Design is Dangerous: Smartphones

Do we control them…or are they controlling us?! There are so many smartphones available in the market right now that can almost do anything and everything; most popular ones are the iPhones, Blackberries and Droids. It used to be so simple, I still remember the days of my old brick like phone where all I can do with it is call, text, and more importantly play that addicting game “Snake”.  Nowadays, these utility knife phones let us email, face time, play music, and plenty of other tech related activities. Sometimes it seems that instead of helping us be more productive, smart phones tend to take us away from our reality, removing us from the moment. Everywhere you look, you can see somebody with that glazed over look in their eye, staring at their phone swiping, pressing, and texting the time away. We seize the phone rather than seizing the day. Smartphones are a necessity today but they do exist as unintentional dangers to society, instead of the community growing through social communication, smart phones tend to remove and hinder the human element of interaction.  Smartphones do get the job done when it comes to productivity and networking, it just happens that with all the new technology advancing, the form of interaction is reduced. Instead of taking away from it, we as a society should not let smart phones be the main focus of our daily life but as a peripheral, a way to enhance human interaction.

Design in Society: Electric Cars

                                                   

           During a time of a suffering economy and high oil prices just around the corner, the concept of electric cars used by everybody in the near future is a Utopian in its design. Electric cars started in the 1900s and its level of mass interest slowly increased due to a focused interest in environment friendly emission vehicles. With current technological advances, the design of the electric car has been refined and is truly an efficient environment friendly and eases the pain of gas price hikes. The true beauty to this Utopian design is that they run 100% on electricity only, removing our dependency on depleting fossil fuels.  With such an innovative and environmentally friendly design meant to improve society, why don’t we see more electric cars out there on our roads today? It’s a combination of many factors, pressure from gas companies, recharge times, and electric cars are pretty expensive. Even with those factors against them, electric cars were designed to remove our unhealthy dependency on fossil fuels. It’s sad to see this Utopian design go unused and underutilized since it can really have a positive impact on our everyday lives. So why not just unplug your cars from the outlet and roll out.

Color Transforms: Google

     Blue, red, yellow, and green; known for reliable and fast web searches, Google’s logo and icon shows complete interaction of primary colors in their design that more often than not would not work if used on another logo. There would be too many colors clashing with each other but in Google’s case, it is a sure fit. Starting with the main logo, each letter of the word is a separated and is colored in one of the primary colors. The colors do not particularly blend or distract from one another but the separation of the solid colors gives it a simplistic feel. The lack of direct physical interaction between the primary colors makes the logo more distinct and straight to the point. You would easily and automatically recognize the logo, which is why when Google comes out with their “themed” logos usually based on a holiday or a pop culture reference, it is always a hit. Just playing around with the letters and incorporating the main colors allows the logo’s identity to remain prominent. Similarly designed to the main logo, Google’s smaller icon design combines the primary colors in a more unified puzzle piece like image. Abstract cut outs of the primary colors are placed close to their complementary color creating a design that flows and seem more incorporated than the original logo.

                                   

Elements of Ergonomics: Mazda RX-8

  

        When it first came out in 2004, the Mazda RX-8’s design was unconventional at the time. Aesthetically designed differently from sports cars at the time, the Mazda RX-8 dared expand their market by reaching new heights of innovation with their new line.

Safety: As its main function as a vehicle, safety is one of the most important features of the car. It achieves this with the “I” beam frame that runs through the middle of the car that strengthens the frame of car. Coupes usually seat 5 people, but since the I beam runs through the car, you have 4 sectioned off seats, providing solidity through the overall car. With safety as its prominent feature, the RX-8 fulfills its priority by focusing on the safety first and letting it influence the car’s design.

Comfort: Designed as a sports car, the RX-8 has bucket style racing seats. Usually just used as the front seats, the bucket seats were also used in the two back seats, this was because of the I beam construction. The regular three person back seat was removed and they installed racing seats just like the front seats because of the construction of the car.

