picked up a polaroid picture of himself with a birthday cake. A wry smile was imprinted on his face. He didn’t seem happy then. Neither does he seem happy now, he would much rather find a picture of the company he was celebrating the birthday with.
Why would he be happy during his birthday anyway? Why were birthdays even a thing to celebrate?
To everybody’s understanding, memory spans go with the amount of years you have left to live. If you had 40 years of life span left, you’d have a 40 day long memory span. People may grow older everyday, but birthdays really counted. They are the obvious days you’d be reminded that you’d have one day less in your new memory span.
Who do people celebrate birthdays with anyway? Heck, do people even remember their own birthdays? It didn’t make sense, especially when you didn’t remember the people who gifted you the gift of life, albeit not a very memorable one.
The old polaroid tugged at John’s heartstrings as a wave of emotions somehow overcame him.
It’s been an interesting journey from site visit to jumping back into illustrator and creating my first infographic, something I never thought I’d do. On top of that, it’s slightly stats based and numbers are just never my thing.
Firstly, it was about sieving out the subject that I wanted to present, and eventually I settled on the war memorial which I had the most feels and observations from the trip there. I think in my end presentation, I was able to present my thoughts and feels gathered from the trip and I’m happy with that!
But, I also feel like my work is kinda basic. I mean I like it, I am happy with it, but just basic in the sense that it just looks like a common infographic. As mentioned in my research post, it seemed to me like infographics all look kinda the same, so it was difficult to do something outstanding. The most special part of my infographic was probably the highlighter, which I thought was slightly genius (concept wise) but unfortunately could be executed better hahaha.
Initially, I was going to opt for a more sketchy look by drawing out the whole infographic. Going for the whole Megan Nicole Dong feel + the sketchy infographic look as written in my research post. However, as I set out to experiment on how I was going to do it, I felt that it wouldn’t work out because of the various structures and different aspects of the cemeteries, and it just wasn’t the look I envisioned.
Some miserable attempts that I almost forgot about:
Totally miserable
So, I settled for Illustrator. The moment I decided this, I knew it was going to look some sort of basic. But good thing is, I also knew the kind of look I was going for.
Much of my infographic was created in references to these:
your-travelling-collections.blogspot.com
behance.net
mkshft.org
The simple, thin, clean lines on a subtle greyish background. In reference to the first and second image, I had also planned to do a splash of colour in my infographic which didn’t turn out that well (shown later).
I set off to drawing out the memorial in illustrator, with the use of some reference images such as
(found on Google)
Really not sure what I was doing with life with the indecision on perspective. My 4D teacher coincidentally saw this and commented on it and I came to epiphany that everything should be in isometric perspective and it all made sense.
Slowly started populating the graphic, which made it look way better. I’m glad I trusted myself as I told myself that it’s going to look okay when it’s finished despite how plain it looked at the beginning.
Tried adding the splashes of color I wanted to do initially. I wanted the cemetery to remain colorless, with a splash of the blue sky to bring across the ‘solemn but not sad’ feel I was going for. A beautiful blue sky with some birds was gonna do the job, I thought. But apparently not. I also wanted to try like a more saturated, cyan kind of color in reference to the river map image posted above, but it was too bright in this context. Because of the way I drew it, there were gaps across all the memorial columns… But hey that kinda looks like shadow / sun thing let’s try if it would work if I added some orange. After all, I was quite for the blue/orange/pink color scheme (as posted in research post) even if they looked quite common. So I tried it out and, “No,” I thought, after rearranging some of the lines and colors and stuff. It also didn’t feel right because I felt like in between the columns should show the blue sky for clarity in visuals instead of the whole block being yellow. It was also getting too bright and happy. Initially, the idea was to include some background knowledge of how the Japanese came from the North instead the South in a whatsapp / text format.
Something like this ^ And at the same time introducing some other elements of Kranji.
