My Title Sequense of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

This is my flash of title sequense for the movie named The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

A funny animated font movie found on Youtube

I wanna share you guys a really nice movie found on Youtube. I really like the way the author use fonts to represent not only the 2 main characters but also their voice. So cute :D

Interface Typographic Assignment

My font choice for this assignment is Olympian which was designed by Matthew Carter in 1970.

It is said that the font is one example of the today generation of fonts that are mix of Old Face, Transitional and Modern typeface forms.

If you address to my previous post about Font Classification, you can see that Olympian has most characteristics of 3 font type said above. However, it tends to be the Old-Face style and is a fovored typeface for today newspapers.

Following are the character map image of the font and also my final flash movie for the Interface Typographic Assignment that to advertise for this font. ^^

Type Family Classification

As a designer, you are going to work with a variey of fonts available nowadays. It's not easy to choose a font for your design. You must consider a lot of related things in choosing a suitable font for your specific artwork.

A font is itself an artwork and it takes a font designer a lot of time to build, design and make it own style and identity. Each font family reflects "a certain time of period or cultural phenomenon" to viewers. A proper use of font can contribute greatly to your works and makes them more valuabe.

Although there are thounsands of fonts nowadays for you to choose, they are all classified based on "historical evolution of type and stylistic charactristics of the letterforms". This blog is to get you to have a look at these classifications cause they're really a basic and vital philosophy about type for designers.

First, let's get familiar with some terminologies:

• typeface: a set of letterforms that have been especially designed to go together.
• type family: a category that type is classified into, based on the historical origin and physical characteristics of the letterforms.
• type style: a modified version of a typeface.
• font: a collection of all the characters of a specific typeface that are necessary for typesetting.

Now, let's see the classification in details:

1. Blackletter Typeface




This is the very old typeface style used popularly in XV century. At this time, letters are written on parchments. These letters are drew very narrowly with narrow counters. This gives the page a overall dark appearance. For this reason, it was called blackletter.





This typeface is based on handwriting styles of Gothic (German) and Celtic (Irish) medieval scribes. The letters are highly decorative. The vertical letter stems cause a strong vertical presence.

Some examples of this typeface are Cloister Black, Duc de Berry, Kelmscott, Goudy Text.

2. Humanist Typeface

There was an significant envent in 1461 in German that made a change in the printing industry. Unlike the blackletter typeface, the humanist typeface is based on the Italian handwriting style. The typeface is most more easier to read. It's called humanist because of its organic style of letterforms.Some examples of this typeface used widely nowadays are Jenson Classico, Centaur, Cloiser, Deepdence, Stratford, Souvenir, True Golden.


3. Old Style TypeFace

This typeface were known widely in XVI century as a favored typeface for printed books. It looks less calligraphic and more precise than Humanist type but still have a organic feel of Humanist typeface.



Some examples of this typeface used widely nowadays are Calson Classico, Bembo, Caxton, Grody Old Style, Original Garamond, Palatino, Times New Roman.

4. Transitional Typeface

Transitional typeface was born 200 years later after the Old Style typefaces. This was because of technological advancements in printing at this time. It s more precise than the Old Face.

Some examples of this typeface used widely nowadays are John Baskerville, Cheltenham, Cochin, Corona, Electra, Mrs. Eaves, Versailles.

5. Modern Typeface
These typeface looks more precise and mechanical than the previous one. It refects "the advancing technical capabilities of societies undergoing industrialization".

Some examples of this typeface used widely nowadays are Bodoni EF, Bernhard Modern, Craw Modern, De Vinne, Linotype Didot, Modern No 216, Walbaum.

6. Sans-serif Typeface
San-serif typefaces were used popularly in the early 20th century and known as favored ones for web or any ones that display on the monitors of the computer.



Some examples of this typeface used widely nowadays are Univers, Helvetica, Futura, Kabel, Eurostile, Gill Sans, Frutiger, Optima.

References

Tova Rabinowitz,exploring TYPOGRPHY, Thomson Demar Learning, 2006, printed in USA

BNW TV commercial Series

These following are TV commercials for BNW car. Let's take a look ^^

An Indian ad ^^

A nice and funny Indian ad found on web, let's take a look ^_^

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7g4e5m5aRc

The designer dilemma

I found a very interesting topic that as a designer you should care of it.

The problem given by this topic is that as a designer, you must satisfy your client; and doing this may result in "not-your-design" at all.