Ease of use: Compared to other sports cars, the RX-8 can hold its own in its class, with some tricks up its sleeve. Designed as a coupe, which normally has two doors, Mazda incorporated freestyle doors to its design. Meant to allow easy access to the back seats, the RX-8 turns into a sedan disguised as a sports car. The RX-8 rotary engine is the lightest factory made engine, only drawback is that needs higher revolutions that decrease gas efficiency.

Performance (productivity): One of the most used forms of transportation, cars are as reliable as it can get, but it depends on the model and make of the car. The problem with this car is that the rotary engine that the overall design was based on needs to be carefully watched and maintained. The rotary engine with its spinning triangle design is completely different from piston engines. Instead of recycling its oil, the rotary burns it up, that means that a constant maintenance of engine oil levels.   

Aesthetics: From one look at the car, the first thing that stands out are the flared out front and back fenders, it’s a very distinctive look that is a real eye catcher on the road. Usually, the salient characteristics that can distinguish brands from one another are displayed on the face of the car, usually by the makeup of the grill, headlights, and hood design. Some people find the aggressive lines mixed with curved fender design a bit too much and over designed, but it is that certain blend that adds to the car’s appeal.

     The Mazda RX-8 displays the gestalt principle with a complete unity of its design working together to further enhance the overall product. Every aspect of the car had a point and reason to its design, fulfilling the categories of the elements of ergonomics for designers.    

Wanderlust Singapore Hotel

Tucked away in the heart of Singapore’s little India, the Wanderlust Hotel takes a fun and quirky approach on hotel room design. Instead of having one single room theme or design for the whole hotel, the Wanderlust hired 4 different agencies to design each of the 4 floors of the hotel. The end result was that the hotel guests are able to choose from 4 different stories, each one designed as separate worlds. The first floor contains small rooms that are coordinated by one single color and the theme of each room is artists and song titles, simply placed on the wall by neon signs. Contrastingly, the second floor has a black and white theme. The third floor houses origami and pop up style rooms. The origami room mostly made up of many corners that give the impression that its “folded” or creased. The most interesting part of this floor are the pop up rooms, stark white room with “furniture” popping up from the walls and ceilings, an effect made stronger by  being lit up with a yellow glow from behind. Lastly, the top floor has loft style rooms with its theme “creature comforts”, designed as if it came straight out of a child’s imagination.

It’s not advertised as the biggest, most upscale, and classy hotel, but it gives travelers and tourists and fresh change from lavish hotels that they can check into at any time. The hotel’s appeal is directed to those who would like to try something new and out of the ordinary. Designed to give its patrons a varied selection of rooms, the hotel wisely uses the designs of these 4 agencies to hook patrons into trying out their brand, even if it is slightly unconventional. 

http://wanderlusthotel.com/

Word & Image: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

     Pretty much stumped searching for a word & image topic for my blog, I turned to movies to give me an inspiration. I remembered watching the movie adaptation of the Scott Pilgrim comic series called Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The plot of the movie revolves around Scott Pilgrim who falls in love with a girl named Ramona, in order to “win” over Ramona, he has to fight the league of seven evil exes. Ramona’s seven exes who are ready to finish off anybody who dares to date Ramona. 

     The movie loosely follows the comic series but the main parts are still present. The action revolves around the comic stylized fights between Scott and the evil exes. The movie did a great job in inserting comic devices into each scene, a THUD, CLANK, SWISHHH aptly pops up during the epic fight scenes, sticking to the comic book style. The movie cleverly uses lines and full phrases from the comic and blends them into the scene along with the actors. In another movie, this would be out of place but in Scott Pilgrim, word and image have a synergistic relationship, the words and motion graphics playfully interact with one another.