But eventually I decided to scrape it and focus on the graves and memorials. On hindsight, I felt it is quite helpful.
Even after deciding on the war cemetery, I had to sieve out what exactly of the war cemetery as there was quite a bit of information. I wanted to present a little about the war as background/context, the other aspects of Kranji that I had visited, or focus the whole thing on the cemetery manager (which I decided not to as it wasn’t data I collected from my site visit) – and maybe that was just too much.
Anyway, I continued with what I had and eventually also stuck to one type of labelling that would stick better with icons which would make majority of the infographic work, as advised by Joy, “to ensure that the text and imagery are integrated well such that the imagery provides information as well. [T]he last thing we want is information in text and just a “background” image of the memorial – making it look like a PowerPoint presentation slide. A good tip would be to imagine if one didn’t understand the language of your text (in this case, English) would he/she be able to tell some, if not most, of the information you are conveying?” rather than just point and put words. The advise was super helpful.
A big part of this project was the information that I wanted to convey. I ended up with stats eventually and was grateful that I found easier ways to calculate them and that there were sufficient information available online (albeit the discrepancies). Data and numbers are dry information and I hope in my end product, I was able to convey them more visually.
Some progress images:
Oh yes, I also stuck with three of my go-to fonts, Courier, Helvetica, and Avenir light. With a wee bit of reference to
mariahalthoff.com
All in all, I think the eventual outcome was not bad, I’m happy with it, but maybe I could experiment with colors more. Quoting, it is
“Good but not sexy” – Clara Lim, 2017
More importantly, I think I have somewhat achieved the goals I set for myself from the last project – to sketch more / come up with more compositions / layouts – as seen in my visual journal. (Yay small improvement steps).
So from this project to the next, I aim to push the boundaries, explore with colors more, let loose, and get sexy.
To summarise this project, it was indeed a tough yet beneficial challenge to tie in messages to visuals.
The final over arching message for my visuals would be “it doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, you can be anything you want to be“.
I have made use of song lyrics from a song titled “I’ll Make a Man Out of You”, that came from Mulan, the animated feature. The particular verse goes like this:
[men] WE ARE MEN
We must be swift as a coursing river
[men] WE ARE MEN
With all the force of a great typhoon
[men] WE ARE MEN
With all the strength of a raging fire
Mysterious as the dark side of the moon
I am relieved to have eventually found a message that resonated with my stand.
Evidently, each of my design showcases the elements and are united with the use of the same colour schemes and side profiles. Equally proportioned Male and Female faces, represented by colours, were used to represent the equality between the genders.
As a believer of teamwork, I also see a sub-message that goes, “if everybody would work together, they can be anything they want to be” in my compositions.
In Coursing River, action is implied with flowing hair and air bubbles forming my names.
Similarly, in Great Typhoon, action is implied with the rotation of the faces, the background and my name.
In Raging Fire, my name was formed with fire and smoke is presented in both the foreground and background.
In Mysterious Moon, my name was ambiguously hidden and it replaces the eyes of the faces.
Agreeing to the feedback I have received, I believe I could have explored more with using colours in the Typhoon and Moon compositions as I did in the River and Fire compositions. Also, exaggerating the pull of the alphabets in the Typhoon composition.
The other feedback received includes the good use of proportions and unifying colours.
The reflection for this project can be found here, in the Progress update.
My four jobs: Coursing River, Great Typhoon, Raging Fire, Mysterious Moon
Since the last consultation, it has been concluded that I needed to tie my visuals more to the message I was trying to convey.
I started off with re-looking at my message, “Women can be these things too” and rephrased it to become “It doesn’t matter man or women” which I found resonated with my neutral stand better as I wouldn’t consider myself a passionate feminist, and gender roles is such a grey area to me.
From here, it was coming up with new designs that would convey the message.
With my previous female-centric stand, I found it tricky to not fall into the confines of gender bias as I thought usage of colours or body forms stereotyped to genders would become a oxymoron with my message.