What do you think about this?

This topic was given by David Byrne, you can access to his site by clicking the link below to see the whole article and leave your feedback about the problem.

http://www.davidbyrne.net.au/

Some nice safe-sex posters found on web

I like the first one a lot because it's a cartoon-based image. A couple with a happy face covered by a condom or in other words, have sex with condoms . This means that "wearing condoms to protect not only yourself but also your partner" (this sentence is just my first figuring message when I get first look ^^) .... Wow very simple but very strong message :D . Nice ^_^

http://www.blog.fr/community/profile_photo_sizes.php?item_ID=639189

Unlike the first one, the second one is very realistic. I'm not sure about the visual message of the artwork without the supporting text "safe sex is hot sex". But the artwork is really cool that can draw people's attention and then have them noticed about the text "safe sex is hot sex". In my opinion, it is effective in someway. This is also my favourite one :P.

http://www.posterservice.com/bigpics/20166.jpg

The third one is another version of the second one. This one was designed for a very dedicate audience in our society: homosexualmen. For that reason, it is not so nice to see so I'm not going to include the poster here visually. For you guys who get interest, click on the link to observe more ^^.

http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/VC/B/B/F/Z/

We now can see that unsafe sex now becomes a really serious issue in the world. There are millions of people in the world now are suffering the result of thier unsafe sex. Most of stituations can be traced into their lack of knowledge about how to have sex safely... To solve such an issue, we must let them know about how to have safe sex by using condoms, for instance.

The above posters are effective visual methods to tell them about safe sex. The audience is not only for nomal people but also for other ones (the third one is one example).

The link below can show you some more cute posters.

http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/VC/Views/Exhibit/visuals/hiv.html

My Safe-Sex Poster

This is my accomplished poster which is to encourage people to wear condoms to have safe sex as well as protect themselves from dangerous disease: AIDS

The work was done in Illustrator which is a great tool for creating vector-based images.


The main artwork was first sketched out on a paper, then be scanned and imported to Illustrator. After that, the pen and brush tool were used to manually trace the outline of the artwork. Finally, colors were filled for each objects in the main artwork.


I have applied the closure concept in gestalt to the main text to make the whole design look more interesting as well as to get attention from viewers when thier eyes continue observing the remaining of the poster after the main artwork at the center.

Playing with Text (expansion)

The repetition of text create an illusion of expansion which is expanding broader and broader...

Playing with Text (compression)

This is compression made of the repetition of compression from out to in.....

Design Thinking Out Loud: Jack of All Trades vs. Master of One

Michael Vanderbyl is a famous designer known as a multidisciplinary designer.



You may be wondering what a multidisciplinary designer is. Well, let's watch the following movie to see Vanderbyl explain and show out how a multidisciplinary designer stands out a singledisciplinary designer.



I wanna share you guys this movie in order to give you a brief look at a new concept in design: multidiscipline.

Photoshop Practice

This week, I have followed some photoshop tutorials on blackboard to recall myself about some vital techniques such as selection, blending, and masking which I still got lots of confusion while handling these tools in photoshop. Following are sme results based upon the given tutorial.

The 1st one is about replacing background which is considered to be one of the most common montage techniques.

Original:


Final:


The secenod one is blending practice.

Original:


Final:


The third one is to incorporate typography in order to extend the communication in photomontages.

Original:



Final:



I have also attached the tutorial in details for you guys who may want to try on your own. Feel free and enjoy ^^.
http://download.yousendit.com/39CC63A01A7CDF78

Government Posters in HCM city

Government posters are ones that from the government whose purpose is to propagate the national policy, or to celebrate or recall historical events, or to advise or reflect a contemporary social evil, or so forth. In other words, these posters are not for commercial purpose. In HCM city, you can see many of these posters especially at places around hospital or national institutes.

There used to be lots of these posters in the past in almost many places in the city. However, a number of these posters have reduced in quantity and be replaced by other commercial posters nowadays. It makes sense because of the changing of the city or the nation in general after war.

These posters do not only differentiate commercial ones from meaning or purpose but also from their special design.

As you can see below, all of the posters are paintings (not photographs); they all take advantages of the use of primary colors (red, green, yellow and blue) which are easy-to-see colors even at a distant point of view. the combination of these colors can also create a clear contrast.The reason why these colors are used is to get a harmony with the national flag of Vietnam.In general, the design is simple and can transfer the behind messages the government want to say.

