Contrast (Excercise 11)

This is the 1974 Chair taken from http://www.flickr.com/photos/anyroom/sets/72157604058350087/. This is a good use of contrast. The base is made out of teak-wood, a natural material, and the actually seating is made out of acrylic, a man made material. The choice of material is ideal to highlight the attributes of materials. The acrylic is clear,transparent and allows other details to be seen through it, which lends off a lightness to the piece. On the other hand, the wood is opaque and blond in color, which suggests solidness.
The acrylic seat is composed of one solid piece that curves right in the middle of the base and back support.The legs of the chair consist of two geometrical parts that are easily connected together like puzzle pieces.

Here is an example of bad contrast. The link to this website is https:/.../CA1_webdesign_YvetteBad.jpg/65930790. The text on this website are relatively the same size and there are too many colors used which does not help create distinction between what is important and what is not.Different sizes of text would put emphasize and guide users to the important links .The overuse of color doesn't allow for "pop" effect against the black background. In this case it overwhelms the web page. It would have better to consider less color and using lower saturation of color would've create a better contrast to the black.
There is no contrast between the foreground and background due to the lack of tonal range that helps to create a sense of depth.

Tone and Color

Here are some packaging containers for a natural beauty company that I found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/14443796@N08/2092756289/. The containers consist of vibrant colors, consisting of fuchsia, purple, aqua, brown and beige that makes the packaging pop out to the viewers. The colors of the boxes are offset by fluid lines that create designs of foliage, situated on the left hand side, several in their complementary color. The fuchsia is complemented with a lime green, the purple is complemented with a teal blue, the aqua with a green image and etc. The complementary colors are a good idea because it creates a harmonious looking box without overshadowing the image and the contrast helps draws the eye to the design. The design is repeated adjacent to the original design, only this time the colors are in a slightly lower tone than the original box color. The softer tones creates additional visual interest and adds a sense a textual element to the otherwise simple packaging.
The text is placed in a square white box. The text size is very small so placing in front of a white background allows it to to be readable despite the tiny size. The light background also helps distinguish between the text from the box.

Basic Elements: Line, texture and Movement

Line:
Here an illustration from one of my favorite metal smith, Abigail Percy. With many, if not all of her jewelry pieces, she likes to make an drawing of an intended piece such as this illustration of 3 ginkgo leaves. The lines are simple and moving in one continuous upward direction that creates an illusion of volume. There is no sense of hesitation with this image as depicted in the strong, steady and fluidity of the lines. The soft lines of the top of the ginkgo leaves is contrasted by the darker lines that constructs the stems of the leaves. The juxtaposition of the light and dark lines also creates a sense of depth for the leaves. Another contrast is the difference between the curve of the top of the leaves in comparison to the straightness of the stem.


Texture:
Here is a the completed ginkgo necklace, by the same artist. The necklace compose of a sawed cut out of a ginkgo leaf. The texture is a created cross hatch design made by placing the metal in a rolling mill. The cross hatch is not very deep, just slightly etched on the surface which creates a matte sheen and creates a uniform bumpiness to the piece. The slight ridges is a good contrast to the five soft polish pearl. The pearls are smooth with rounded edges which gives off a mirror or reflective quality.


Movement:
Here is an inspirational picture of a relief carving on a Paris building that is yet to become a jewelry piece from the previous metal smith, Abigail Percy. This carving is a great example of movement. This images is not static like the two other example. It consist of four leaves that are connected at a base with three of the larger leaves climbing upward of the building. The smaller leaf cascade downward and eventually joins with additional leaves and flowers. The tips of the leaves on this carving curls to the right, the left and in every direction creating a wave like motion.

Good and Bad use of Syntactical guidelines

The above pictures are different Tropicana juice containers taken from www.thedieline.com. The first image is an example of the most recent container and an example of poor use of the Syntactical guideline. The container uses three main colors, orange, green and white. It is a very boring design and lacks packaging appeal due to the flatness of the design and text. The Tropicana logo consist of green lettering placed on the top right hand corner which is to create stress and focus to the name brand of the product. Although, with the logo being in a vertical stance it makes it harder to read. It reads from the bottom to the top of the container.
A glass containing orange juice is place next to the logo, with only half of the glass visible on the front with the other half on the side. To see the complete image of the glass of orange juice the container has to be angled as depicted in this picture. It would've been more appealing and balanced if the image was placed in the center.
What is in the center is the text stating that the Tropicana's juice contains 100% juice. Despite the use of white text for the 100% juice, the flatness of the text and the image blends together creating no real distinction. In fact the whole container is flat, lack contrast and depth.The only thing that has any dimension is the container screw top shaped like an orange.