I preferred the neutral stand as the usage of colours would simply be a representation of the genders instead of a stereotype. Typing “feminist” into the search bar and seeing a variety of designs being pink also helped realign my thinking.
In the above designs, pink was used as colour to help convey the message better and I found that designs with the pink help the feminist message stand out better as compared to the designs in other colours.
Instead of a ‘stereotype’, colours can be used as a signifier, a semiotic mechanic to drive the message as blue and pink could be considered indexes that connects the message – pink commonly represents females and blue commonly represent males.
Secondary Research (Brainstorming has been documented in sketchbook)
Saw this during research / brainstorming for the visuals and thought it might be helpful
Let’s get down to business ?
Relooked at the Mulan video for some inspiration!
Like most animations, Mulan’s face is rather minimal and I think that influenced my style.
Also, I really like artist, Henn Kimm’s minimal lines and colours.
I love how despite the restricted (but strong and contrasting) flat, solid colours and clean lines, she could deliver her illustrations minimalistic-cally. I also like how clean and solid the backgrounds look with no textures, just one flat color.
Redesigning:
After brainstorming, I came to using faces of a man and a woman. They provide a focal point, and are straightforward, effective and obvious enough to carry my message, rather than using hands or the whole body which could end up in things being unnecessarily complex.
I started off with sketching some composition ideas, and then coming up with the faces, the new main attraction of this series, tracing the carefully deliberated and handpicked side views of a male and female faces.
I traced the images instead of drawing them from scratch because I felt like the forms and contours matter. Despite the fact that there are some very pretty Korean boys, men generally have different facial features and structures as compared to women.
I snuck in the differences using minute variations in angles in the brows, lips and blusher.
I thought thick and straight eyebrows would be cute and would stand out, instead of basic and legit eyebrows, since they’re stylised drawings anyway. I feel like they complementing the equally outstanding blushers and help make the design more stylised. Plus, Mulan has thick eyebrows too. (And as everybody already know, thick eyebrows are in trend)
I love including blushers in my works. They’re cute. Especially as seen in local artist Lyyeow’s works:
From here, I guess it is pretty obvious that the overall style for these pieces would be more graphical and stylised – fitting to my major in animation, as well as the origins of the concept, an animation feature.
Drew blobs of water for hair because the imagery of ‘swift as a coursing river’ reminds me of hair gloriously flowing in the water.
(It always does, just like in this piece from my Ego project:)
But I used blobby hair this time to match the flat, vector look, and also…
Since the last update, I have decided that the lasso tool is my go-to for this series. It is a secretly powerful tool that if often overlooked as I try very hard to digitally draw smooth flowing shapes. I first came across it while I was watching one of Feng Zhu’s (a concept artist) digital painting videos. Look at what it can achieve!!! It is a secret weapon and I was going to try and make use of it more.
In the compositions above, the type wasn’t working out yet, and the background was still messy – I received some suggestions to try using the bubbles to spell out my name.
Also considered using different kind of foam / bubbles but nope, just nope.
Though there is rather rhythmic movements in the above composition (it was intended for the bubbles to look like it was flowing down the hair to suggest action), I thought the negative space on the right side seemed awkward so I tried to switch it around.
Adjusted the layout, then tried to remove some elements of the original designs (Brush strokes in the background and testing out different colour schemes and opacity).
Eventually the brush strokes were removed to achieve a flatter and cleaner look, taking into consideration that brush strokes /textures might not fit in the other designs as the they were placed initially to help mimic the gradience of water.
So there, swift as a coursing river, the swiftness is demonstrated in the flowing hair, bubbles and blobs of water in the background.
Originally, I wasn’t going to use dark grey for my all the background, but figured that it was fitting as it helped make the faces stand out as I was working on the Typhoon design:
In the first draft, I used Green and Blues because that’s how a typhoon is seen from outer space (as researched last post). I also thought that the contours formed by the faces made the middle section look like a continent.