Following are some examples I did capture to get you have a clearer image of how they look.

The first one is to celebrate an historical event happening in September 23rd 1945.



This one is about a symple of a yellow star get lighted in the freedom .It represent the spirit of the the national event happened in September 2nd 1945.



The slogan of this one is "Let's bring into play the nation's tradition of being in love with the country, being active and creative; together we'll build a rich-beautiful-civilizationed-modern city."





This one is to reflect the fect of driving at high speed in the city which leads to accident.



These three final ones are the context of where these poster are placed in the city.

MP Logo

6 months ago, I was asked to design a logo for my father's company. It is a small company which produce a variety of clothes for the main market in Russia. The name of the company is Minh Phuong so that the logo is MP for abbreviation. I have posted my final design and the background of why I chose that design, you can access this site to see my logo design http://s3131700.blogspot.com/

2 weeks ago, I was asked to design a small card based on the original logo which you can see above. This new card will be attached to jean short products rather than other ones.

Following is my final design card which now has been in mass production as you can see.




There is a little change in my design for this new card. Rather than populate the whole design with the black horizontal lines, I have limited the amount of the lines to give more blank space or negative space for the whole design to the top and the bottom.

The whole theme color still remains as the original.

Ringbearer medium Font

Ringbearer medium is the font that was used for "THE LORD OF THE RINGS" title logo.

You can download this font from this site http://www.thehutt.de/tolkien/fonts.html

As a homework for Typography lessons, after identifying the font for the title logo for "THE LORD OF THE RINGS", I did playing with the font in Illustrator that is trying to match the font to the original font image. Following is my done product :P



It was hard to do modifying the 2 letters "L" and "R" to match the original one. "R" is the most difficult part; to deal with this problem, I got to use the pen tool to add extra points and then use direct selection tool to do modifying these points.

After this homework, I now can throughly understand the capability of the two main tools in Illustrator (pen tool and direct selection tool).

My Gestalt Practice Exercise

This is my final version for my Gestalt Practice Exercise ^^.

My first website

The snapshot above is my first website design for the assignment of Web Programming course.

It is a website of an imaginary online job agency which offers a variety of utilities for both company employers who look for capable employees and job seekers who seek for jobs.

Because this is an informational website means that it provides people with mainly information other than entertainment or for commercial purpose, I try to achieve a simple design to avoid unexpected effects on web viewer.

I chose red as a main color for my web design. It is used for the main banner on the top of the page and other small banners. The red is quite statuated, not so dark or light and plays as a main contrast for the whole page. For the rest of page, I used dark blue for most of the main label and black for universial text.

I divided my whole page into 3 parts. The first part is the navigation area to the left of the page; the second is the main content stands in the center of the pages; the other is for extra purposes like advertising which will be added later. This simple layout keeps united for the other sub-pages.

This website is not uploaded on web yet because I have to deal with lots of codings. However, the main design would remain with little changes till the day it is uploaded on the web (at the end of this semester) ^^

Negative space

In the first week's class, Mrs. Maddy has mentioned about the concept of negative space in design as a tool to create something called.. (not find a word now ^^) In an example about Bitis shoes, she has shown out that every negative space is $$$ not only because of its cost of papers in advertising or marketing but also its effects of defining products' value. To be specific, one product of shoes on an advertising paper will let you know that the product is much more expensive and valuable than one which is listed in a page with many of shoes in small scale.

One way to keep things in mind is to do more research about this aspect.

Let's get started with a simple definition of negative space "What's negative space?"

Well, negative space is thing that is negative in an image. In this case, it is empty space surrounding one or more subjects inside an image. The empty space in an image is as important as the main subjects themselves. According to en.wikipedia.org (June, 2007), it is said that a good designer makes proper use of negative space to create a good composition in design. For that reason, negative space can be seen as an element in composition. So, you must defend yourself a lot when deciding to eliminate the space by adding other things into your design ( it was said by Maddy in week 2 class as she emphasize the importance of negative space which should be seen as a somewhat sister). In my opinion, the negative space is not special because of the above I have mentioned, but because of its empty result in resting for the reader eyes (so that you can feel free to observe other positive elements which contains messages that the designer want to transfer).

Back to the effect of negative space in advertising or marketing, I have found some ads that take advantage of negative space in order to define the value of the products.