A good container design would be the original Tropicana design, the second container. There is a good balance with this container. The brand, image of the orange and the additional text are perfectly lined up in the middle. To offset this balance, a straw is position in the orange as to indicate to buyers that this orange is so natural it's like drinking straight from the orange. The orange image is natural and realistic with the right balance of light and shadow placed on it. This feels more natural than the first container, which feels a little stark. The use of the round, soft edge orange is, also, good to play off the angular rectangle shape of the container. The Tropicana logo varies in color from a evergreen to a dark forest green which is good to create some depth and distinction from the rest of the text, placed underneath and on the bottom of the container

This image was taken from Elle magazine. It is an advertisement for Cover Girl mascara. The direct message is telling viewers that if you buy this product you can achieve “big and bold lashes with a hint of shimmer”. The indirect message is hinting that if you purchase this mascara you can be pretty and popular like Drew Barrymore.
The image is a head shot of Barrymore, with her head slightly cocked to the left and she is gazing straight ahead to the viewers as to engage with them while showing the viewer how long her lashes are. This is a common poise for this kind of advertisement. In fact the first five or so pages, not all of them cosmetic advertisements, of this particular magazine contain women in this similar position. The tilting of the head creates a imbalance to the picture which draws the attention towards her. Concentrating on her face helps to draw viewers to the intended selling feature, her eyes which is slightly above the center of the page, and the model herself.
To offset (or reduce the stress) the imbalance of the pose, the mascara icon and white text is placed the lower left hand corner. The additional text Cover Girl is, in the same complementary color as the mascara image is placed right on the top of the page to create more balance

The goal of this puzzle is to connect the five men, (A-E) to their designated house, creating five different routes that did not cross path. We were allowed to go horizontally, vertically but not diagonally. My husband, Brian, and I had different tactics but ended with similar results. My first attempt had me placing a straight line from man A to the house A. My strategy was to attack it without really thinking about it. I intuitively went with the man with the longest distance to his house. My first attempt apparently did not work. By going straight down the page, it created a road blocks for the other men. My second attempt was just as spontaneous as my first, only this time I tried to connect the man C with his house while working simultaneously with house A, trying not to cross path. It worked. After that I connected the D's together and everything fell into place. I had the men and house connected very quickly after that.
Brian's attempts were more planned out than mines. His first attempt was to connect man A with his house, also. He had the same logic that if he connected the man with the longest distance first then the others should be easy. It took him several tries before he was successful. Unlike me, his approach was to tackle each men one at a time. In the end we ended up completing each task in the same order with the exception that his was planned out and I went forward without considering a plan.

This second puzzle was harder than the first one. The goal was to match the 12 shapes into pairs, with one pair that does not resemble each other. We thought it was going to be fairly easy because this puzzle involves us mentally rotating the images and matching them with their pairs. We were able to get both A, I and C, D correctly because they required us to mentally rotate the pieces once. As the other pieces required more mental rotating, shifting and flipping our matching capabilities got worse. We made the same amount of errors. We both only got the two set correctly.

Visual search feature hierarchies continued...

As mentioned before with low level processing, that feature is biased and tuned into what a viewer is attempting to see, consciously or subconsciously. The brain processes the visual scene in parallel combing two preattentive feature at once to provides an easy, natural, "instantaneous" view of attributes, such as the "what and where", that one is looking for . The advantages of this process is that it grabs the viewers attention first. The process also makes "visual searches faster and more efficient".
This image is a good example of preattentive features. The below image is provide by Sage Media design company. Their link is http://www.flickr.com/photos/sagemedia/1732739146/. The candy boxes are in a vibrant purple,orange and green color. Coloring being one of the most powerful preattentive feature helps draw the attention onto the boxes. The colors are limited to three basic colors with modifying hues for the brand logo. By limiting the number of color helps avoid conjunction searches (searches with more than five elements or attributes within a search). According to researcher Anne Treisman "increasing the number of element in the display would produce a corresponding increased in the time required to notice the target". In this case, less is better.
The shape of the boxes are rectangle, vertically, long . The images of the content ,placed slightly higher than the middle of the box, is the same shape, rectangle, but the label is placed horizontally to provide a nice contrast. The images also provides depth to the otherwise flatness of the lettering on the boxes.