Word & Image: Brian Fies, Mom’s Cancer

           During Brian Fies’ presentation in last Thursday’s class, the concept of word and image came up plenty of times. Separately, word and image are different kinds of forms that relay a certain message. If combined together in a cohesive and unified way, that message becomes stronger and supported.  In the book Mom’s Cancer, Brian Fies was able to tell the story of his family’s tough journey battling cancer through a comic. The serious and emotional theme of the book was carried strongly by the combination of word and image in most of the panels of the comic. For example, the part where his mother was unable to keep up with the medical terminology of everything, Fies illustrates his mother “drowning” in the terminology by having his mother on the foreground, floating above a background with plenty of small bold faced medical terminology repeating over and over. In another scene, Brian Fies said that his mother’s therapy was like walking on a tightrope, a dangerous balancing act. He reinforces those words by illustrating his mother on a balancing on a tightrope, showing that each different therapy was like balancing an elephant on one side of the pole, showing the delicate and risky predicament that his mother was going through. The combination of both word and image was able to create a deeper impact to the readers, solidifying the message that the author was trying to convey. 

Lebron Rise

One of the world’s most famous athletes, Lebron James, publicly announced his decision last summer that he is going to another team, making him public enemy number one in the eyes of every NBA fan.  Now seen as the villain and a traitor, Nike had to protect their multimillion dollar investment by quickly launching a new ad with Lebron asking the viewers…”What should I do?” Nike’s commercial is designed to change the current state of Lebron’s tarnished image. He does this by asking the viewers in the beginning of the commercial if he should admit that he made a mistake. Touching upon all areas where Lebron had an influence in, like his former team the Cleveland Cavaliers, shoe deal, and more importantly the message that he is NOT a role model. The ad is designed to remind the viewers that even if Lebron’s decision was a very bad one, it is made to humanize him as much as possible. That famous superstars like him are not perfect and are not prone to make mistakes. By breaking the fourth wall, the ad feels more organic, more emotional and vulnerable, a perfect recipe to what Nike has been doing really good of lately which is resuscitating the images of their tarnished stars.    

Murakami

     Turning “low art” and taking it to a higher degree of contemporary art, is the essence of Takashi Murakami. Subjects and ideas that are categorized as low culture are seamlessly integrated to higher forms of art and other media. His style called Superflat takes its roots from Japanese manga and anime, combined with contemporary western ideas. Andy Warhol’s method of turning everyday products and turning it into art was flipped around by Murakami, who took his art and applied it on them instead.

     

     Murakami doesn’t just create paintings and sculptures, he also is involved with commercial branding and merchandising, applying his eye catching and iconic style on high end brands. One of the high end brands that chose to collaborate with Murakami is Louis Vuitton. Vibrantly crisp colors and Japanese styling was used for one of Louis Vuitton’s signature bags, which was widely successful, becoming the most illegally copied bag ever.Murakami’s Superflat design is a stark contrast to the usually sophisticated and static Louis Litton designed bags. The colorful pattern shown in picture was applied on a white bag, showing complete trust in the marketability of Murakami’s art. It’s not every day that you find these clashing hues and multi colored eyes imprinted on a designer bag look appealing, but his art has been so popular and widely accepted that contemporary low culture designs like these are transferable to the high class fashion industry. Effortlessly blurring the line between art and commercial branding.

Comparison and Contrast:: Gap logo fiasco

                                         

     There’s a reason why the Gap logo has been running strong for 20 years. After previewing a new logo slated for a holiday marketing campaign, Gap immediately heard and listened to the response from the online community and scrapped their new logo design. Gap wisely listened to the outcry from the hundreds of replies on Facebook saying the same exact thing that the new logo could have been basically designed by an elementary school kid.

     Visually, both logos don't have many similarities. The only similarity that they share is the company logo and the ever present blue box. Everything else is changed, for example, the most glaring change would be the serif typeface to a bolder sans serif. They changed the company name from a slim white disposition to a black, heavy and enlarged type. The type of the company name itself can be a logotype, one can easily make an association with who the company is just by looking at the logo. The updated design looks clunky, unpolished and uninspired. The new logo shows that Gap is going to a completely new direction, which is definitely not good idea when you already have an established brand. Aesthetically, the old logo is refined, fully symmetrical with the lettering centered and surrounded by the dark blue box. On the other hand, the san serif logo is heavily left justified with the iconic dark blue box changed to a small fading blue afterthought at the end of Gap. From a design aspect, I believe that Gap did the right thing in staying with their 20 year old logo. At society’s rate of development, change is inevitable, it’s just that this change of logo isn’t the right one.