The first one is an advertising of Bank One, a well-known and successful bank. They use an image of a confident business woman in big scale from the left. That is the first one they want to transfer to the customers and is the one that attract your eyes first, then the "BANK1ONE" in blue, the big one on the top and the smaller letter on the right. You can see that they all covered by negative space.

The second one is an ad from Crest organization. A big toothbrush at the center, covered by other information and the negative space in cyan.

The third one is an ad from an insurance company named USAA.


an ad from BankOne (2005, Armstrong & Kotler)


an ad from BankOne (2005, Armstrong & Kotler)


an ad from USAA (2005, Armstrong & Kotler)


References:

Wikipedia, 2007, Negative space, Wikipedia, June 2007, viewed on 08 July 2007, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_space

Armstrong, G & Kotler, P 2005, 'Marketing: Managing Profitable Custimer Relationship' , in Marketing I An Introduction, 7th edn, Pearson Education Inc., NewYork, pp.21

Armstrong, G & Kotler, P 2005, 'Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning: Building the Right Relationship with the Right Customers' , in Marketing I An Introduction, 7th edn, Pearson Education Inc., NewYork, pp.187

Armstrong, G & Kotler, P 2005, 'Managing Marketing Information' , in Marketing I An Introduction, 7th edn, Pearson Education Inc., NewYork, pp.111

JAVA LOGO

In the first week of this semester, we did discussion about logo in Maddy's class. This was such an interesting class because of Maddy's talent of presentation. She gave us lots of examples about logo ranging from Apple logo, Bitis logo, etc. Through these examples, she has given to me a quite clear concept on logo design such as what the meaning of a logo is, how a logo affects the company's image and how to design a logo based on the client's request and so on.

This semester, I did enrol to Java class. When accessing the Java website in order to download Java application software for my computer, I got a strong impression on Java logo. It is a representation of a cup of tea or coffee with a 2-line smoke coming out from the cup. Just like any other logo, the colors of this logo are based simple ones, red and blue in this case. The logo was placed nicely in the top left of the website.

Wow, this was such an impressive logo made up by smooth curved lines. I really like it. However, it couldn't really make sense for me; I was wondering why the designer design such a logo as a representation or symbol for such a programming language; hey you did a discussion about logo in Maddy's class, why don't you try to analyse this one to have a clearer image?_ I replied myself ^o^.

Before analysing the logo's meaning and its design composition, let's take a look at the logo.


(source "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Java_Logo.svg")

First, let's talk about the shape of the logo itself; it is an image of a cup on a saucer with steam on the top. One interesting thing of design is that the image is made up of simple curved lines ( 8 lines in total, 6 lines for the cup and the saucer and 2 for the steam).

About color, it is made up of 2 main colors (red and blue) which are 2 primary colors in design. By using these two colors, it can be placed nicely on different colored backgroud but still keeps a nice contrast... Hey, let's look at the steam, it should be white in reality, why ... red ? Uhmm maybe it is not only a steam coming out a cup, it's acttualy a fire :D Wow it really look like a fire now. I can now see one interesting point here the cup make you think the 2-line steam as a steam but the color of the steam tells you that it's a fire; or in other words, the cup anchors the meaning of the 2-line symbol as a steam while the color of the symbol anchors the meaning of the symbol as a fire, so interesting. It reminds me about lessons on representation, signifier and signified and the respond assignment of using words to anchor the meaning of an image which may have many of different meaning when standing alone in DIM 1.

Fire is a symbol of power, heat, energy, strength, danger etc. Based on this association of meaning, it shows out a sense of the power of this programming language, Java. Indeed, Java is a strong language in computing, especically on Web environment. By writting a program in Java, you can get it run on almost computing systems. I'm not going so far to technical of Java... but by using a "steam of fire", the designer has transfered to us the power of the Java language. In addition, the fire is light red which signifies joy, passion means that you as a programmer or user can find joy with apps written in this language.

About typography, there is only one word Java (the TM on above is not important, just don't care of it :P). The designer uses sans-serif rather than serif font for this word. The reason for this is that the Java logo will mostly appear on a computer screen, san-serif font could result in less flickering effect than serif-font. For PDA devices, the logo may even be very small at a top-left or lower-right of screen, we cannot recognize the word Java if it's serif font in such stituation.

Note: This anylasis of Java logo is based on my own observation of the logo as well as my emotion, impression and knowledge of the Java language so far ^^; so it may not be 100% correct and even wrong to other people's ideas. I hope getting you comments to share your opinion about the Java logo. ^^