Final project: Hype, crook and lyric – Comic magazine

Assignment: A comic book targeted at teenagers

Criteria: Print medium, 2-4 pages, copy less than 200 words, strip size approximately A3

 

This time round, our group decided to mimic American comic magazines. Hence, from comic dimensions, layout, paper, cover page, advertisements, we had intended for it to be as close to the real deal as possible.

 

As for the storyline, I suppose we did achieve the “hype” part of the project. The entire LT was in somewhat of an uproar.

Well, our storyline is basically a fresh take on fairytales / fables/ children nursery rhymes.

The existence of a darker side to the Grimm brothers’ tales is probably known to all, but usually, the darker side came from the characters already present in the story -  and that actually forms part of the moral of the story I suppose.

 

As for our “crook,”  instead of the characters themselves being darker, we made them remain innocent still.

Instead, we introduced a new character, a blood thirsty tree that blooms red flowers whenever it kills.

Our “lyric” in this case, is how each of these characters really met with their deaths. I won’t be revealing the entire story here, but we have

1. A  Jack and Jill + Rock-a-bye baby remix

2. The cow which jumped over the moon

3. Rapunzel

 

Here are they are.

 

And here are some pages of our comic magazine. These 4 are the front (inside, outside) and back (inside, outside) covers  of our comic.

Assignment 5: Post card – Your notion of colourful Asia

Assignment: To design a post card targeted at international publics, and that it conveys message about cultural/social/political aspects of Asia.

Criteria: Final prototype to be A6, front – in colour, back in B/W or grey + versions of post card in different colour schemes.

 

Initially, I hit upon the idea of representing Asia as a cube, to make use of the various colours of the flags to show how colourful Asia is but in hindsight, I wasn’t exactly sure how to execute it back then.

Let me show you.  

Hence the half-baked excuse of an open cube (and if it is open, it can’t be a magic cube!). I personally feel that while I like the idea, it is rather playful and unusual, it doesn’t really seem to mean anything.

And the colour combinations, in a later consultation, were described to be “rather boring.”

Worse still, a friend asked, “So if it is open and empty, does it mean Asia is like empty inside?”

T______T

So it was back to the drawing board. 

After spending some time developing the idea, this is my final prototype for Assignment 5.

 

From left to right, here are the names of the colour schemes.

(Top) Traffic lights, Morning, Ice-cream at the side-walk

(Bottom): Raining in the City, Bonding over Coffee, Psychodelic Night life

 

As you can probably tell, they are inspired by various slices of moments in the city. And this city, could  be any of the cosmopilitian Asian cities.

 

Colours of Asia
they flash, blink, swim, and swirl.
 
From the billboards, streetlamps and lights in the cities.

And to me,  if the whole of Asia can be
condensed into one building,

it would be the brightest tower  around the city that is known as The World.

 

In my new version of the postcard, there are two metaphors using the cube.

Firstly, Asia is a cube-shaped building radiating light in a city. But why is it in the form of a magic cube?

It is because it also represents the many combinations of colour that can be formed simply by twisting it.

Assignment 4: Poster – Save, Prevent, Kill

Assignment: To design a poster targeted at general public, and that it conveys message through its layout.

Criteria: Final prototype to be A3 sized.

 

I had quite a few quirky themes, but I figured that they are not suitable for the general public. Ideas like saving the garlic chili sauce from Macdonald’s, or save Superman. Well, the example of aliens was given in lecture, so I suppose that was where the inspiration came from.

In the end, I decided to use a supposed restriction – we were supposed to put “Supported by the Communications and New Media programme” and the NUS logo on the poster – into a strength.

And I began to brainstorm on what kind of public service announcements would the CNM department support? That was when I hit upon an idea: Cyber-bullying.

Here is Version 1.

 

Comments from the class were generally favourable. I raised the question as to whether I should colour it and there were differing views. My second question was as divisive, whether I should change the quote in the top left corner.

I was content to leave the poster as it was initially. However, a later consultation with Ms Siti changed my mind. That, and the fact that  many of my classmates used colour to great effect (which obviously raised the bar.)