Design as Conversation: Banksy

        

        To chuck or not to chuck? Graffiti artist, Banksy, takes everyday street life and transforms it into a controversial work of art. The illegal nature of his work doesn’t stop Banksy from creating these one of a kind “street” art. Why conform and make art only for art museums and exhibits, when you can take existing symbols and give people a different spin on it. His art takes the shape of an existing structure and manages to show us his he views the world with the use of his creativity

        Banksy’s “Flower Chucker” is a powerful piece that we as a society, can learn something from. From what looks like a rebellious man, in a violent stance, a bouquet of flowers in hand ready to throw. Banksy’s political message of bringing peace instead of war is strongly conveyed in this piece. Removing the flowers from his hand, the man’s aggressive stance looks like he should be throwing a Molotov cocktail or a grenade. Instead he holds a colorful arrangement of flowers, ready to throw them and spread peace to all. Not only fine and other forms of commercial design allow communication between the artist/designer and their audience. This conversation between the artist and the audience is the determining factor to the message getting across. To me, graffiti like Banksy’s work communicate more strongly than some forms of art and design. Magically transforming a ragged wall on some nameless street corner into a political pro peace movement is a direct conversation between the artist and the viewers. 

Islands

          

                       Newcomer’s to the indie scene, The XX made noise in 2009 and just recently won the Mercury Prize, an annual music prize awarded for the best album from the UK and Ireland. The young trio from London, focuses on spacey, hypnotizing rhythmic beats, and intimate back and forth musings of between the lead singers. Their music gives me the feeling of vulnerability and honesty all wrapped up and delivered in delicately crafted simple beats and lyrics.  

                     The video that I wanted to analyze entitled Islands. I was never really into the indie scene until I heard this song. I was pretty much hooked onto the band after that. The video is a direct parallel to the heart of this band. Simply complex. It’s like an iceberg, the deeper you go, the more you’ll get their message. The video has the trio sit on a black couch in the middle of set that has X’s lit up on the back wall. Surrounding the trio are 3 couples, dancing to a tight 8 second set of choreography, which is repeated throughout the whole video. The first time I watched it, I didn’t get it at all. I just sat there thinking; hmm they just did the same thing like a hundred times…that was kind of cool? So then I watched it again closely and realized that after each repeated set, the dancers change a small part of the choreography. The intense stories of the 3 couples slowly unfold, with band monotonously still sitting there on the couch, fearing the inevitable. Simple design, complex message.

STONE SOUP

              

                Last Tuesdays Stone soup activity was pretty interesting. We were told to bring any arts crafts materials or anything we have around the house that would be an interesting addition to the “soup”. I just recently moved up here so I didn’t have any art materials to bring. I after a furious search all over my apartment, the ingredients that I ended up bringing are a bunch of colorful notecards, pipe cleaners and disposable spoons/forks. Armed with a bunch of random materials, then we were told to create something using the materials that we brought as inspiration. At first, my group and I were just throwing around ideas to see what we can make. Since our ingredient were random and limited, it was pretty hard to come up with an idea then try to create from scratch. We were heading in the wrong direction from the start but eventually figured out that we need to let the items that we brought, steer the direction of the project.

                The final product…Mr. Fredricks the octopus. We got the idea from looking at Christine’s shirt, which had an octopus that was holding something in each tentacle. The octopus was actually a good choice since there were 8 of us in the group, we can decorate our own tentacle with whatever we want. This made the piece a bit more personal since we all contributed to the final product. It was difficult to put together the octopus with all the random stuff that we got but at least the main idea of our project was clear to us. Sure, you definitely wouldn’t be able to guess that our humble octopus and his baby octopus scene is a depiction of daily student life in Davis but who’s counting anyway. All that matters is that we all came together, crafted an idea, and delivered as best as we can.

