Week 5 Exercise

      This is the Billabong surf company logo, which is a company that I would love to work for and hopefully help design logos and other graphic designs. I think this logo is a great example of design and follows a good structure of balance and abstraction. It has a nice horizontal feel to it, resembling the ocean, as we can see the sets of waves. It also has a great positive and negative affect by using black and white for the same image. If it was black where the white was, then it would just be all black. Its very organized and balanced which is why I think people respond positively to it and can relate to the waves because thats the actual way the face in real life. It even has a nice shadow effect on the edge and also makes it feel like the poser is flowing with the waves, which helps its overall meaning and adds to the balance and perception of the ocean. Its a nice, level logo with good positive and negative contrast, and I think its a good example of graphic design. 

     This is the shoe/skate company called DC shoes. I think this is an alright logo, but ultimately, I don't think its very good. It is balanced, but not very abstract in any way, and it really shows the literal meaning of the company DC. I mean when I even type the two letters, it just looks like them blown up, so I fail to see the creativity put into the logo. It doesn't really show any positive or negative effect except that its pretty transparent, with black lining in the shape of the letters. Also there is a random star in the C, which I also don't know the meaning for, so it just seems random and pointless. One thing this has is balance. It is very level and clear to me because it is standing in its normal, upright position that my brain can easily focus with. It follows a very strict horizontal and vertical axis, which for this image, I think could be bad in a sense that it is too perfect.  

Week 4 Exercise

Line, People, People in a Line, Newspapers, Transparent, Bold, Unemployment, Help Wanted

     The picture above depicts what people see as unemployment. We see a single file line of general people, men and women, in all transparent black facing left. It actually is a loop of people because I can see the same shapes of people every two or three persons. Behind them are newspapers in a sort of collage with the headlines reading, "employment," "Help Wanted," "busy." The color of the newspapers are a faded yellowish color, maybe signifying old papers that have been read through many times. At the top of the picture there is the bold word in black, all caps, "UNEMPLOYMENT" over a white transparent background. This just shows the overall meaning of the picture and what it is trying to represent. 

Blog Exercise Week 3

     This is the Billabong surf company logo. There are many other surf companies out there whether small or big that have their own logo and design. This is just one of the biggest ones, similar to Quicksilver, Rip Curl, West, and many more. I chose this one because it covers all three leves of design. Representationally, this shows what a real wave in the ocean basically looks like but is not exactly a photograph. For it to be a perfect representation, it would have to be an actual photograph with attention to detail and this is not, although we do see what most people recognize as a shape of a wave. 
      Thus, because it is not a representation of a wave, it leans more toward symbolism and abstraction. The waves have been completely stripped of all extreme details and reduced to the bare minimum of what people recognize as a wave. Once they did this, they multiplied and reproduced it all over their clothes, surfboards, backbacks, etc. and many people can recognize it as the billabong logo. It retains the main aspect of a wave without showing a mass amount of detail hence making it a symbol. 
     Also it is abstract as well because of the design around the waves. We can see some sort of have rounded squares surrounding the two waves inside. Abstraction usually refers to a much deeper meaning than what meets the eye. Who ever designed this was inspired by the ocean to make a logo based on what they saw, and simplified it to a look that meant something to the designer specifically making it much more abstract than people would normally think. 

WEEK 2 Exercise

Representation: Here I have a picture of a real surfboard by the company super which makes really awesome boards with their shape and aesthetics. This is what it would look like in real life to our eye. We can touch and feel it, hold it, and recognize it in person. Representation is all based on reality since it is the most basic and dominating experience we have. We base what we see off of total visual experience and how we recognize it in life. When we look at this surfboard, some people will recognize for either its function or its shape. Either way, people can recognize it in person and it can't be changed from the form its in now. 

Abstraction: This heart is considered an abstract heart because it is a heart reduced to its most basic and simple looking form. A real heart would be drawn with much more detail and have veins and many other components to it that a real human heart has. This is just a plain red color in the shape of what most people recognize as a heart, even though the shape of a real heart has no resemblance whatsoever to this heart. This heart is stripped completely of its surface detail so that it can be more widely recognized. Also with the abstraction comes meaning. Most people would say that this heart, or any heart symbolizes love, but that has no connection at all with a human heart thats function is to keep us alive.   

Symbolism: This picture of a hand is more widely known as a symbol to tell pedestrians to stop while crossing the street. When the hand is blinking it means you only have a few more seconds before the light changes. This simple picture of a hand is meant to say stop, but that has no connection at all with a human hand and therefore is a symbol. It has been stripped down to the most simplest form of a hand without any detail at all, we only see a black line in the shape of a hand and everyone can recognize it. This hand has been reproduced all over the united states and at every cross street so people can remember it very easily making it widely known throughout a very large population. This symbol refers to the idea of stopping, but other symbols my refer to different things such as a political party, group, business, or institution. 

First Post

testing this out