So this is the final prototype for Assignment 4.

 

I will have to admit, the quote in the corner, the poster messages, I had more elements than some of my classmates. I think while I am happy that I did not sturggle too much with multiple elements in my poster (which I suppose in communications is the logical or cognitive appeal), somehow my classmates’ posters which used emotional appeal left great impact on me too.

Hmm, NM3215 anyone?

Assignment 3: Photo story – U C what I C

Assignment: Visual narrative – Telling a story in 8 photos.

Criteria: Photos to be approximately 3R each.

There is storyboard for me this time. I spent a lot of time trying to figure how to present the story that I had in mind, and then I spent even more time trying to take decent photos to convey what I was trying to present.

Initially, my photos involved peo-ple enacting the story (you will have to wait till you see the photos before I tell you my storyline though.)

Here is model #1. However, a quick blog surf online showed that the majority of past year photo stories consisted of people play acting. Hence I decided to switch to using representations of human instead. Twitter photo story competitions usually have pretty interesting examples on such a theme.

               

That wicked finger belongs to me. And I was trying out the idea of using instead of a person to execute my story. But I felt that hands alone still seem rather inadequate, because they are not very expressive on their own.

Hence, the use of ice hearts. Here are the photos, arranged to fit into A3. If you can’t get the story, don’t worry, you get one more try later because I have yet to add in CG, which was allowed for this assignment.

Now the one I presented in class did not have the clocks in the corner of the photos, I added them in after collecting comments from the class and friends that it may be a little too abstract, though apparently if you go up close to look at the photos, the story becomes more apparently, and more quickly too.

The storyline: The seven-hour itch

The seven year itch may no longer be that applicable, in a generation raised on fast food and the information super highway.

The seven hour itch is a new take on the seven-year itch.

The woman, represented by the pink heart, found the love of her life, represented by the blue heart.

But alas, as she aged, as seen in an older hand (my mum’s hand had a cameo) along came a younger woman, represented by the grey heart. And the blue heart was stolen.

 

Last comments:

Figurtively, all these happened in 7 hours but actually, it is all relative. I could have used 7 months, or 7 minutes or seconds, but it is harder to find visual representations for these units of time.

I used ice hearts, because I thought it would be more impactful to express heartbreak in this manner, as opposed to a broken hand, which probably may not make a lot visual sense as well.

All in all, this is a rather cycnical view of love, I know. But I still had fun and pain doing the shots. The hearts melted really quickly and I caught a cold from holding them in my hands for too long. Thank goodness for timer functions in cameras

Assignment 2: Abstraction – Pictogram

Assignment: To design a pictogram for the NUS community.

Criteria: Letters of my name must be readable. Final prototype to be size A5.

Progress: 1 photo > undergoes 5 steps of abstraction > pick one > develop into final prototype

 

I took a shot of the tray return area at the Burger King at The Deck.

 

Above is my initial abstracton process. I used a lot of cropping because I felt that it would be effective to my abstraction process.

However, when I had to pick one for my prototype, turned out that I would have picked the last one.

It should not be so, because the last one should have been too abstract had I followed the process correctly. Hence, as expected, the class commented that I could skip Step 2 or 3.

So I took their advice.

I picked Step 5, and from it, came up with a few prototypes.

Those three above were out of the four that I came up with. Here is my final prototype for Assignment 2.

Assignment 1: Namecard – Me, Myself and I

Assignment: To design my name so as to describe/communicate some aspect of me.

Criteria: Letters of my name must be readable. Final prototype to be size A5.

Process: 4 sketches > Pick one > Develop into 2 roughs > Pick one > Develop into final prototype.

I first came up with 4 thumbnail sketches.

1. MK is loving 2208.

• This idea was born out of trying to use my fingers to form my initials. It was when I was looking at the shadow of the “M” I had made that I realised that if I invert them, they form two victory signs. Or representations of the number “2.” As for the accompanying text, it is a throwback to McDonald’s tagline in its advertisements, ” I’m lovin’ it!”