But the colours didn’t work out and black worked much better, especially in promoting a style and unity between the four pieces and breaking the predictability of the colours used for my four jobs.
Tried to use the concept of random neon colours (from the previous designs) again but it didn’t seem to work out. Then, I drew my name instead of using a commercial font and attempted for it to look like it was being sucked into the middle.
Played around with different ways to signify the typhoon as I thought the first one really looked quite like people smoking.
Force of a great typhoon, straightforwardly signified by the circle of people around, as typhoons are just rotating and rotating and rotating and rotating….
Using the idea of covered fonts form my previous designs, here’s mysterious moon.
I didn’t mention in the previous post, but how the name was hidden (in this version) was inspired by the moon phases.
? ? ? ? ? ? ?
I didn’t realise, but feedback said that it looks like solar eclipses!
The side profiles were fitting to dark side of the moon. Even more so because the colour scheme is near black and the type being backed by shadows. Researching mysterious men/women, I came across these pieces which stood out to me:
https-//www.pinterest.com/jealouscurator/.jpg
Wellllll I couldn’t smudge a minimalistic illustration like this and it wouldn’t fit into the look and feel of the series, so the eyes were removed to help exude mysteriousness.
Lastly, raging fire was really quite challenging.
My attempts at taking elements from my previous designs like the other pieces were no good as it didn’t fit in with the other three visuals and they had too much red in them:
How to represent fire with faces????
I remembered that the sun is a ball of raging fire
So why not give it a shot:
Which didn’t work out. There are waaay to many faces and it doesn’t show any signs of a fire.
I looked at the three other visuals as a whole and came up with a composition for the faces that is different from the other pieces.
I also thought of using smoke and silhouettes to help signify fire. A raging fire would mean lots and lots of smoke.
Initially I collected this as a reference to write out my name:
But I wanted a flatter layout to resonate with the other designs.
Since there are some colours in the coursing river piece as compared to the other designs, I thought of similarly including colours in this piece to help balance the pieces out as a whole.
Tried different colour combinations and eventually decided to include the lines for the faces to help read them clearer and also harmonise more with the other pieces.
Still rather unhappy with the design, I explored with drawing my name differently, this time making use of Photoshop’s liquify tool.
Base drawing (before Liquify)
After Liquify and color changes / additions
How the name was drawn was inspired / referring to animation of flames that I have encountered before (while doing research on another project):
Also ended up using orange because it made that fact that this piece is about fire, obvious. Tried out other colours in the process and they just didn’t work out.
The GIF below also shows the process of trying to integrate the type more into the design. Within the composition, I also tried placing the name in different places but they didn’t work well. Eventually, I found that varying the opacity of the smoke in the background helped a lot. It also gave a better impression of a raging fire, or an impression of smoke in varying distances.
I also switched the male and female faces around so that in the combined presentation, the gender of the faces will mostly be alternated.
Reflection
Initially, I really found it a struggle to have to include a message within my visuals. It was tough for me and really something I thought I was quite bad at. In hindsight, I think it was a good struggle to have to have meaning in my design. After all, I came up with a message I thought was quite special, and I think the end product speaks.
I also found that in my end products, there was a sub message that really resonated with me. With both the faces of men and women, other than genders not playing a part, it could be seen as men and women working together, just like eventually in the video of the sound track. After all, they were all coming together to defeat the Huns, so why would genders matter as long as they are willing?
Because I am so neutral (or some say indecisive) person, more often than not I find myself not being able to pick a side, I often fall back onto the solution of people working together. I love it when people work well together. Half way through designing I realised this sub message in my designs and felt like it really worked out. Despite my works usually not being personal and being more general, I like how the end product was still mine in the end because of it’s neutral tonality and sub message about working together.