     Stay classy Mr. Fredricks 

                                                              

Zoom Zoom.

    There is just something about basketball shoe design that intrigues me. It requires the ability to create an aesthetically pleasing and marketable shoe that is also designed to be capable of performing in high competitive play. This balancing act is necessary in order to thrive in the athletic shoe industry. Eric Avar, a famous Nike shoe designer takes this idea and brings it to life with the Zoom Kobe V. Kobe Bryant approached Avar and asked him to develop a low cut and the lightest basketball shoe ever, capable of handling the stress of a full season. The design of the shoe is very unconventional. First, professional basketball players prefer to use high cut shoes that cover the ankle, mostly for support. Secondly, a light shoe usually demands less materials leading to a shoe without a lot of cushioning. These two big concerns were solved by molding the shoe in a way that it acts like an extension of the foot, what may seem like only visually pleasing design concepts on the outside of the shoe also plays a part in the shoe’s performance on the court

    To further extend the marketability and popularity of this shoe line, the designers also decided to produce plenty of colorways for the consumer. They wisely crafted some of these shoe colorways to resonate pop culture. The picture on the top is the Bruce Lee edition, the dominant yellow resembling the famous jumpsuit that Bruce Lee wore in the movie “Game of Death”. The shoe on the bottom is the Dark Knight edition. The caped crusader would’ve been proud of the stylized and updated color scheme that fit the design of the shoe. The Zoom Kobe 5 takes on past concepts and seamlessly integrates them into a new product, giving them a fresh new look.          

Lets have a toast.

The scene, a ballerina striking a pose and a worn down gray floor next to tattered green siding of a warehouse…sounds like a recipe for a rapper’s cover art? For the controversial Kanye West, most definitely. This is the album cover art for Kanye West’s new single “Runaway”. Displayed in bold red above the ballerina, there’s no mistaking that the artist wanted to make statement. Visually, the cover art is both enigmatic and simply designed. The last thing one would associate rap music with is a picture of a ballerina, but in this case, Kanye cleverly unifies the music and the packaging. The single is about telling the girl to runaway from him, with Kanye West admitting to his flaws, an catchy self-incriminating song with blunt lyrics like, “...Let’s have a toast for the jerkoffs! Every one of them that I know.” The design of the cover art and the song both convey the same message, strengthening it, daring and straight to the point.

The worn down and tattered surroundings that the pristine ballerina is in provides a gritty scene. Simplistic but carries a heavy tone. Moving the main subject, which is the ballerina, to the left side shows a fine use of negative space. I really like the muted color scheme used in this design; it’s bold and eye catching without being off-putting to the audience. The composition is well executed and designed to be ambiguous to the listener until they hear the song and fully understand the concept that the artist was trying to deliver.    

My first encounter with design...The Jeepney

Living in the Philippines when I was a kid, jeepneys were an everyday reminder of creative self-expression.  Jeepneys can be found everywhere and are the easiest and cheapest mode of public transportation. The main thing that intrigued me about these humble former US military jeeps was the fact each jeep was original. Sure, the basic structure of the vehicle is similar but I have never seen two jeeps with the same design. The driver or the owner starts out with a blank slate and then peppers the jeep with a taste of their personality. I can always remember the bright and usually clashing colors that cover the jeeps from bumper to bumper. In my view, they were not purely decorating these vehicles for aesthetic purposes but for expressing themselves in the only creative medium that they have access to.

The jeepney provides both form and function. They give the sometimes grey and dull poverty stricken streets a shot of life and energy. It would be pretty hard to imagine a bunch of plain silver military jeeps running up and down Philippine roadways. The range of creativity can also be noted as well, some jeep are painted with one or two basic colors and most of them are lively decorated with intricate designs. Even until today, whenever I go back home and flag a jeepney down, I’m still fascinated its design. Whether it has colorful flags, family crests, or sculpted metal horses on the hood, it’s a pleasant reminder of self-expression in their daily life.