 2. I am MK and I need coffee.

• The message (that coffee is very very important to me) wasn’t hard to come up with. Rather, it was how i want to present it that took quite a bit of thought. Initially, I figured that this idea has probably been used a few times over, but I thought it would be good to get some feedback on it since it felt like it has potential. 

 3. I am MK and I like mahjong.

• I did have a sketch for this idea. But as I had thought of this over the lunar new year, I had time and resources to execute the idea – by putting my mahjong sessionn on hold to do this. The shot turned out better than my initial sketch and hence I used it as my thumbnail sketch. If I choose to use this thumbnail, then it would need work in PS before it can pass as a CG anyway. (I can’t possibly submit a photo as a piece of CG right?!

4.  I aM Klutzy.

• This was possibly the hardest to execute – due to the amount of “damage” -related effects I had to add on to my initials. While I liked that there was some wordplay and the visuals tie in to the message, I felt that it may not be easy to create a CG out of that idea.

 

From my 4 thumbnail sketches, I finally decided on my second thumbnail to be developed into 2 roughs.

 

2.1 I am MK and I need coffee.

• I took the importance of coffee to me even further and dramatized the concept a little. Instead of a cup of coffee, a pack of coffee – similar to IV drips – is used instead.
• This rough is coloured after I had developed 2.1 and 2.2. I picked this to be my final prototype.  

 2.2 MK reacts instinctively to coffee.

• I changed the perspective of the drawing a little. Instead of a hand reaching INTO the picture towards the cup, I redrew the hand reaching across the page to the cup at the edge of the drawing. This is to create the feeling of a sense of action unfolding right in front of the viewer.

 

Reflections: I picked 2.1 to be developed into my final prototype because I had like the idea more.

Here is a listing of the feedback from the class on my tentative prototype 2.1.

• Hand – in full colour.
• Nails – paint them.
• IV tube / Name: the separation of my name from other elements in the drawing can be increased to make my name stand out.

 

But in addition to incorporating advice from my classmates and consultation with Ms Siti, I felt that more could be done to improve the overall design.

Along the way, I did consider changing the design to that of an actual name card, but I feel that if I had done that, I may have missed the entire point of the assignment. In the end, I introduced a “setting.”

I gave it a vintage look (or it could be interpreted as a coffee-kind of colour palette)., but that was partially because the pack of coffee and the “MK” are brown, so I had to balance out the hand colour too. It was initially a healthy peach-pink as you can see.

Now the setting, I added a table, and a noisy rainbow background. I feel that the noise in the background adds to the bustling and vibrant coffee-shop feel that exists not only in our HDB coffee-shops but also in your coffee chains.

Font used for the IV drip tube is “Turn Table”, font for my self introduction? “Caffeine.”

There you go, my final prototype for Assignment 1

Lecture Assignment 1 – Creativity Multiplier

In-class exercise: To draw a machine that enhances your creativity by a 100 times.

Mine is basically a teleporter and a time machine rolled into one. The right side of the picture shows a gigantic console where you can specify where and when you want to travel to. And I suppose all knobs and handles and switches allow you to be a little more specific. Coordinates, era, weather etc if you are really anal about what you want to teleport yourself into.

On the left is the place where the teleportation takes place. In the picture you can see me (the figure MK) walking out from what looks like a portal leading to a street (which is inspired by the WarioWare Touch! game on Nintendo DS).

Reasoning: The machine I drew had a lot to do with how I view design. I believe that stimulation or inspiration comes from understanding the context of the audience, the user you are designing for. Hence the purpose of the teleporter is, first and foremost, for me to find a way to understand these people better.

And if I need other forms of art or craft techniques later, this machine conveniently allows me to learn it in person, as opposed to learning through texts.

Reflections : The perspective of the console is a little off. The bottom-most line needs fixing, and the details on the console look 2-dimensional (while the machine itself is drawn to be 3-D?!)

This drawing was digitized by taking a photo of it, as opposed to scanning it. Hence dark and bright spots are apparent on the image. Drawing can have less feathering in its lines as well.