In last semester, I mostly tried to use traditional mediums and methods which were mostly very time consuming. Using a digital medium was in contrast much more effective. Butttt, I thought I should be more particular at the beginning especially if I was going to use the same illustration for all four pieces. Because I was not so particular then (I thought I was just testing compositions), I duplicated the illustrations into other designs though the strokes were uneven and not clean. I had to go back to each design and touch up afterwards.
Also, with the digital medium, it was convenient to explore minor tweaks but I think I might have fell into the trap of easily settling on a composition. My usual work process was – find something to start with (in this case the faces and my previous design), lay them around, find something good, and work on it. I thought I could really have explored more compositions by sketching first before diving in digitally. When I explore digitally, the compositions would usually differ much less.
Tying in with exploring more compositions, I would also like to build up a better habit of doing more research, especially according to specific artists instead of related words. When I get too excited, I tend to come up with my own ideas and work from there. I find that this results in limitations in my designs, especially since the visual library in my head can in no way compare to the multitude of resources and references, I can find out there. I could probably have pushed my research more, and earlier, instead of being too anxious and diving into test designs – which I ended up settling on (too) quickly. This was evident when I was stuck on my raging fire composition. By then, I was already more or less done with the other three designs and searching related words (like fire, fire typography) wasn’t able to help much. If I had researched more and explored more compositions in the beginning, maybe I could have come up with something better.
Additional research according to the style I was going for could have been more beneficial, though the research in the beginning did help as I was so inspired by David Carson. I really enjoyed his style and tried to use some of his methods, though eventually I veered away because of the change in design concept. Despite that, David Carson’s interview inspired me to be more personal about my designs, which I felt at least this pulled through because this series was something related to animation, and the concept and design were still things that were in my style. It feels/seems like something I would do, and I am happy with that, especially since I almost just gave up with my stand when people suggested that a female-centric message would be easier to convey.
So there, in this assignment, I overcame the great barrier of marrying the message with the visuals. I think the compositions could have been better, but I am happy with how the end product speaks, is united, and the main colour scheme.
My first consultation concluded that I was off track as my initial concepts had no messages behind it. I came up with a few other ideas, and am going ahead with idea A!
A: Concept: What makes a man The four jobs: Coursing river, Great Typhoon, Raging Fire, Mysterious Moon Message: Women can have these qualities too! Tone: Parody of Mulan’s “I’ll Make a Man Out of You”
B: Concept: What makes a housewife The four jobs: Caregiver, Chef, Housekeeper, Teacher Message: Housewives / mothers are everything. They are multi-talented, and they seem to be able to juggle everything. Tone: Cheerful / appreciative?
C: Concept: Shortcuts to be rich The four jobs: Tai tai, Bank Robber, Drug Lord, A Rich Character Message: Everybody wants to be rich, but is there really a shortcut to it? Tone: Satirical
D: Concept: The hidden work behind an animation The four jobs: Producer, Pre-Production Artist, Production Artist, Post Production Artist Message: People so easily enjoy the work they see on screen, but most don’t know how much work and time is put into it. Tone: More serious? – I am also considering adding a twist to make the above concept more ‘me’ by using ‘Jack’ as my name (ironically). Because of the phrase, ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’, because I am a generalist.
Since this project was more typography based, I thought about how I could make use of types to express the various verbs (swift, force, strength, mysterious). I decided to experiment with using the formatting of the fonts, such as bold, italics, and stuff like that.
Swift as a Coursing River
Hmmmm how to express coursing river? Italics was used in hopes to express movement, like swoosh. I started off with the imagery of river contours in mind, using blue as a base colour, and eventually delving more into using hints of turquoise and teal.
I also experimented with moving the alphabets around, as if they were carried by the water current. However, I thought that it wasn’t expressing ‘swift’ and ‘coursing’ enough as the visuals seemed calm instead of quick.
Eventually, I tried to overlay various images of water, and drew some bubbles, attempting to make it seem more like a coursing river, at the same time complementing the alphabets and filling some negative space to make the visuals more interesting and less plain.
As I was working on this, I also saw this video: https://www.facebook.com/culturacolectivaplus/videos/1583477421669715/
and super loved it. Went back again in hopes of finding some references and inspiration and noticed how effective the use of the oil/ink/soap videos was. Yyyyes, oil, ink, soap imagery is bae.
So I grabbed this one and overlaid it on the existing design, experimenting with different blending options.
More experiments with the movement of the alphabets.
This one is my favourite so far. I thought the ink helped to represent movement as they looked like the bubbles you would see in the movement of water.
Force of a Great Typhoon
Don’t have much for this yet, except some possibly relevant imagery.
Thought of using trippy neon colors coming into blend because typhoons remind me of a huge blender that blends everything (represented by a mish mash of random colors) up. The base colours blue and green would represent the sea and land in this case. This is still a mess, have yet to be developed!
Strength of a Raging Fire
The text is in bold because well, strength of a raging fire. Didn’t want to use a typical fire imagery for this and used bold and expressive brush strokes as inspired by the ruggedy-ness in David Carson’s works. Half way through, I thought of how the brush strokes reminded me of Red Indians’ face paint and I did some research and experimenting with that, as Red Indians are commonly known to be fierce and strong warriors.
Mysterious as the Dark Side of the Moon
Experimented with hiding the type for this, because, mysterious means not revealing everything easily. Also tried different ways I could hide the types. The drawing of the moon was from an old work. Played around with using different colors and I preferred a dark moon because of the contrast it gives plus it could better represent the dark side of the moon better. The cropping around was again inspired by David Carson’s works.
Tried to use an image of the moon like this one but it didn’t really work out.
Moving forward after the group consultation, I am going to try to think of other possible messages these four ‘jobs’ can indicate as well as how I can better tie my visuals to my message.
I should also be thinking more about helping the type fit in with the designs instead of looking like it’s overlaid.
They call themselves enforcers. I was tortured, even though they know I won’t remember.
Finally, they threw me back into this cell at Bacon Street they call my home, they thought I fell asleep, they thought I won’t remember.
But I will stay awake to write.
It was the last day of this memory span and they finally caught me. But the room is still safe, my home is still safe. There’s still a lot to be investigated, but there’s new progress every memory span. Remember to keep track, document, and stay hidden.
Their watch will keep growing tighter.
The map is tattooed on my chest. This note has to stay hidden.
Forbidden.
John read the note stuck onto the mirror as he observed his appearance and traces his fingers along the scars on his shoulders and chest. He turned around to see his back. There were more scars, and underlying were tattoos that are too disfigured to understand. He only remember his own name, and the fact that in this world, citizen’s memories were limited by their memory spans. Was he a fugitive? Did he find out who these people were? What was he investigating? Where is Bacon Street?
He turned to look around the room once more. Attached on the wall was a map with read marks all over, and a red pin marked Bacon Street, along with a note that said:
They put civilians in apartments and houses, so we would wake up thinking that’s where we live. Right HERE is my home – map is tattooed on my chest.
There was a newer note that wrote:
There must be closer surveillance back at Bacon Street after I was caught. Go back once a day so they won’t be suspicious. Be wary of neighbours.
John steps back and glances upon the wall once more, noticing multiple mentions of a “red book”. He turned to the desk and sure enough, there was a hint of a red book, covered by scattered pieces of paper. He picks up the top piece, which read:
Given the restrictions of 6 lines we’ve come up with, we were tasked to make a short film.
Our lines were
What do you see?
I see red.
I don’t want to do this anymore.
Fuck.
I’m sorry.
It’s too late.
After much development, I chose to tackle ‘red’ as a name of a character, referring to schizophrenia where patients commonly see hallucinations, hear voices and fail to understand what is real.
Did you know? Bipolar, schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorders are three different mental disorders.
And I am a Great Typhoon
And I am a Mysterious Moon
